A MAYOR'S LAMENT – OVERNIGHT:  When Eric Adams became mayor New York City in January, our enthusiasm was limited.  The Republicans, as usual, had barely put up a fight for the mayoralty, preferring golf and dinner at the club.  Of the Democratic candidates, Adams was the least bad.  He'd been a cop, and he'd made it clear that he was a moderate Dem, not a blazing revolutionary dedicated to tearing down the Statue of Liberty for fun. 

It's now more than four months from inauguration day, and Adams is in trouble.  He can't seem to get much going on the major issue facing New Yorkers – crime.  The left, which controls his party, sees criminals as an oppressed sort, misunderstood and essentially angelic.  The lefties have put up a STOP sign in the mayor's path.  The mayor has just expressed his frustration, and what he said is worth reporting, for it applies around the country.  From the New York Post:   

In an impassioned defense of the NYPD, Mayor Adams called for more help from the federal government, and New Yorkers themselves, to help crack down on what he called the city’s latest crime scourge – ghost guns.

“I feel like I’m in an alternate reality. We’re probably the only civilized country that sends their troops into battle and we criticize them every day. That’s what we do,” a frustrated Adams told reporters Wednesday at the NYPD’s headquarters in Lower Manhattan, referring to 131 firearms on the table in front of him.

“That father and son-in-law, future son-in-law, in spite of all that we say about them, they go out there again with the uncertainty of coming home. And all we do is criticize them!

That’s all we do. I don’t hear any good stories about men and women who are protecting us from the bad people. No one is talking about that,” Adams said of the rank and file cops.

Adams also slammed the “extreme left” for failing to have the backs of officers and promoting the Defund the Police movement. He didn’t mention defund proponents like socialist Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by name, but in the past he’s blamed the city’s soft-on-crime stance in part on his predecessor, left-leaning ex-Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Mayor Eric Adams is fed up with rising crime rates, the treatment of NYPD officers and ghost guns.

“We’ve had this battle before, but you know, we won it before because everyone was with us – we were operating as a team, we weren’t solo.”

COMMENT:   We can understand the mayor's frustration.  I think he's fundamentally a good man, who knows what must be done, but doesn't have the power or the sheer influence to do it.  I think he now realizes that the Democratic Party in New York is not a liberal party, but a socialist party, and that ideology, not street conditions, govern it.

Adams is black, but is not part of the black establishment.  And he is not part of the liberal establishment either.  The black establishment has never been interested in solving the crime problem, and wasn't even consulted when Mayor Giuliani went on his successful anti-crime crusade in the mid 1990s.  The liberal establishment feels deeply about rubbing shoulders with other cultures, speaking an African language, and having a space in a parking garage.  Oh, and finishing The New York Times crossword puzzle. 

We wish the mayor well.  Optimism is another story.

May 11, 2022