New York City Mayor Eric Adams is cheering Kamala Harris for touting her law enforcement background despite progressives’ past resistance to tough-on-crime messaging.

“The Democratic Party has a tendency to run away from public safety, but it is a very attractive criterion and is a very attractive part of your resume,” Adams, whose own successful 2021 run played deftly on his life as a crime-fighter with deep ties to Black New Yorkers, told Semafor. “I think that she’s really using that as front and center, and that’s really, really impressive.”

Harris built her career in California as a “smart on crime” prosecutor who sometimes positioned herself to the right of other Democrats on issues of law enforcement. But during her 2020 presidential bid, and amid nationwide protests against police brutality, Harris downplayed that reputation and took positions intended to win her friends on the left, praising demonstrations aimed at “defunding” the police, or at least shifting funding toward other services.

“This whole movement is about rightly saying we need to take a look at these budgets and figure out whether it reflects the right priorities,” she said on a New York radio show.

Adams thinks that was a mistake.

“She did run away,“ he said. “I don’t think she should have moved away from it. I think that now you see, she’s leaning into it.”

Harris and Adams are both Black former law enforcement officers: The vice president was district attorney of Alameda County in California and of San Francisco before serving as the state’s attorney general and senator. Adams is a retired police officer with more than two decades of service before his mayoralty.