He became mayor on the promise to reduce crime. But crime continues to soar.
He became mayor on the promise to reduce crime. But crime continues to soar.
A fter Bill de Blasio’s disastrous two terms as mayor, the general consensus was that things in New York City could not get much worse. De Blasio had inherited a thriving city that was experiencing two decades of historically low crime. Yet the openly communist-inclined mayor proceeded to destroy the Big Apple, reversing the decades-long work of successful mayors such as Rudolph Giuliani, who dramatically reduced crime and restored prosperity. The New York Post endorsed Eric Adams, a former captain in the NYPD, to be de Blasio’s successor primarily because they believed he would make the crime wave ravaging New York City “his top priority.” Adams indeed ran on the issue of reducing crime. That is the mandate he was given by the voters on Election Day. In office, however, Adams has acted more like a progressive liberal than the blue-dog Democrat that New Yorkers were expecting.
As soon as Adams got the keys to Gracie Mansion, he implemented progressive policies. He extended Covid restrictions put in place by his predecessor — one that mandated vaccines for private-sector employees and another that extended proof-of-vaccination requirements for multiple indoor settings including gyms, restaurants, and music venues. Instead of putting all his energy toward addressing skyrocketing crime, Adams was focused on masking kids under the age of five — which he kept up until June 13. In January, the mayor permitted legislation to become law that allowed 800,000 illegal aliens and “Dreamers” to vote in municipal elections (this law was just struck down by the New York Supreme Court). Adams has said he does not believe there should be any restrictions on abortion. In response to a reporter’s question as to whether abortion should be banned on the day of birth, Adams responded, “No I do not. I think women should have the right to choose their bodies.” These are radical views, no doubt shared by many of his fellow New Yorkers. Nonetheless, Adams was seen as the moderate option in the Democratic primaries, an indication of how far left the Democratic Party has moved and how progressive the city’s inhabitants are.
As for the skyrocketing crime in New York City, on this Adams has been an abject failure. Violent crime this year has been rising compared with 2021. Subway crime is up 54 percent this year, making many too afraid to ride public transit. According to an April–May Quinnipiac poll, 61 percent are afraid to ride the subway at night. Robberies are up 31.7 percent since 2021, burglaries are up 65.6 percent, and rape is up 13.5 percent. Nonviolent crimes are also on the rise — there has been a 47.3 percent increase in car thefts since 2021, while petit larceny is up 55.3 percent. Just this week, a 20-year-old mother walking with her baby on the Upper East Side was shot in the back of the head. Adams has vowed to catch the killer.
Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute, author of The War on Cops, spoke to National Review about what Adams needs to do to defeat crime in the city, beginning with making the “defense of public order the central aspect of his tenure.” Adams “should be speaking every day . . . about the unacceptability of public encampments, about the right of law-abiding citizens to have squalor-free public spaces in which to conduct their business and go about their lives.” The mayor and his police commissioner “should make it totally clear to the NYPD officers that they expect them to enforce the law and that they will support them when the inevitable charges of racism emerge.”
While Adams is certainly better than his predecessor in his treatment of the police, he misdiagnoses the crime problem as a gun problem. The mayor often attributes the spike in crime to the number of guns in the streets, making no distinction between legally and illegally owned firearms. Yet the guns often used in crimes are likely illegal ghost guns. There are 3 million illegal guns in New York City, and an estimated 100,000 crime guns throughout the city. Adams condemned the Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which struck down a provision that mandated that New Yorkers who want to carry a handgun outside of the home needed to demonstrate “proper cause” for self-defense. The court ruled that New York’s “proper-cause” requirement violated the 14th Amendment and that there is a constitutional right to carry a gun outside the home. States with higher gun ownership actually have lower or similar murder and gun-murder rates compared with states that restrict access to guns. Adams, as a gun owner and former cop, should know that law-abiding gun owners in New York are not the problem.
Adams has taken some positive actions on crime. The mayor often dons an NYPD cap, showing that, unlike de Blasio, he is on the side of the police. He rides the subways with the NYPD. He has directed the police to return to solo patrols on the trains to widen their presence. In January, Adams reinstituted the plainclothes anti-crime unit, though he has given it a new name, the Neighborhood Safety Teams.
Yet Adams should be doing more. His hands are partly tied by the Soros-funded, leftist Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, who declines to prosecute certain offenders for their crimes, downgrades certain felonies to misdemeanors, and tells prosecutors simply not to prosecute certain misdemeanors at all. Unfortunately, Bragg cannot be recalled by voters, but state Republican lawmakers are introducing a constitutional amendment that would allow voters to recall district attorneys. Only the governor can remove Bragg from office, and it is far from likely that Governor Kathy Hochul, a progressive, would do that. Lee Zeldin, the Republican nominee for governor, vows to remove Bragg if elected. Adams should exert more pressure on Bragg to abandon his soft-on-crime policies, and he should work around him.
As Mac Donald points out, police today are under attack. “The inhibition of all law enforcement in the post–George Floyd era is that all color-blind, constitutional policing inevitably has a disparate impact on blacks, not because the police are racist but because the black crime rate is so astronomically high compared to other groups,” she says. “It is to avoid that disparate impact that policing and prosecution are being unwound across the country.” Bragg, like his predecessor, Cyrus Vance, has “forsworn the prosecution of a host of corrosive crimes like resisting arrest, turnstile jumping, and petty theft.” What could Adams do? He “should use his bully pulpit daily to put Bragg on the defensive. . . . Adams should challenge Bragg to publicly justify his race-driven de-prosecution agenda.” And he “should give a platform to the law-abiding residents of black neighborhoods who beg for more police protection,” Mac Donald says, pointing out that “incarceration lowers crime, it does not increase it.”
Adams should allocate more money toward increasing the number of patrol officers, according to Mac Donald, and he should advocate for the public’s right to confine the mentally ill to asylums. The mayor should attend every ComStat meeting (ComStat is a system used by the NYPD for information-sharing, managing police resources, and tracking crime) to reassure police leaders that their officers will be backed up if they go on proactive missions. Finally, Mac Donald says, the mayor should investigate whether the police need to conduct more undercover work in order to bolster the NYPD’s plainclothes police unit.
Adams should also pressure Governor Hochul to remove Bragg from his position and replace him with a hard-on-crime prosecutor who will respect the law and prosecute violent criminals. The mayor should send a stronger message to the city’s residents, further emphasizing that those who violate the law, whether it be a misdemeanor or a felony, will face harsh penalties. For Rudy Giuliani to get a handle on crime in New York City in the ’90s, it took a commitment to law enforcement and broken-windows policing. Eric Adams should return to policies that have been proven to work to tamp down the crime terrorizing New York City residents.