Mayor Eric Adams needs to take action against crime, not just talk about it By Miranda Devine January 23, 2022 10:48pm Updated
It’s all very well for Mayor Adams to stroll around Harlem with an entourage, mouthing video platitudes for social media, as the city laments the slaying of NYPD Officer Jason Rivera and the grievous wounding of his partner, Wilbert Mora.
But Hizzoner was elected to bring back law and order, and we need more than motherhood statements.
So far, Adams has not said anything to allay our concerns since taking office.
He does not appear to have a plan, despite having had almost three months to figure out how to address New York’s exploding crime-and-disorder problem.
Everything he says is straight from the useless Democratic political playbook, rather than using his mandate to set the city straight the way former Mayor Rudy Giuliani did.
The Giuliani way is straightforward, but it requires a strong will to apply the broken-windows theory to eradicate signs of disorder, to allow police to stop and frisk suspects and get weapons off the street, to prosecute crimes to the full extent of the law, to lock up bad guys inhumane prisons, forcibly rehabilitate drug addicts who commit crimes and detain the mentally ill in secure medical facilities where they are given the treatment they need.
There is nothing compassionate about abandoning the mentally ill to the streets and making the rest of us live in their bedlam.
Adams is mayor because he was the only Democrat who acknowledged that Gotham is out of control, thanks to years of deliberate policies pushed by his feckless predecessor, radical leftist pols in Albany and progressive prosecutors.
Anti-police protests demoralized New York’s Finest and culminated in the City Council stripping the NYPD of $1 billion of funding in 2020.
As a result, New York is now very familiar to anyone who lived here in the bad old days of the 1980s and 1990s.
It’s been barely a week since Deloitte executive Michelle Go was pushed to her death in front of a train by a homeless ex-con at Times Square, after which Adams staged another empathetic media performance. Yet on Sunday a 61-year-old man also was shoved onto the subway tracks at Fulton Street station, thankfully managing to scramble back to safety.
Being shoved in front of trains has become a regular hazard we are supposed to live with.
Expensive barriers are not the answer, as some pols are saying. That only admits that we have to live with violent psychopaths roaming free to menace us forever.
Exploding crime is not something that rights itself. It does not go away with subway barriers, or gaslighting claims that the real problem is a “perception of fear,” as Adams said after Go’s murder, before realizing his error and admitting he feels unsafe on the subway.
Tell the 11-month-old girl shot in the face in The Bronx last week that she is suffering from a “perception” of crime.
If you have to pick your way through human excrement on the sidewalk outside Penn Station, for instance, or avert your eyes from men with their pants down in Hell’s Kitchen, or walk past open drug taking, or cross the street when you pass a homeless hotel in Midtown stacked with felons prematurely released from Rikers, you are not suffering from a “perception” of crime and disorder. You are living in it.
Mayor Eric Adams needs to take action against crime, not just talk about it
ReplyDeleteBy Miranda Devine
January 23, 2022 10:48pm Updated
It’s all very well for Mayor Adams to stroll around Harlem with an entourage, mouthing video platitudes for social media, as the city laments the slaying of NYPD Officer Jason Rivera and the grievous wounding of his partner, Wilbert Mora.
But Hizzoner was elected to bring back law and order, and we need more than motherhood statements.
So far, Adams has not said anything to allay our concerns since taking office.
He does not appear to have a plan, despite having had almost three months to figure out how to address New York’s exploding crime-and-disorder problem.
Everything he says is straight from the useless Democratic political playbook, rather than using his mandate to set the city straight the way former Mayor Rudy Giuliani did.
The Giuliani way is straightforward, but it requires a strong will to apply the broken-windows theory to eradicate signs of disorder, to allow police to stop and frisk suspects and get weapons off the street, to prosecute crimes to the full extent of the law, to lock up bad guys inhumane prisons, forcibly rehabilitate drug addicts who commit crimes and detain the mentally ill in secure medical facilities where they are given the treatment they need.
There is nothing compassionate about abandoning the mentally ill to the streets and making the rest of us live in their bedlam.
Adams is mayor because he was the only Democrat who acknowledged that Gotham is out of control, thanks to years of deliberate policies pushed by his feckless predecessor, radical leftist pols in Albany and progressive prosecutors.
Anti-police protests demoralized New York’s Finest and culminated in the City Council stripping the NYPD of $1 billion of funding in 2020.
As a result, New York is now very familiar to anyone who lived here in the bad old days of the 1980s and 1990s.
It’s been barely a week since Deloitte executive Michelle Go was pushed to her death in front of a train by a homeless ex-con at Times Square, after which Adams staged another empathetic media performance. Yet on Sunday a 61-year-old man also was shoved onto the subway tracks at Fulton Street station, thankfully managing to scramble back to safety.
Being shoved in front of trains has become a regular hazard we are supposed to live with.
Expensive barriers are not the answer, as some pols are saying. That only admits that we have to live with violent psychopaths roaming free to menace us forever.
Exploding crime is not something that rights itself. It does not go away with subway barriers, or gaslighting claims that the real problem is a “perception of fear,” as Adams said after Go’s murder, before realizing his error and admitting he feels unsafe on the subway.
Tell the 11-month-old girl shot in the face in The Bronx last week that she is suffering from a “perception” of crime.
If you have to pick your way through human excrement on the sidewalk outside Penn Station, for instance, or avert your eyes from men with their pants down in Hell’s Kitchen, or walk past open drug taking, or cross the street when you pass a homeless hotel in Midtown stacked with felons prematurely released from Rikers, you are not suffering from a “perception” of crime and disorder. You are living in it.
GRA:An honest reporter,but no solutions.
--GRA