Mayor Adams Considers Hiring More Police Officers, Uses Strategies Learned from 9/11 to Fight Crime

By Yehudit Garmaise

After a shockingly high number of violent crimes took place in New York City in Mayor Eric Adams’ first month in office, he told WABC today that he may hire more NYPD officers.

“If we need to hire more, we’re going to hire more, and nothing is going to get in the way of that,” said Mayor Adams: but that is not all he is doing.

While former Mayor Bill de Blasio repeatedly relied on “improving the relationships between communities and the police,” and the end of the pandemic as the keys, which proved ineffective, to driving down crime, Mayor Adams is working closely with Gov. Kathy Hochul and President Joe Biden, who is visiting New York City on Thursday to meet with the mayor, to bring city, state, and federal agencies to work together to fight gun violence. 

Intelligence and information sharing among agencies has long been one of Adams’ innovative and ambitious ideas to stop the gun violence that is plaguing New York City, and he commended Gov. Kathy Hochul at her Interstate Task Force meeting last Wednesday for “analyzing every river and dam every river to stop the flow of violence.”

“Our city, our state, and our country, we have become an ocean of violence,” Mayor Adams said at the meeting that took place at the New York State Intelligence Center in East Greenbush. “If we don’t build a dam on each one of the rivers that are feeding this sea of violence, we are going to lose families and children.”

“We need to understand [the laws] that allow dangerous people to return to our streets,” Mayor Adams said. “We need to understand why guns are continually flowing to the cities throughout this country. 

“We need to understand why we are continuing to produce broken children that turn into broken adults and become broken people to commit violence. We need to understand the connectivity to our failures in education, our failures in opening our court system.”

“We need to understand how the slowdown in processing DNA data has preventing gun cases from moving forward. We need to understand that there are too many defense attorneys and public defenders who are not in the courtroom.”

In New York City, the mayor said, “it is time for us to use the same strategies that we learned to use after September 11: to stop external terrorist threats.”

“We learned so much after the World Trade Center attack on Sept. 11, 2001,” Mayor Adams said. “We made up our minds that we will not sit back and allow terrorists from foreign shores to come to our country, and we produced information-sharing: that is what this consortium is going to do.”

Tuesday’s shooting at Jacobi Medical Center, when 25-year-old Keber Martinez, who has been arrested, went to the hospital for asthma, but when he noticed a rival gang member also there, he pulled out a gun and opened fire in the waiting room, reveals the urgency of the high level of violence in the city, Mayor Adams said.

In addition to that disturbing incident in which the victim, who is expected to recover, was shot in the arm, Mayor Adams recounted that at the same hospital, a police officer at the scene told him that an X-Ray technician discovered in a patient’s X-ray that he was carrying a firearm.

“We have normalized the carrying of guns in our city, our state, and in many cases, in our country,” Mayor Adams lamented about the constant availability of weapons in the city. “We have no longer made it taboo to do so.”

Adams added that the Lashawn McNeil, 47, who killed the police officers 22-year-old Jason Rivera and 27-year-old Wilbert Moya was carrying an “automatic modified weapons that carried 40 rounds of ammunition, and he had an additional AR-15 assault rifle under his mattress.”

“This [extent of ownership of automatic weapons] is what we are up against,” Mayor Adams said about the assault weapons that NYPD officers do not carry on patrols, but are used by soldiers in war. 

“We must be unified on this threat,” Mayor Adams said. “Our entire country mobilized against the COVID threat to make sure that it did not continue to spread, but that same level of intelligence we must use to end the pandemic of gun violence.”

Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office