NYC Mayor Eric Adams risks repeating history with proposal to slash NYPD budget

Insanity is popularly defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

As an example, see slashing the number of cops at the NYPD and believing public safety won’t suffer.

History proves otherwise.

In the extremely bloody era of the early 1990s, when the city had more than 2,000 murders a year, the force had fallen to just 29,000 officers.

If Mayor Adams gets his way, it will hit that number again next year through attrition, a drop of about 13% from the current 33,500.

Can a vicious new crime wave be far behind?

As Republican Councilman Joe Borelli put it, the “defund the police crowd’s woke dream has come true.”

There is more than a little irony in the fact that it’s happening under Adams, who ordered cuts in all agencies as he canceled the next five classes of NYPD recruits.

Adams, a former cop, was elected in 2021 on an anti-crime platform, and there has been real progress in reducing murders and shootings.

But overall crime reports continue to climb, and no one who lives in the city believes it’s safe.

So this is a rotten time to tempt fate by not replacing officers who retire or resign.

If anything, the city should be expanding the NYPD.

That’s what officials did during a crime wave 30 years ago, and within three years, in 1996, the headcount hit a record 38,310 officers.

The added troops, combined with the aggressive “broken windows” policing under Mayor Rudy Giuliani, saved Gotham.

Crime fell for two decades, ushering in a remarkable era of public safety and prosperity that continued through Michael Bloomberg’s three terms.

Bad Ol’ Days amnesia

But Adams and the City Council didn’t learn, so here we go again.

Worse, shrinking the force now is asking for double trouble because the city’s population in the early ‘90s was about 7.3 million.

Today, it’s at least 8.5 million, so 29,000 cops will be a proportionally smaller force than it was then.

Even more troubling is the main reason the budget is out of whack.

More than 125,000 migrant asylum seekers came to the city to take advantage of free shelter, food and medical care.

Adams, in calling for 5% cuts in each agency, estimates the total migrant cost will surpass $12 billion over three years, yet for months he was encouraging more of them to come.

Although President Biden is primarily to blame because of his open border policy, the mayor foolishly boasted of the city’s sanctuary status and rolled out the Welcome Wagon.

In a memorable example of his inconsistency, he made a deal with a Texas mayor to take numerous busloads of new arrivals even as he blasted the Texas governor as a racist for busing other migrants to New York.

Adams also had officials meet many of the buses and welcome each new arrival with a goody bag and help in getting taxpayer freebies.

The wonder is not that so many came to New York.

It’s that millions of others Biden let into America didn’t come here.

If they had, the city would be overrun and already broke.

As it is, the mayor is telling public-school parents they might have to replace security guards the city can’t pay and asking wealthy New Yorkers to increase their charity giving to fill empty coffers.

He might as well tell them to get out of Dodge while they can.

If they do, wherever they go, they will find plenty of former New Yorkers who gave up on the city and state.