In his opening remarks at today’s weekly off-topic press conference, New York City mayor Eric Adams upped the ante as he went into his usual opening spiel about his accomplishments in office. While over the past month he has appeared accompanied by visual aids in the form of signs, today he also made use of a very large monitor that cycled through a presentation with talking points as he shifted from one topic to the next. When Adams came around to his refrain about crime, restating as he has done every week how safe the New York City is, the screen displayed dozens of cities on a graph chart, with New York’s minuscule graph near the bottom. The slide highlighted New York’s enviably low placement on the list in yellow, and singled it out even more with a large arrow that took up much of the the rest of the screen.
In case anyone might still have been missing it, Adams walked over to the screen. He then read out the slogan next to the graph, pointing to each word and enunciating them individually: “Safest. Big. City. In. America. Okay? You see that guy down there?” He said as he pointed out New York’s next-to-lowest place on the list. One eagle-eyed reporter quickly pointed out that the “New York” on the list was not the whole city, but “New York county,” which is just Manhattan. Indeed, Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx were all on the list as well and placed higher. The mayor pointed out that even taken together, New York does not come close to the top of the list.
That said, what also might be misleading about the list is that it takes a fairly narrow view of what qualifies as safety, counting only deaths from homicides and traffic accidents. According to an analysis of public safety from U.S. News and World Report that measured these factors and others (violent crime and property crime rates, access to health care), New York county did not place in their top 25, while Kings and Queens counties placed 25th and 20th, respectively.
As the mayor remains in office despite the storm of scandals surrounding him, new questions have been raised about his political relationship with Donald Trump. The former president has repeatedly come to Adams’ defense regarding the charges against him, and last week went so far as to imply that they are due to his opposition to the White House’s immigration policy. “I know what it’s like to be persecuted by the D.O.J. for speaking out against open borders,” said Trump on Thursday at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, which the mayor also attended. “We were persecuted, Eric. I was persecuted, and so are you, Eric.” The mayor refused to disavow Trump’s support in today’s briefing, and when asked what he makes of it in the first place, he brushed it off as a joke, saying that “this is the season where the silliness comes into politics.”
Asked if he would be attending Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden next week, Adams said he would probably stay home and “meditate.”
