Mayor Adams' laxity on corruption at City Hall could derail his public safety program

Mayor Adams has always had a shockingly casual attitude toward the appearance of corruption.

From the beginning, his election campaign and his term as mayor were accompanied by investigations by federal authorities and press reports about irregularities.

But in his election and re-election program, these issues always played a subordinate role: reducing crime.

The latest round of federal raids on the homes of his three top public safety officials changes that, jeopardizing Adams' only The already fragile claim to success as mayor is fragile.

Last Wednesday, federal investigators executed search warrants at the homes of Police Commissioner Edward Caban, Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Phil Banks, and Tim Pearson, a senior Adams aide in charge of security at the migrant shelters (as well as the homes of several other high-ranking City Hall officials, but that's enough).

There are no charges against anyone and the government often makes mistakes.

And yet, no one is shocked by this development, and Adams alone bears the blame for this cynicism.

When he took office in 2022, he chose Banks – even though Banks, then the highest-ranking uniformed police officer, had been caught accepting expensive gifts from influential merchants a decade earlier. (Banks was not charged with a crime, but others were and were convicted.)

Post editors warned that hiring Banks would “hinder Adams' war on crime.”

Pearson is also not very careless with the rules: Already at the beginning of his term in office, he tried to balance his new job at City Hall And the position of chief of security in a casino, although City Hall helps regulate casinos and will play a role in issuing new casino licenses.

And then there is Caban, who takes a series of luxury trips paid for by third parties, including the government of Qatar, which provides shelter to senior Hamas members.

As a junior police officer, Caban was once disciplined for lying about his shifts and using his patrol car for personal purposes.

Because Adams ignored initial skepticism about this gang, his entire public safety leadership is now distracted by a full-scale federal investigation.

And then Adams' only credible argument for his re-election – that he has reduced crime – already weak.

After the federal raids last week, Adams touted the “decline in crime” on FOX 5 and vowed, “We will continue to reduce crime.”

He downplayed the deadly gang shooting at the West Indian Day Parade in Brooklyn over Labor Day weekend, saying: “At the parade, you saw police, community groups, a crisis management team, you saw an amazing response.”

But crime is not actually consistent down during Adams' term in office.

Now the numbers are in for the year ending September 1st. Adams' third summer as mayor and the last summer before he has to win the primary election next June.

Yes, the number of serious crimes decreased by 2.4% compared to last year, and that also represents a decrease of 2.4% compared to 2022.

But this flat trend leaves serious crimes 33.8% higher than in 2021, the last year of the previous government.

The crime rate hasn't been this high since 2006 – and back then, crime was steadily declining.

The tiny declines Adams has achieved are not the turnaround New Yorkers expected when they elected him in 2021. This is especially true as robbery and aggravated assault rates continue to rise: both have increased this year.

For the most part, Adams has done a good job of directing the NYPD to focus on gang killings – the murder rate has dropped 25% since 2021.

But they are still 17 percent above the record lows that New York reached between 2017 and 2019.

Adams keeps saying that crime in the subway has gone down – but the city has seen nine subway murders this year, three of them in the last two weeks.

This puts New York on track to surpass 11 murders on public transit by 2022 – a level not seen since underground crime began to be curbed in the early 1990s.

And Adams is in denial about the extent of the unrest on the city's streets – including the unrest emanating from the poorly policed ​​migrant shelters in downtown Manhattan.

So it is not a good time for Adams' hand-picked security chiefs – all of them – to fear that they themselves have come into conflict with the law.

By tolerating all of his deputies' minor offenses, Adams appears to have violated the rule of broken windows policing: small crimes, if not kept under control, can lead to even bigger crimes.

Adams' failure to enforce discipline at City Hall jeopardizes his already fragile – and in some areas nonexistent – public safety improvements for all of us.

Nicole Gelinas is an editor at the Manhattan Institute's City Journal.