BLM’s Hawk Newsome blames ‘white man’ Mayor Eric Adams for NYC ‘war zone’
A Black Lives Matter leader who last year threatened “riots,” “fire” and “bloodshed” if Mayor Eric Adams cracked down on crime turned around Thursday and blamed him for letting New York City turn into a “war zone” — while also using racial invective against the Big Apple’s second black leader.
During an appearance on Fox News, Hawk Newsome accused Adams of failing to protect black New Yorkers from surging gun violence and blasted the former NYPD captain’s recent appearance with the mother of slain 12-year-old Kade Lewin, who was fatally shot while sitting in a parked minivan in Brooklyn.
“Don’t listen to what Eric Adams says, he gives great press statement. He’s the master of the press conference,” Newsome said.
“Some kid dies, he hugs their mother. He’s holding up sneakers, he’s crying. But what we elected him for — the city of New York — was to keep the city safe. This city is a war zone and he can’t stop it.”
Newsome, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York, also referred to Adams by using a racial slur and called him a “white man in blackface, and a very conservative-minded white man at that.”
Last year, Newsome sparked outrage when he emerged from a meeting with Adams, then the mayor-elect, and attacked his plan to create a new version of the NYPD’s undercover anti-crime unit to target illegal gun possession.
“If they think they are going back to the old ways of policing then we’re going to take to the streets again,” Newsome said at the time.
“There will be riots. There will be fire, and there will be bloodshed.”
Adams responded by calling Newsome’s threat “silly,” vowing, “This city is not going to be a city of riots, it’s not going to be a city of burning.”
“This is going to be a city where we are going to be safe,” he added.
Official NYPD statistics show that the number of shooting incidents this year through Sunday was up 9.9 percent compared to the same period last year.
The number of victims was up 15.9 percent, fueled in part by last week’s mass shooting in a subway car in Brooklyn.
On Thursday, Newsome also criticized Adams for calling out the silence of BLM and anti-cop activists following a series of shootings across the city that killed three people and wounded at least 13 more between late April 12 and early April 13.
“So with all his power, he turns to BLM and says, ‘What are you going to do?’” Newsome said.
“Well, I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to organize people in our communities to go out and preach a message of love and unification in the streets. We’re going to take control of our cities because the government has failed us for decades.”
He added: “Even when crime is low, we’re still dying. And we have to fix this problem ourselves because we believe that poverty is the mother of crime.”
In a prepared statement, mayoral spokesman Fabien Levy said Adams was “focused on ending gun violence across the city and will not respond to personal attacks that simply seek to divide us.”
“Mayor Adams has made clear that he believes that Black Lives Matter, but, as he said, he is hopeful that more New Yorkers will stand up and show their outrage when innocent Black and Brown individuals, many of whom are children, are victims to gun violence,” he said.
