The Manhattan Chamber of Commerce hosted its first-ever anti-crime summit on Thursday. It’s a bad sign that the Chamber thought the event was necessary. If things are going well, the polls will leave it up to them. The mayor isn’t Bill de Blasio, so he maintains a lot of goodwill, but not enough time to deliver some eye-popping early results.
Eric Adams’ summit speech illustrated the problem. The mayor cannot decide whether he wants to declare victory or issue a state of emergency for help.
He closed with a triumphant note, telling the crowd: “New York is back,” he declared. “We’re seeing a decrease in crime.” But he’s also smart enough to know that he won’t sell victory to those who feel he’s losing.
Core Manhattan Crime No under.
In the Manhattan South Patrol Special Administrative District (half of Manhattan and a major business concentration area), felony crimes increased 13.3% year-over-year for the month ending January 15. A 24.7% increase compared to 2019 before the pandemic.
These bad results caused the whole borough to collapse. Serious crime across Manhattan is up 5.3% from a year ago and up 19.8% compared to 2019.
And Manhattan is doing worse than the city. Across the city, serious crime is down he 1.3% from last year.
Summit’s location between Midtown and Hell’s Kitchen was good if the purpose was to explain the problem. Twenty-four hours before him, just a block away, a gang of robbers shot an employee of an illegal hot pot shop.
And the giant storefront, less than half a block away, was empty for a year as the drugstore that had been there for a quarter century closed due to mass shoplifting.Joe Stein, “property protection director” at Walgreens Speaking to conference attendees, Mr.
Manhattan’s Upper West Side was the scene of the first subway murder of the year late last week when a violent state parole inmate crushed a man to death. Not far away, an elderly woman was tied up and killed in her apartment.
When the host asked a panel of business owners and private security officials if they agreed with the mayor that “New York is back,” the answer was — laughter.
1 speaker Did it Forgive me for things being “better”. Yes, they’re doing a little better now that Broadway and the reopened tourist trade have brought more traffic and police are more aggressively dealing with dangerous street vagrants.
But if laughter is an instinctive response, New York needs to do better than terrible.
Many of the slow rolls aren’t the mayor’s fault. As he said in a speech, state law will “handcuff” police by closing 1,400 illegal all-cash pot shops in the city, such as the one where a worker was shot last week. , as incompetent state legislatures crafted pot regulations, hundreds of crime-attracting junk stores flooded New York.
But Adams says otherwise. “Because of the way the rule was imposed in Albany…we have to get around it,” he observed, rather than asking the governor and Congress to amend the rule now.
After the mayor left, a panel of the state’s most powerful elected officials showed them is not Whether it’s criminal justice or marijuana “reform,” I’m in the mood for more change to the hastily enacted laws that have “handcuffed” New York.
So we agreed that the problem was with “resources”. “We made a change,” argued State Sen. Jamal Bailey (D-Bronx). ‘Repeat offenders can be arrested’
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has admitted that state changes to the evidence-finding process have forced his office to drop important cases, including domestic violence cases.
But he also hinted that the state could solve the problem with cash. “We are short of funds,” he said. “The first problem is resources.”
Rep. Jeffrey Dinowitz (D-Bronx) blamed the officers for failing to arrest the suspect. said of the NYPD.
In response, New York Police Department Commissioner Jeffrey Madley said police were “arresting the same people all the time .
Eventually, New Yorkers will tire of the excuses, but will blame the mayor. there is.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
