That sound you hear from City Hall these days is a political leader hastily returning to his roots as an NYPD cop. With less than 90 days until the start of early voting, Adams is staking his reelection bid on falling crime numbers, arguing to voters that he has made New York safer and can continue to do so if he gets another four years in office.
“So far this year, we’ve had 100 fewer shootings compared to the same period last year,” he told reporters at a press conference shortly before the July 4 holiday. And when you compare this six-month period to the same period in 2021, right before we came into office, shootings are down astronomically, 54 percent. These are real results.”
And lest anybody miss the point, Adams said the stats are the reason he is a better candidate than the Democratic nominee, Zohran Mamdani. “Look at these numbers. This is a moment of having experience. Not a moment where you’re doing an experiment,” Adams said. “Experience over experiment.”
But public safety won’t necessarily be a winning issue for Adams. The crime stats, while trending in the right direction, are not quite as rosy as the mayor would have us believe. More importantly, Adams has refused to address devastating, credible accusations that he has allowed cronyism, bribery, corruption, incompetence, and sexual misconduct to run amok at the highest levels of the NYPD.
Adams is on solid ground in claiming that fewer shootings and killings are an unambiguously good thing, and he is right to tout six consecutive monthly declines in robbery, burglary, and grand larceny. But a look at the latest crime stats reveals that rapes are up by more than 21 percent so far this year and have increased 35 percent over the past two years. Felony assaults are up by nearly 6 percent over the past two years. “New Yorkers should celebrate the current crime trends. Things are most certainly moving in the right direction,” conservative commentator Rafael Mangual warned in the New York Post. “But it would be a grievous mistake to take this good news for granted.”
The mayor’s back-patting also ignores some glaring failures by the NYPD. Last summer, my Crown Heights neighborhood was traumatized by a mass shooting on Labor Day at the West Indian American Day Parade, when a man jumped over police barricades and fired into a crowd in broad daylight, wounding four and killing 25-year-old Denzel Chan. Weeks later, the cops named a 15-year-old suspect in the case, but that turned out to be a mistake. It took five months and negative press attention for the NYPD to apologize and retract its erroneous accusation against the teenager. Nearly a year later, the case remains unsolved.
Meanwhile, five recently filed lawsuits against Adams and top NYPD leaders accuse the mayor of meddling in police business, bypassing the department’s chain of command, and covering up illegal acts by his buddies. The accusers include former police commissioner Tom Donlon, ex–chief of detectives James Essig, and Joseph Veneziano, the former assistant chief of the NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau.
“The New York City Police Department under the direction of Defendant Adams functions as a racketeering enterprise in violation of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act,” Donlon’s lawsuit begins. “A coordinated criminal conspiracy had taken root at the highest levels of City government carried out through wire fraud, mail fraud, honest services fraud, obstruction of justice and retaliation against whistleblowers.” Over the course of 250 pages, Donlon accuses top NYPD officials of rampant illegal behavior, such as using Donlon’s signature stamp to hand out promotions and plum jobs to cronies who were otherwise unvetted and ineligible.
“This enterprise — the NYPD—was criminal at its core,” Donlon contends. In one case, he alleges that a top NYPD officer, Tarik Sheppard, used the commissioner’s stamp to illegally award himself an unmerited promotion from two-star to three-star chief. Essig’s lawsuit accuses former commissioner James Caban of handing out promotions for up to $15,000 in bribes and says untrained officers with connections won spots in important police divisions like the Special Victims Unit, which handles rape and crimes against children.
In case after case, senior officers say they alerted Adams to the misconduct but were ignored or punished. In response, the mayor has issued several nothing-to-see-here statements. “New Yorkers love their police officers and I know they do because I wore that uniform and it showed me a lot of love when I was a police officer,” he told NY1 News. “Did we have to tweak some things? Yes. But you do not have rampant corruption in the New York City Police Department.” (Along the way, the denials by the mayor and Sheppard have included suggestions that Donlon was not mentally fit to serve; he promptly sued the pair for $10 million for defamation.)
The mayor’s real political problem is that New Yorkers may not be looking for a mayor to save them from out-of-control crime. When a recent poll by Emerson College asked voters to rank their top concerns, housing affordability ranked first, followed by the economy (jobs, inflation and taxes). Crime ranked third. The same survey showed Mamdani — who has been focused on affordability — completing the surge that carried him to victory in the Democratic primary.
Ex-governor Andrew Cuomo, who is running as an independent candidate, is all in on public safety, just like Adams. “Of all the things we have to do when we’re talking in New York City, specifically, crime, crime, crime are the top three,” Cuomo said at a press conference; he has promised to hire 5,000 more cops. And Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels safety patrol group, calls himself “the only one who can stop the crime.”
But if voters aren’t panicking over public safety, the central arguments of Adams, Cuomo, and Sliwa lose much of their appeal. It could be that the NYPD under Adams, for all its flaws, may have driven crime down so much that voters are ready to move on to rent, the price of food, and other issues.
The original version of this story swapped two names with respect to accusations made in Donlon’s lawsuit. The charges in question are being made by Donlon.
