"We Can’t Tolerate and Accept That,” the Mayor Says about the 483 Protests Taking Over NYC

By Yehudit Garmaise

“I don't believe people should be able to take over our bridges,” Mayor Eric Adams told reporters at City Hall on Tuesday. “I don't believe that people should be able to just take over our streets and march in our streets. “I just don't believe you can run a city in which people can just do whatever they want.”

Since October 7, New York City has seen more than 161,000 people participate in 483 protests, the mayor reported.

Seen at all of the marches are hateful propaganda, incitement against Jews worldwide, and illogical and factually untrue claims about Israel, such as that Jews did not live in Israel before 1948.

BoroPark24 is waiting to hear back from the mayor’s Ethnic Media Office for the breakdown of how many of those protests have been pro-Palestinian, which appear to comprise the majority of the protests.

Although Jewish calls for solidarity mostly take place privately in our own communities, on November 14, nearly 300,000 Jews and others supporting Israel marched in Washington, DC, showing the world what a true “peaceful protest” looks like as they sang, prayed, and listened to many speakers.

New York City’s permissiveness regarding public protests, the mayor said, is the result of a legal settlement that was decided by a judge after the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020.

“When you look at the agreement [with the NYPD], New Yorkers’ right to walk in the streets is more lenient,” said the mayor, who also bemoaned the NYPD’s lack of clarity and freedom on what and how much action they can take to disrupt violent protests. 

 “The Police Department has to be extremely hesitant in [undertaking any] actions that they would have carried out in the past to keep the peace,” the mayor said.

“The settlement imposes a tiered system for responding to protests, so there's a lot that depends on the circumstances, said Lisa Zornberg, the chief counsel to the mayor, to express the vague guidelines given to the NYPD regarding protests.

The decision that came out of that agreement “set us in a very troubling direction,” and now the city is seeing the fruits of that decision, the mayor said with sadness.

“As soon as I read the settlement, I said, ‘This is a problem. Anyone who polices this city should be concerned about what's in the settlement.”

Although the settlement “did not allow protesters to block access to critical infrastructure,” according to Zornberg, thousands of protesters have attempted to close down Grand Central Station, sit on the street in front of Times Square, and take over the Brooklyn Bridge and the George Washington Bridge: all of which most New Yorkers would consider “critical infrastructure.” 

When an assailant spray-painted a Manhattan Starbucks with what the mayor called “hateful terminology and “riled up the crowd,” NYPD officers arrested six protestors in what the mayor called “great restraint” in a “volatile situation.”

Mayor Adams blamed the chaos and ugliness of the pro-Palestinian protests on “outside agitators who come from all over the country and embed themselves into peaceful protests to rile up the crowd.

“We can't tolerate and accept that.”