As Mayor Eric Adams wraps up his last month in office, he deserves a round of applause for the biggest success of his administration: Bringing down New York City’s sky-high crime rates.
On Tuesday, the NYPD announced huge declines in crime across multiple fronts; shootings in the first 11 months of the year were at record lows, and as were murders for the month of November.
Retail theft was down 20%; transit crime dipped sharply, too, and the stretch of July through November was the system’s safest on record.
It’s a promise kept: Adams ran on getting the city back in order after the passage of the no-bail law and the demonization of law enforcement post-2020 plunged the city into crime-ridden chaos.
But for the first few years of his administration, the disorder got worse.
Adams’ first police commissioner, Keechant Sewall, left quietly because City Hall didn’t let her actually run the department; then the department under her successor, Edward Caban, became a scandal-plagued mess.
And President Biden’s migrant crisis brought hundreds of thousands of unvetted migrants, including rapists, gangbangers, murders and thieves, into the city.
What turned it around was Adams’ wise decision to put Jessica Tisch in charge of the NYPD, where she immediately cleaned house and began cracking down on quality-of-life offenses.
She also called out the soft-on-crime state and city laws that make it far harder for cops to do their jobs, and far easier for serial offenders to keep on serially offending.
Tisch has achieved nothing short of a minor miracle in bringing down crime, and she’s done it with one hand tied behind her back, facing rabid opposition to enforcing the law from the city’s progressive leadership and activist class.
Yet for all the gains this last year, the work isn’t over; in crucial ways the city’s still less safe than it was a decade ago.
Every week seems to bring a fresh horror story of bone-chilling assaults on innocents, almost always by emotionally disturbed menaces with long rap sheets.
The latest: a 20-year-old NYU student shoved and groped by James Rizzo, a serial sex pest with 16 prior arrests who was busted for murder in 1997.
Rizzo was on the street for the same reason that countless other mentally ill, often homeless repeat offenders are free to terrorize city-dwellers: The justice and mental-health systems refuse to deal with them.
As if the need to dodge crazies wasn’t enough sign of disorder, New Yorkers must also wade through clouds of weed smoke on the sidewalks, thanks to the state’s hopelessly overbroad pot legalization.
The NYPD’s doing all it can, and the statistics show it, but all public-safety gains will remain fragile as long as the laws let dangerous menaces continue to stalk the streets.
And all bets are off once Zohran Mamdani takes over; it’s wonderful he’s convinced Tisch to stay on — but an open question as to whether he’ll give her all the support she needs to keep crime going down.
Adams (finally) got crime headed in the right direction, and for that he deserves the city’s thanks.
But whether the leaps in public safety continue, or vanish, relies on the next mayor.
