Even during his first months as mayor, Eric Adams was intent on dehumanizing the homeless. On February 17, 2022, the mayor declared that he gave New York Police Department (NYPD) officers a clear mandate to enforce Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) rules on the subway against drug use, littering, lying down on seats, and “using the subway for any purpose other than transportation” — measures designed to harass homeless people and force them out of the subway. Shockingly, Adams then said about homeless people: “You can’t put a Band-Aid on a cancerous sore. That’s not how you solve the problem. You must remove the cancer to start the healing process.”

By comparing the homeless to a cancerous tumor, Adams was publicly dehumanizing the homeless — and questioning their right to exist.

Adams’s words that day should be kept in mind when considering the heinous murder of Jordan Neely on May 1 on the F train at the Broadway-Lafayette stop by Daniel Penny, a twenty-four-year-old former marine. That murder is not an isolated incident; it comes in the context of an escalation in the criminalization of the homeless that has been a hallmark of Adams’s tenure. Just in September, when large numbers of migrants in need of humanitarian aid arrived in the city, many of whom were bused here by Republican governors in other states, Adams tried to “reassess” the city’s right-to-shelter law, which guarantees a bed to anyone who needs it. This week, he weakened the law in anticipation of more migrants. Adams has been willing to relocate and devalue the homeless of this city, treating them as an annoyance that he wishes would just go away.