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New York City’s police commissioner Edward Caban has resigned amid a sprawling federal corruption investigation that has threatened to engulf mayor Eric Adams’s administration.
The move comes days after Caban’s phone was reportedly seized by law enforcement, along with those belonging to other senior City Hall officials. Adams’s own devices were seized last November as part of an unrelated probe.
In a statement on Thursday, Caban said “the noise around recent developments” has made his work impossible and led him to tender his resignation after “30 years of service to this city”.
He added that he would “continue to co-operate fully with the ongoing investigation”. Lawyers for Caban said they had been informed by federal prosecutors that he was not a target of their investigation.
Caban, who started his career as a police officer in the Bronx, was appointed by Adams, himself a former police captain, in July 2023.
In a video statement on Thursday, Adams, who has not been charged with a crime, said he wished Caban well and touted the fact that crime had dropped for 13 of the 14 months he had served as commissioner.
He said he had been “as surprised as you” to learn of the law enforcement inquiries into senior City Hall figures, including the first deputy mayor, the schools chancellor and a senior adviser to the mayor.
Adams, a centrist Democrat and former Brooklyn borough president, was elected as mayor in 2021 on a promise to crack down on crime and homelessness in New York City. He has since faced persistent accusations of cronyism and has been widely criticised for his administration’s haphazard handling of migrants bussed in from the southern border.
The 64-year-old is separately facing a corruption investigation into his 2021 election campaign. Last year, agents raided the Brooklyn home of his 25-year-old chief campaign fundraiser Brianna Suggs, reportedly as part of a probe into donations from the Turkish state.
Adams was stopped in the street soon after by the FBI, who seized his phone and laptop. He has consistently claimed he has “nothing to hide” and said he was co-operating with the investigations.
Adams’s 2021 campaign has been referenced in other criminal probes. Six people, including a retired police inspector, were charged by the Manhattan district attorney in July for allegedly “subverting campaign finance laws”.
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