New York City mayor Eric Adams ripped into Ron DeSantis on Monday ahead of a Staten Island rally that kicked off the Florida governor’s tour of four progressive cities struggling with soaring crime.
“Welcome to NYC, @GovRonDeSantis, a place where we don’t ban books, discriminate against our LGBTQ+ neighbors, use asylum seekers as props, or let the government stand between a woman and health care,” the mayor tweeted. “We’re happy to teach you something about values while you’re here.”
At the event in South Shore, Staten Island, which drew a large crowd of supporters and members of law enforcement, DeSantis defended Florida’s law-and-order record, touting its “50-year low” crime rate and pointing to New York City’s 23 percent surge in crime in 2022. Republican New York Representative and former gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin, who campaigned on Democrats’ failures on crime, introduced DeSantis.
“As you see crime that has spiraled out of control in all these areas around our country over the last few years, Florida has a crime rate that’s at a 50-year low,” DeSantis told the crowd. “The reason is, we support strong policies to keep our communities safe and we back the blue and support their mission with money and other stuff.”
So far for 2023, New York City has experienced an 11 percent increase in criminal complaints of felony assault, a 2.2 percent increase for robberies, and a 0.2 percent increase for burglaries, compared to the same period in 2022, according to NYPD statistics. Murder is down 8.3 percent and rape is down 3.8 percent for the period.
Other jurisdictions are dealing with lawlessness because they’re injecting woke ideology into policing, DeSantis told the audience. He also cited Chicago, which is another stop on his tour in addition to Philadelphia.
“Anti-police politicians should stop catering to the woke mob,” DeSantis tweeted after the event.
DeSantis blasted the progressive prosecutors in New York City who “get elected and take the law into their own hands.”
District attorneys like Alvin Bragg have come under fire for embracing bail reform and other progressive criminal-justice policies that let offenders back onto the streets soon after they’re arrested. Zeldin promised to fire Bragg as a first order of business during his failed New York gubernatorial campaign.
Despite his criticisms of DeSantis, Adams, a former cop, has pushed Hochul and fellow Democrats in the state legislature to roll back a bail-reform law that routinely lets suspects back onto the streets hours after they’re arrested. Throughout the fall, Adams urged the governor to convene a special session of the legislature to redraft the sweeping 2019 bail-reform law, which prohibited cash bond for most crimes except serious misdemeanors and felonies. While state lawmakers withdrew portions of the law in 2020 and again in 2022, Adams wanted to overhaul the law and add a stricter pretrial detention provision.