Awaiting the Adams Doctrine

Six months into a highly energetic mayoralty, how has Eric Adams changed the city-if at all?

- By David Freedlander

ACCORDING TO THE AUTHORITIES, as a northbound Q train climbed the Manhattan Bridge one Sunday morning this spring, a 25-year-old passenger named Andrew Abdullah began to pace and mutter. He paused in front of Daniel Enriquez, a Goldman Sachs employee who was on his way to meet his brother for brunch. Abdullah, who had served four months in prison for attempted murder, pulled a 9-mm. pistol from his pocket, pointed it at Enriquez's chest, and fired. At the Canal Street station, as Enriquez was bleeding to death, Abdullah exited the train and slipped into the streets. In a season of unspeakable crimes, the unprovoked homicide was perhaps the worst. Police launched a citywide manhunt.

The next day, May 23, Abdullah's aunt called Bishop Lamor Miller-Whitehead, who runs the Leaders of Tomorrow International Churches-a nondenominational Christian ministry operating from a banquet hall among the body shops and auto mechanics on a block in Canarsie. The aunt was in a panic, worried about what was going to happen to her nephew, whose face was by now all over the news and social media. She was concerned that the police were going to hurt or kill Abdullah and that he was going to harm someone else before he could be apprehended. And so I made a phone call, Miller-Whitehead told me, to my mentor, the mayor of New York, Eric Adams.