Eric Adams Seems Serious About Crime. Is Biden? The president meets the new mayor in New York as the city buries its second police officer in a week. By Heather Mac Donald
President Biden will meet with New York City Mayor Eric Adams Thursday, in a belated acknowledgment of the violent crime surge that began with the George Floyd riots of 2020. Mr. Biden arrives in New York following the second funeral for a policeman in less than a week. Officers Jason Rivera and Wilbert Mora were responding to a domestic-violence call at a Harlem apartment on Jan. 21. A man emerged from a bedroom, shooting, and continued to shoot Rivera and Mora as they lay on the ground, in what a police source calls an “execution.” Rivera, 22, died at the scene; Mora, 27, a bullet lodged in his brain, was taken off life support four days later.
Such ambush attacks on officers were up 115% nationwide in 2021, the National Fraternal Order of Police reported. All told, 73 officers were intentionally killed in 2021, the highest number since 1995 (apart from the 9/11 attacks) and at least a 56% increase over 2020. This January’s casualties included a Houston-area corporal gunned down during a car stop before he even got out of his cruiser; a St. Louis officer who had been following a car connected to a homicide and who was critically shot in the abdomen; a Milwaukee County deputy shot seven times by a suspect fleeing a car stop; and three Houston officers shot during a vehicle pursuit. On Dec. 16 in Baltimore, Officer Keona Holley was assassinated with two bullets to the head while sitting alone in her patrol car at 1.30 a.m.
Mr. Biden will want to talk about gun control and federal funding for social services and police hiring. Expect him to ignore the root cause of record-breaking violence—the demonization of law enforcement, to which he has contributed. During his presidential campaign, Mr. Biden asserted that black parents were right to fear for their children’s lives at the hands of the police. On April 12, 2021, the president tweeted about the need to address the “trauma that Black America experiences every day” from police shootings. On Oct. 16, during the National Peace Officers’ Memorial Service in Washington, he lamented that the promise of “equal and impartial justice” was denied in “too many communities—black and brown” and that too many families “are grieving unnecessary losses of their sons, their daughters, their fathers, their brothers” from police violence.
Police departments are down in manpower not because of a lack of money for hiring, but because officers are leaving law enforcement and telling family and friends to avoid it. Pedestrian and car stops dropped in many cities after the George Floyd riots as officers disengaged from the proactive policing that the media and the Democratic establishment call biased. Police chiefs have ordered officers to ignore traffic and quality-of-life offenses for fear of disparate impact on black offenders. And progressive prosecutors refuse to enforce many laws as written in service of the narrative that the criminal justice system is racist. District Attorneys George Gascón of Los Angeles and Alvin Bragg of Manhattan have said they won’t even prosecute many cases of resisting arrest, an invitation to defy the police’s lawful authority.
Washington’s role in fighting urban street crime is limited. Joint task forces and federal prosecution of gun offenses can be useful, but the current crime surge will be turned around only if local officers go back to assertive, and fully constitutional, policing. Mr. Biden can contribute to that turnaround if he uses his New York visit to broadcast the truth about policing: It is the best hope residents of crime-ridden neighborhoods have to lead lives free of fear. The real threat to black lives is criminals, not the police. Four black civilians deemed “unarmed” in the Washington Post’s database of fatal police shootings were killed by a police officer in 2021. The number of black civilians, including children, killed by criminals will likely exceed 10,000 once the data are in.
Mr. Biden should urge all components of the criminal-justice system, from police to prosecutors and judges, to go back to upholding the law in a color-blind fashion. Resisting arrest, as well as looting, illegal gun possession, trespassing and other crimes, cannot be given a free pass without undermining the basis of a civilized society. New York has a mayor who seems to understand that. Let’s hope he persuades the president.
Ms. Mac Donald is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of “The War on Cops.”
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