While the mayor competition of New York City is warming up, the public safety of the opening of voters – and the most important point of discussion of Mayor Eric Adams remains surrounded.
If there is one success in his re -election offer if there is one success that Adams can indicate, this is the recent sharp decreases of serious crime in the city under his new (and popular) police commissioner, Jessica Tisch.
The first quarter of 2025 saw considerable drops in both murders (with 34%) as shootings (for example with 23%).
So you can expect Adams’ critics and opponents to try to poke holes in his record.
Some are bickering with the statistics.
‘Of course a serious crime is going off now“The argument is going.” But it is still generally compared to when Adams took on, if you look at crimes and other violations outside the seven ‘big’ crimes. ‘
It is a reasonable point, but it is an uncomfortable for the progressive left -wing to make: they have led New Yorkers about crime since murders and shootings in 2020.
Their party line then and in the two years that followed was that the crime problem of the Big Apple was nothing but a false story split by Donald Trump and the Pro-Police Right.
So they can’t just make a U-turn now without admitting that they have been full of it over the past five years.
Instead, the left-wing critics of Adams return to one of their favorite points: as far as crime rose earlier in his term, it is because the NYPD has been more active in black and Latino neighbors.
Are not That there is more crime, as Donna Lieberman of the New York Civil Liberties Union told Politico this week; It’s just that Adams has put more agents on the street and “they make more arrests.”
But the idea that since 2019 the crime increase in the city is only an optical illusion that is created by an aggressive, proactive NYPD simply not resistant control.
Undoubtedly, enforcement has risen in recent months. Yet there is a good reason to believe that it is the increases of enforcement that have applied a great crime.
If more enforcement causes higher crime percentages, the crime numbers of the city should be spiking now. But the opposite is true.
The idea that the city’s crime problem is only an artificial by -product of the police is also against the fact that the calls of New Yorkers for service to the NYPD have steadily risen.
In 2018, the department will call for 6.1 million 911 to emergency aid. It played 6.4 million in 2019, 6.2 million during the 2020 Lockdowns and 6.4 million in 2021.
In 2022 the number rose to a dazzling 7.1 million 911 calls – as the major crime rose by more than 22%.
In 2023 the count relieved a bit to 6.8 million, still 11% higher than the number of calls received in 2018.
So no. We know that the crime problem is not only a matter of more agents who find more crime ” – because New Yorkers have been report More crime.
What is made this year’s crime, the more impressive is that the NYPD has done its work with an exhausted force.
The number of uniformed NYPD officers has fallen steadily in recent years, one of those annoying realities that undermine the claims of the progressives that proactive police have created an air mirroring of increased crime.
The ability of the department to discretionary enforcement is in any case limited by the personnel crisis.
The idea that a understaffed police department has sufficiently increased discretionary enforcement to stimulate an overall crime increase during the field hundreds of thousands More calls for service is ridiculous.
The simple truth is two-fold: Gotham’s post-2020 crime problems are largely powered by misguided criminal justice policy at a state and local level that led to less enforcement after the arrest than there should be.
The recent decline in crime is a by -product of the enforcement efforts of Tisch concentrated in the most problematic block clusters of the city, where officers have focused on the most productive and violent perpetrators.
The person who becomes the next mayor of New York, his or her ability to protect the public, is limited to what the NYPD can do.
The next mayor will not control the Das. The next mayor will have no control in who is being held, or who goes to prison in the event of conviction.
So although it is completely acceptable to want more progress priority, know that it is not the mayor, but the legislators in Albany and the radicals in the city council who have the power to keep the recidivists off the street.
As long as there is a rotating door in the courthouse, the mayor and his police can only do so much.
Rafael A. Mangual is the Nick Ohnell Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal and the author of “Criminal (in) Justice.”
