Mayor Eric Adams won election for one reason: He was the only Democratic candidate to acknowledge New Yorkers’ public-safety fears.
Those fears are worsening, and Adams blames the media — overlooking one factor over which he has total control: the disastrous tenures of all three of his public-safety commissioners.
New York has three commissioners who oversee the uniformed workers whose job is public safety: police, fire and correction.
The mayor has sole power to appoint each commissioner.
How’s that working out?
With the murder level up 53% in the two years before he took office and felonies up 7%, Adams’ most important appointment, in early 2022, was his police commissioner.
He chose well: Keechant Sewell, a Queens native, was head of the Nassau County detectives.
She earned officers’ trust and respect and made gains in the city’s worst crimes: After the first half of this year, murders were down 12% compared with 2021, and shootings were down 34%.
Then she left, giving two weeks’ notice in mid-June.
Why she departed says a lot about Adams: Though he chose her, he wouldn’t let her do her job.
The most serious allegation is that when Sewell tried to discipline an underling, chief of department Jeffrey Maddrey, for attempting to erase a gun-related arrest of a retired cop, Adams interfered, asking her to let Maddrey off.
Adams’ willingness to tolerate this low-grade corruption sends a terrible signal to honest officers and to the city — and harms the public support police need to ensure safety.
Now we have a leaderless department.
It’s worse than when Commissioner Bill Bratton left in 1996 because Mayor Rudy Giuliani was envious of the attention Bratton was getting.
Bratton had served more than two years, not one and a half — and when he left, crime was falling by double-digits in all categories, and New Yorkers were feeling safer.
It was clear the improvements the commissioner had made would stick.
This time, New York’s gains are fragile: Despite progress Sewell made on murders and shootings, total felonies are up 39% since 2021, and murders remain 40% above 2019 levels.
Crime isn’t New York’s only public-safety crisis.
Since 2020, fire deaths have soared. Between 2010 and 2020, New York suffered an average of 65 fire deaths annually; last year, 92 people died, a jump of 42%.
The culprit: e-bikes and e-scooters, which have killed 13 people this year, 23 since 2021.
When the state and city legalized e-bikes in 2020, for the benefit of food-delivery apps, neither Albany nor City Hall offered ideas on how they’d keep shoddy, poorly maintained, imported no-name batteries from exploding in or near crowded apartments.
The fire department could prevent some carnage by announcing that commercial e-bike batteries — made of a classic volatile, hazardous, combustible material — should not be stored in or near residences.
Just because such an edict would be difficult to enforce doesn’t mean it wouldn’t save lives: It would give landlords and family members leverage to forbid e-bikes.
Instead, Laura Kavanagh, Adams’ handpicked fire commissioner, has dithered.
Kavanagh was always a weaker pick than Sewell; a nonprofit manager and PR expert, she had no firefighting experience and had never managed a big organization.
Nevertheless, she could have acquitted herself by leading on the biggest public-safety challenge facing the department in decades — and hasn’t.
As department veterans charge in an age-discrimination suit, “she suppressed and did not support action within FDNY to press for [e-bike battery] regulations and bans, and even suppressed a campaign to promote greater awareness of the risks.”
Kavanagh allegedly cited “political winds” as a reason not to support a proposed New York City Housing Authority ban, never enacted, on e-bikes in public housing.
Finally, there is Louis Molina, Adams’ correction commissioner. Molina’s task was to turn around violence at Rikers Island.
Instead, his approach is to (unsuccessfully) muzzle bad news, refraining from sending bulletins to the press about the six deaths at Rikers Island so far this year.
The federal monitor overseeing Rikers is so upset about bad-faith actions, including a coverup of a recent violent death, that he’s asked a judge to hold the department in contempt.
Meanwhile, assaults at Rikers are 41% higher than last year.
Of Adams’ three public-safety commissioners, then, one is gone, and two are failing.
Not the best result for the public-safety mayor.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
