Adams has fine ideas for NYC but risks losing focus on issue #1: crime

The state of the city is . . . long. Mayor Eric Adams spoke for more than an hour Thursday, lobbing proposal after proposal to pols, commissioners and media at the Queens Theatre. Many of the small-bore initiatives the mayor unveiled are worthy enough, but he risks losing focus on what brought him to the party: crime.

Adams is rightly mindful of the budget constraints he faces as he launches his ideas for year two. Just like during the 2021 campaign, and just like last year, he still doesn’t have a mega-project to his name.

That’s a big contrast to his predecessors: Bill de Blasio had pre-K, and Mike Bloomberg had a bunch of stuff, including bringing the 7 train to Manhattan’s far-west side. 

That’s fine. Plenty of big ideas are bad, and there’s nothing wrong with pursuing lots of little ideas. Phonics-based reading in schools instead of experimental approaches that don’t work; helping people with disabilities get jobs; small-scale rezonings to add housing; a more aggressive crackdown on bad drivers; “fewer rats” — all good. 

And Adams appears to be killing his predecessor’s ill-judged, now-$10-billion-plus, four-borough jails plan, by just entirely ignoring it — also a good development. 

Just as with his budget presentation this month, though, the biggest problem with Year Two is that the mayor is losing the relentless focus on cutting crime that got him to City Hall in the first place. 

Adams didn’t even get to crime ’til about halfway through his stemwinder. “We’ve already made real progress,” the mayor said. “Shootings are down, murders are down, and major crimes were down last quarter for the first time in six quarters.” 

Yes — sort of. Adams wrested the number of murders down from 488 in 2021 to 433 last year, an 11% drop.

Down is better than up. But consider the contrast to the last mayor who won office on crime: Rudy Giuliani. In his first year in office, Giuliani sliced the city’s murder tally by a full 20%, to 1,561 killings that year, the lowest level in a decade.

And that was after murders had already been falling for three years. The following year, 1995, murders fell by another 25%, marking the final year murders were ever above 1,000 (so far, at least). 

Adams didn’t come anywhere close to that momentum in Year One. And for the first three weeks of January, murders have been running exactly even with last year. This pace is not going to get us back to pre-COVID murder levels, between 292 and 319 a year from 2017 to 2019.

Adams’ new(ish) tack is to tackle recidivists: “roughly 1,700 known offenders that are responsible for a disproportionate amount of violent crime.”

Violent sociopaths are let out over and over again, largely because of state changes to the criminal-justice code. But Adams still won’t quite call Albany out: He wants lawmakers only “to find reasonable, evidence-based solutions.” 

Adams also doesn’t have a firm-enough grasp on New York’s lower-grade plague: 1,400 illegal pot shops. His warning — “If you think you’re going to come into our communities without a license, put our kids at risk and steal jobs away from people trying to do it the right way, you must be smoking something” — sounds hollow, given that you can’t walk many blocks in any direction without encountering an illegal pot shop. 

Here, though, Adams walked back the mild criticism he leveled at Albany last week, in a speech to business leaders. “I really want to take my hat off to my state lawmakers” for the pot laws they drafted, he said this Thursday, even though last Thursday, he was blaming those laws for the city’s inability to close down illegal smoke shops.

Which is it? 

Finally, Adams continues to flail when it comes to the migrant crisis.

This week, he’d flirted with the idea that tens of thousands of migrants tenuously claiming asylum don’t qualify for New York’s automatic shelter. In Thursday’s speech, however, he pledged, “We will continue to do our part. . . . We will continue to provide care for new arrivals.” 

Again, which is it? The mayor has just taken another high-quality, centrally located Midtown hotel, the Paramount, off the market, for migrant housing — literally destroying the hotel taxes and food and drink taxes the city was taking in from the property. 

“We’re just getting started,” Adams said Thursday. Nope, not anymore — and Adams needs a better focus on what really matters.

Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.