Crime is now catching up to Eric Adams’ swagger
While he was in Los Angeles on a trip, paid for by his campaign, partying with Dave Chappelle and appearing on a “digital transformation” panel at the Milken Institute led by the Junk Bond King who Rudy Giuliani helped send to prison and Donald Trump eventually pardoned, the NYPD reported that the number of major crimes was up nearly 35% last month from April of 2021 and a new Quinnipiac poll showed that just 37% of New Yorkers approve of how the mayor is handling crime.
That’s a huge swing from plus 14 points with 49% approving and 35% disapproving to minus 17 points with 37% approving and 54% disapproving at a moment when 49% of New Yorkers see crime as the most urgent issue facing the city.
The crime numbers aren’t just rising compared to the pre-pandemic, George Floyd protests, and bail and other criminal justice reform numbers of 2019 — they’re up nearly 21% so far this year from the same stretch in 2010.
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While that’s a far cry from the “bad old days” of the early 1990s, it’s no longer the “good old days” of recent vintage either but a more violent and disruptive “new normal” that New Yorkers aren’t happy about — let alone after electing a candidate who’d vowed to reduce violent crime but keeps talking as mayor about the “many rivers feeding the sea of violence.”
Adams isn’t wrong about those rivers, starting with a criminal justice system that’s made it much harder to get the 700 or so New Yorkers responsible for a vastly oversized share of violent crimes off of the streets, but he’s being judged, as he asked to be, on what happens to the sea on his watch.
One drop in that sea is known ghost-gun enthusiast and parts seller Edison Cruz, who was working at a Taco Bell in the Bronx when he allegedly got into a late-night fight with a customer there he then followed into a smoke shop around the corner and executed while also wounding two other people before ditching his gun and returning to work. He’s being held without bail now, and reportedly told detectives he was “removing a problem from society.”
If Cruz had been removed from society after earlier arrests, including one in 2020 for walking down the street wearing a bullet-proof vest with an “incendiary launcher” strapped to his back, there would have been one fewer murder victim and three fewer shooting victims.
One piece of good news amid a deluge of bad and bloody headlines is that the number of shootings this April was down nearly 30% (from 148 to 105) and the number of murders was down nearly 40% (from 50 to 31).
But those numbers are still nearly twice what they were in the prelapsarian days of 2019, and it remains to be seen over the inevitably more violent summer months ahead whether April’s progress and a dramatic increase in gun arrests this year are an early sign of the NYPD turning a corner in fighting what Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell a month ago called “continuing and completely unacceptable violence.”
She said that at the NYPD’s first full briefing on the crime numbers in two years, as the coronavirus interrupted what had been a monthly ritual in the last administration where the commissioner and other top officials reported those numbers and answered questions about them.
Now, a DCPI spokesman says, “The NYPD releases monthly press releases regarding crime statistics. We will hold crime briefings on a quarterly basis.”
So the numbers will still be there — including on a running basis, at the CompStat 2.0 website — but without the police brass accounting for them as often.
After last month’s horrific subway shooting, a New York magazine cover story about New Yorkers’ fears asked: “Does anyone really want the cops arresting somebody for smoking on the subway?”
Yes! Eighty-six percent of New Yorkers say they want more cops on the trains, and all of us understand what comes with that.
That 86% accounts for pretty much everyone outside of a small but well-amplified echo chamber that includes decarceral lawmakers and prosecutors often acting as de facto lawmakers, along with the think tanks and well-funded advocacy groups that work to get those officials elected in low-turnout primaries and the journalists feeding comments from those think tanks into their glowing stories about those politicians.
Adams, who won office by talking about fairly restoring public safety as too many Democrats have neglected the safety side of that balance, likes to say he’s here to Get Stuff Done.
If he does that, just about everything else comes out in the wash. If he does not, there’s no anti-gun-violence jacket he can wear to the Met Gala that’s going to cover it up. New Yorkers are judging Adams on whether he walks the walk, going against the current of those rivers he keeps talking about.