In his weekly press briefing this afternoon, Eric Adams sought to buttress his record in office as he faces a challenging re-election campaign later this year. After a pair of shocking attacks on the city’s subway just before the new year, in which a man was critically injured after being pushed onto the tracks and a homeless woman was killed by being set on fire, the mayor has publicly pressed his commitment to public safety on mass transit.
In a press conference yesterday with Police Commissioner Tisch, Adams announced the deployment of two hundred more police officers onto the subway system, returning to one of his most frequent refrains that “public safety is the prerequisite for prosperity.” That sentiment was reiterated today, when he repeated stats about the city’s falling crime rate, and stated that the goal must be to “match the numbers with the perception” in the wake of these grisly occurrences. “My job is to make sure I do the substantive things to bring down crime–which we have done,” the mayor said. “But I have to do the symbolic things that make people feel safe.” The mayor also blamed the City Council for measures which, he claimed, negatively affected public safety. “City Council passed a law that said people have a right to sleep on the street. People have a right to public urination. This is what we are policing in.” New York City (and the country more broadly) is in the midst of an ongoing housing crisis and homelessness spike, and New York city is also infamous for lacking restroom facilities available to the public.
The functioning of the NYPD more broadly was brought up by Gothamist’s Liz Kim, who asked the mayor about overtime abuse by the force, telling him that her sources said his leadership was to blame. Adams, a former police officer, swatted the critique: “if you say that former police officers and former elected officials who have criticized me from January 1st 2022 are now giving you an opinion on management, am I supposed to take that seriously?” This past year, the NYPD set a new record for overtime spending, topping $1 billion. That surprising figure was punctuated with a scandal last month involving former chief of department and Adams ally, Jeffrey Maddrey, who was accused of sexually harassing a subordinate in exchange for overtime pay topping $200,000, making that administrative worker the highest paid officer on the force.
Pressed by Kim about the allegations of abuse, the mayor said the buck stops with him. “The infrastructures that are in place are to [prevent] any form of abuse,” Adams said. “And those who I put in place to do that, they should do their job, but the ultimate responsibility of the fiscal management of this city falls in the lap of the mayor of the city of New York.”
