Battle Of The Forts: Mayor, Pub Advocate Spat Over Police Hits Home

NEW YORK CITY — Call it the Battle of the Forts.

A feud erupted this week between Mayor Eric Adams and Public Advocate Jumaane Williams that began with a disagreement over public safety and devolved into taunts over where each top New York City elected officials lives, or doesn't.

Adams sparked the spat with an unprompted swipe at Williams for supporting a police reform bill.

"He lives in a fort," Adams said, referring to Williams home in the U.S. Army's Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn.

Williams didn't hold back in response, and also took the opportunity to hit the mayor at home.

The public advocate, in a hastily arranged news conference, characterized the Adams' swipe as "bratty" and alluded to a 2021 Politico report that the mayor actually lived in Fort Lee, New Jersey.

"My understanding is the mayor lives in New Jersey with his girlfriend," Williams said.

Adams has strongly denied any suggestion he actually lived in New Jersey, including by staging a bizarre tour of a Bed-Stuy home he insisted he, and not just his son, lived in.

Williams' dig prompted Ingrid Lewis-Martin, the mayor's powerful chief adviser, to level an attack of her own.

"This is really beneath you," she tweeted in response to Williams. "You should be ashamed."

This is really beneath you. You should be ashamed. You live in a fort on an army base. The mayor lives in Bed Stuy with his constituents. Shameful beyond belief.
— Ingrid (@ingridBKNY) January 3, 2024

The tweet prompted Williams to try to street the conversation toward substantive issues.

"There's a lot of things this administration should be ashamed of," he wrote. "I don't think a discussion of them is productive on Twitter, though. So, hopefully, we can pause here."

Adams and Williams have disagreed on issues in the past, but have generally avoided taking potshots at each other in the way the mayor has, for instance, done against City Comptroller Brad Lander.

But Williams' backing of bills requiring NYPD cops to file police reports on low-level stops and a ban on solitary confinement — both of which Adams has vowed to veto — appeared to have created a rupture in their relative public chumminess.

The mayor often lashes out at critics and lawmakers with whom he's at loggerheads, but doesn't often name names. That wasn't the case this week.

"I find it astonishing that we have a public advocate who pushed for this police bill," he said.