Eric Adams Will Need Help to Make New York Safe Again Legal and political changes leave the next mayor without the anticrime tools that Giuliani and Bloomberg were able to use. By Seth Barron
Optimism is running high in the wake of Eric Adams’s election as mayor. As a former cop who grew up in the city, Mr. Adams appears to understand the corrosive effects of disorder. Keechant Sewell, his pick for commissioner of the New York City Police Department, has 25 years of policing experience. Together they will try to bring sanity back to a city that has lost its way.
But there are serious reasons for concern about the capacity of Mr. Adams—or any mayor, for that matter—to confront effectively the wave of violent crime overtaking the city. Over the past decade, changes in the law, shifts in prosecutorial focus, and the imposition of federal oversight have limited crime-fighting options. In important ways, the city’s toolbox of resources to restore order has been rendered unusable.
However one feels about the use—or supposed overuse—of “stop, question and frisk” during the Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg years, there is no dispute that the policing tactic was instrumental in driving down the rate of violent crime in New York. Any serious effort to remove guns from the street—either through seizure or by persuading criminals to leave them at home—will depend to a large extent on empowering cops to stop and frisk people they reasonably suspect of carrying weapons.
But that avenue is now largely closed to the NYPD. Mayor Bill de Blasio dropped the city’s appeal of a federal ruling that its use of stop and frisk was unconstitutional. The NYPD’s patrol policies and practices remain under the supervision of a federal monitor, whose office minutely oversees the department’s compliance with its guidelines. Any effort to expand stop-and-frisk will run up against this oversight.
A further limit on police patrol practices is the city’s 2018 Right to Know Act, which requires police to ask for specific consent to perform searches, even with reasonable suspicion. It also requires officers to explain that suspects can refuse to consent. No other major city has an “informed consent” law like this. It effectively forces cops to behave like ad hoc public defenders.
Littering, public urination, graffiti, public intoxication and other antisocial behaviors are signals that a city tolerates neighborhood disorder. Disorder begets disorder, and the prevalence of “quality of life” infractions creates conditions conducive to more serious crime. While advocates promised in 2015 that the decriminalization of these public nuisances would enhance justice, many communities haven’t seen it. Instead they’ve seen an increase in open drug sales and use, street violence, and organized theft from stores.
Similarly, the 2018 announcement by the district attorneys of Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx that they would no longer prosecute turnstile jumping, and the NYPD’s decision to arrest only the most perniciously habitual miscreants, has led to a sharp increase in subway violence. Stopping fare evaders was for years an efficient means of catching wanted criminals and seizing illegal guns. But this ready and routine tool is no longer available to law enforcement, with predictable outcomes.
New York state’s 2019 reform removed cash bail as an option in all but the most serious violent felonies. This instantly turned the criminal justice system into a carousel. People arrested for major crimes could be released almost immediately to offend again. Though the law was marginally reformed after a few months to expand the number of bail-eligible crimes—sex trafficking, burglary and money laundering in support of terrorism had been nonbailable in the original legislation—the system continues to free people charged with extraordinarily serious crimes, who then continue their sprees, even at cost of human life.
To his credit, Mr. Adams wants Albany to revisit bail reform, saying the existing law is “sending the wrong message.” But the Legislature, along with a new governor desperate not to be outflanked on progressive issues, have already foreclosed the possibility of reopening the bail law. Mr. Adams says he will instead focus on appointing better judges—hardly an immediate solution to a pressing problem.
Alvin Bragg, the newly elected Manhattan district attorney, has vowed not to prosecute trespassing or resisting arrest in almost any circumstances, and signaled his unwillingness to prosecute illegal gun possession unless someone has been shot. He promises that the “presumption of non-incarceration is the outcome for every case,” except for murder, rape and “major economic crimes.” The mayor can crack down on crime as much as he wants, but if prosecutors decline to press charges, justice will be elusive.
Plans to close the Rikers Island jail complex entail building borough-based jails that would cap the city’s jail population at 3,300. This is substantially lower than 5,300 inmates currently in city jails, most of whom are awaiting trial for serious crimes. The plan’s rosy projections assume either a city that is much less violent than the one we have now or one in which violent criminals are simply released to the supervision of the community.
It is fine that the city has elected a new mayor who appears to take public safety seriously. But the machinery of the Big Apple’s criminal-justice system has been sabotaged to the point that it may be beyond repair.
Mr. Barron is managing editor of the American Mind and author of “The Last Days of New York.”
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