That morning, after being briefed by my team on the violence and mass looting that occurred the night before in New York City, I was reminded of a scene from The Perfect Storm. In that movie, George Clooney plays the captain of a fishing boat. No, I do not think I am George Clooney; I am a realist. The captain decides to try to sail through a terrible storm to get back to dock to sell his fish. After fighting the storm for what seems like an eternity, the captain decides that he can’t make it through and turns around to head out to calmer water on the other side. There comes a point where he has to concede he’s in trouble. “She’s not going to let us out,” he says of the storm. In that moment on that day, that’s how I felt.
Just weeks earlier, New York City was the global hot spot for COVID. Now, after so much progress controlling the virus and days before the reopening started, the city was descending into chaos. It started with people throwing bricks at NYPD cars. The next day the looting began. I supported the protests, but these were not protesters; they were criminals. The looting was nakedly opportunistic. The streets were empty, and while the police worked to manage the protests, looters smashed glass doors and ransacked businesses small and large, from mom-and-pop stores in the Bronx to the iconic Macy’s flagship store in Herald Square. Watching the criminal activity and chaos was like a kick in the stomach. I feared what it meant for our economic reopening and our work to control COVID—just as we’d started to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
While New York City had it the worst, the violence and rioting spread to other cities in the state: Buffalo, Rochester, and Albany, where people burned down the Capital City Rescue Mission, which provides food and services to the homeless.
The looting could not go unanswered. We had been through too much and made so much progress, I would not let these criminals threaten all that we had accomplished. Mayor de Blasio didn’t have enough of his police force deployed to control what was happening. Mayors in other cities around the state had requested assistance from the state police, but Mayor de Blasio did not. And the violence and destruction continued. I issued an ultimatum: Either he had to empower the police force to do their job, deploying all available personnel, or, I said, “my option is to displace the mayor of New York City and bring in the National Guard as the governor in a state of emergency and basically take over.” That night, the full NYPD was out in full force. Peaceful protests continued, and looting began to dramatically subside.
JUNE 12 | 822 NEW CASES | 1,898 HOSPITALIZED | 42 DEATHS
“We’ve gotten to a place where people think talking is enough. Talking is not enough. Being angry is not enough. Being emotional is not enough. How do you transition that to action and change and results? And that’s what we’re doing here today.”
AT THE BRIEFING WITH ME that day I had several extra-special guests: Eric Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr; Sean Bell’s mother, Valerie Bell; my second mother for many years and president of the NAACP, Hazel Dukes; and the Reverend Al Sharpton. I was also joined by senate majority leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and assembly Speaker Carl Heastie. Gwen Carr and Valerie Bell were two women who had lost their sons to police violence. Because of COVID, we had to limit who could be present in the room, so these two mothers were there representing every mother who lost her child to police violence.
From the start, I said I stand with the Black Lives Matter protesters, who continued to march since the death of George Floyd. But I had been unequivocal that we needed to translate protests into meaningful action. And New York acted most quickly, with the legislature enacting a nation-leading police reform law that I had proposed: the “Say Their Name” Reform agenda. It included a choke-hold ban, transparency measures, and other important law enforcement reforms. In addition, I signed an executive order that put forward a clear plan to fundamentally restructure the police-community relationship across New York State. It required all five hundred police departments in New York State to work with local governments to come up with a restructuring plan by April 1, 2021, or they would lose state funding. It was the most aggressive legal action taken in the nation, and l was proud to sign this package of bills into law with the legislative leaders, Al Sharpton, Hazel Dukes, and the two mothers by my side.
As the Reverend Al Sharpton has said, we need demonstration, legislation, and reconciliation. You hold demonstrations to generate public support; you pass legislation to make change; and only then can you proceed to reconciliation. At the end of the day, the politicians don’t lead; the people do. New York State had seen and heard the people, and it was a moment for fundamental change to the system.
When it was Reverend Sharpton’s turn to speak that day, he said, “Twenty years ago, when I called a march in Washington on the anniversary of the March on Washington and Coretta Scott King presided over that march—the widow of Martin Luther King—the only member of President Clinton’s cabinet that would come to the march was Andrew Cuomo, and he stood with me when I was much fatter and much more controversial.”
I have known Al Sharpton all of my adult life.
We first met when the legendary columnist Jack Newfield at The Village Voice (back when the Voice was really something) took Sharpton and me out to lunch at this little Italian restaurant in lower Manhattan. He said,
