Eric Adams says critics of his record on stop-frisk can just ‘shut up’

Democratic mayoral hopeful Eric Adams on Wednesday told critics of his record on stop-and-frisk policing to “shut up.”

Speaking at a Brooklyn rally ahead of Wednesday night’s Democratic candidate debate, Adams, who served as an NYPD cop before entering the political arena, was challenged by a heckler on the controversial policing tactic once widely used by the department.

“Imagine 25 years from now, you have people who want to reimagine history [and] start attacking [Dr. Anthony] Fauci and saying he had no role in [fighting] COVID-19,” said Adams. “We will all look at them and say, ‘What is wrong with you?’

“So can you imagine the audacity of some people to say Eric Adams had no role in stopping the over-abuse of stop-and-frisk?” he continued, referring to himself in the third-person.

Adams said that critics of stop-and-frisk often cite a 2013 federal judge’s ruling declaring the tactic unconstitutional, while ignoring his own work to dismantle the practice.

“It’s obvious they cited it but they didn’t read it, because inside the ruling the federal judge acknowledged it is Eric’s testimony that talked about the abuse in the police department,” he said. “What are [they] trying to do? Re-write history?

“So when you have hecklers running around and saying you want to do this with stop-and-frisk? Shut up. Shut up,” Adams continued. “This has been the issue that I put on the forefront not while I was outside the police department, while I was in the police department.”

Asked about Adams’ remarks at a campaign event a short time later, fellow Democratic candidate Maya Wiley said, “I’m used to men telling me to shut up.” The former MSNBC contributor and counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio added, “And I don’t when they do.

“I will not bring back stop-and-frisk, that frankly terrorized black and Latino communities, almost returned no violent weapons and simply was just humiliation and harassment,” she vowed. “I’m not the candidate who wants to bring that back, and I’m certainly not bringing back the anti-crime unit, which Commissioner [Dermot] Shea himself — the defender of the police misconduct we saw this summer — said was the last vestige of broken stop-and-frisk.”

Adams has voiced support for reviving the gun-hunting plainclothes unit, which was disbanded during a wave of “defund the police” moves last summer that critics have called a knee-jerk reaction to bad policing.

He has also backed legal use of stop-and-frisk as a method for getting illegal firearms off of city streets.

Wiley, by contrast, released a campaign ad on Tuesday claiming that the NYPD doesn’t see her and other black New Yorkers as “people who deserve to breathe” — a notion swiftly condemned by the department’s unions.

“So I’m not that candidate,” she said Wednesday. “And I don’t stop talking because someone told me to.”