President to Travel to NYC Next Week to Share Crime-Fighting Ideas with Mayor Adams

By Yehudit Garmaise

President Joe Biden will travel to New York City on Feb. 3, to meet with Mayor Eric Adams to discuss comprehensive crime-fighting strategies that the president would like to apply nationwide. 

On Monday, Mayor Adams announced an unusually well-received plan to fight crime in New York City called the Blueprint to End Gun Violence, which ambitiously seeks to use all the city’s agencies and proposes that local, state, and federal governments work together to both fight and prevent crime.

“We will expand the partnership between the NYPD and New York State Police,” said Mayor Adams on Monday. “We are already working with Gov. Hochul’s Public Safety team on reducing gun violence, sharing critical law enforcement data, and supporting the Interstate Gun Tracing Consortium.”

As many New Yorkers have been urging the mayor to do for years, Mayor Adams said that he will “start putting more officers on patrol in key neighborhoods throughout the city.”

The mayor’s other ideas include improving existing Public Safety Units with new Neighborhood Safety Teams, which will focus on gun violence. 

“We will launch these additional teams in the next three weeks, with deep focus on the 30 precincts where 80% of violence occurs, even as the Public Safety Units continue their lifesaving work,” said Adams, who also seeks to provide better diagnoses of learning disabilities and better educational and job opportunities to prevent lives of crime.

President Biden’s approach has been to “include historic levels of funding for cities and states to put more cops on the beat and invest in community violence prevention and intervention programs, as well as stepped up federal law enforcement efforts against illegal gun traffickers,” the White House said.

“I look forward to welcoming President Biden to New York City next week and sitting down to discuss how we can work collaboratively to end the scourge of gun violence we are seeing on New York City streets,” Mayor Adams said in a statement. “The sea of violence comes from many rivers, and that’s why my Blueprint to End Gun Violence in New York City seeks to dam every river that feeds this greater crisis.

“Public safety is my administration’s highest priority, and we welcome the opportunity to display to President Biden how federal and local governments can coordinate and support each other in this fight to keep New Yorkers safe.”

flicker / Gage Skidmore