Eric Adams and the NYPD Repress Dissent

Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist

08 May 2024

Ortanzso Bovell was killed by John Chell, now NYPD Chief of Patrol - Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty

New York City Mayor Eric Adams may well be the very worst of the Black misleadership class. He takes great pleasure in supporting apartheid Israel and he conducted police raids and intelligence operations against student protesters. The former cop shows where his loyalties still lie.

“Thought we fucking shot someone.”
Text sent by NYPD officer at Columbia University

John Chell is Chief of Patrol of the New York Police Department (NYPD). Chell has made news lately because of his threatening social media posts directed at a judge, journalists, and even City Council Members. His language was of such concern that the City Council Speaker requested that the Department of Investigation’s Inspector General conduct an official investigation.

Chell is also a white police officer who shot and killed a Black man in 2008. He shot Ortanzso Bovell in the back, claiming that he did so accidentally. In usual fashion he was never charged with a crime and the case was quickly closed. But a jury in the civil case found his version of events not credible and the city paid $2 million to Bovell’s family. Oddly, Chell ended up investigating the murder of Bovell’s surviving brother in 2022.

Despite being a killer, Chell continued to climb the ladder in successive mayoral administrations and he now has a prominent position in the department which is under the jurisdiction of a Black mayor, Eric Adams. A killer cop is one of Adams’ right hand members of the police top brass.

Chell and his colleagues played a strange role in the crackdown on the college protesters who were demanding that their institutions divest from Israel. The NYPD didn’t just round up hundreds of people and arrest them, they drove a smear campaign which was reported uncritically by corporate media so-called journalists who acted as their personal scribes.

New York City is the epicenter of the state repression being carried out against anti-Zionist protesters. Mayor Adams and the NYPD were very happy foot soldiers as the order came down to break up encampments at colleges and universities and to smear students and their supporters with heavy handed propaganda, outright lies, and even gunfire.

On the evening of Tuesday, April 30, the NYPD arrested hundreds of people at City College and at Columbia University. Students had taken over Hamilton Hall at Columbia and renamed it Hind’s Hall in honor of six-year old Hind Rajab, who was killed by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) along with members of her family and the medics who were trying to rescue her.

Students were in negotiations with Columbia administrators when the police broke in and arrested them, causing injuries in the process. At one point a gun shot was fired, we are told accidentally, but as there has been no investigation, that claim should not be blindly accepted.

What followed was a stage managed orgy of lies and smears which may have been orchestrated by people affiliated with the Israeli government. Jonathan Conricus is a former IDF spokesperson who posted this interesting statement on twitter along with a photo of Chell and Kaz Daughtry, an NYPD Deputy Commissioner. “Bumped into two of New York’s finest @NYPDnews at @NewsNation tonight. They defend law and order on US campuses and returned the flag after pro-Hamas thugs replaced it with a Palestinian one. Desecrating American values or symbols cannot be tolerated!”

Conricus refers to a video on the Twitter/X platform which showed police removing a Palestine flag at City College and replacing it with an American flag, “old glory” as they called it. It was just one of a series of spectacles which New Yorkers were subjected to after the campus raids. Daughtry made quite a show of claiming that students had books on terrorism. Of course he was referring to a text book on terrorism but the moment wasn’t as funny as it may have first appeared. The IDF often claims to have found copies of Mein Kampf in Gaza in order to justify their war crimes. NYPD is taking its cues from the Israeli state.

The NYPD has no business examining what anyone reads. Mayor Adams played the good cop and bad cop routine by vilifying students but also claiming that they were being “radicalized.” “This is a global problem that young people are being influenced by those who are professionals at radicalizing our children, and I'm not going to allow that to happen as the mayor of the City of New York."

Young people are radicalized by U.S. and Israeli war crimes. But regardless of how they come by their political beliefs neither the mayor or any other politician ought to concern themselves with anyone’s ideology. Doing so is a textbook definition of fascism, a political system we’re now told will only be avoided if Joe Biden remains in the white house. Of course his actions as supporter and protector of Israel and the efforts to silence anyone who speaks out against him are themselves fascistic. It seems that the U.S. will have fascism regardless of the electoral outcome in November.

The corporate media played a disgraceful role in this process. The NYPD said that the wife of a “known terrorist” was involved in the protest. It is assumed that they referred to Nahla Al-Arian who briefly visited the Columbia encampment and whose husband, Sami Al-Arian, was indicted but cleared of terrorism charges. The claim was repeated by countless news outlets without skepticism or investigation. That practice of repeating what officials say is also an example of fascism in action.

New York City is sadly not an outlier in this regard. In Los Angeles another former IDF operative admitted to running a “quiet infiltration operation into the UCLA encampment” before it was violently attacked by that city’s police department. The NYPD has an Israeli office and police departments all over the country send officers to train in Israel.

Repression is the order of the day in the U.S. Of course police have always had a license to kill Black people as in the case of John Chell. Now the state is in crisis as a restive population expresses anger that their public monies are sent to foment wars against Russia or China or that Israel kills with the backing of the U.S. The lies have been exposed in a system that has lost all legitimacy and brute force is now their only out. Students are the first victims, but anyone who takes a public stance against U.S. policy risks getting the same treatment. Fascism is already here and we must determine how to fight against it.

Margaret Kimberley is the author of Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents. You can support her work on Patreon and also find it on the Twitter, Bluesky, and Telegram platforms. She can be reached via email at [email protected]