What irony: Tuesday’s celebration of New York City’s huge 2025 gains against crime went without mention of former Mayor Eric Adams, who actually led the success.
And the chief celebrant, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, seems primed to tear it all down.
Also onstage was Gov. Kathy Hochul, who did far less to help Adams than she should’ve.
OK, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch was up there, too, and she absolutely deserves major credit for the historic reductions in crime and gun violence; nor can you blame the career public servant for sidestepping politics by not calling out Adams’ crucial role while the politicians mugged for the cameras.
Still: Are Mamdani and Hochul so insecure that they couldn’t even speak Eric Adams’ name?
Crime doesn’t fall by accident: It was Adams’ commitment to safety, the rebuilding of the NYPD and to supporting Tisch’s focus on a “deliberate, data-driven” policing strategy that made this happen.
Adams left City Hall with his head held high, knowing that he kept his 2021 campaign vow to bring crime down — not as quickly as he’d hoped, and not without some terrible missteps in handling the NYPD, but delivering in the end.
Per the stats, New York City’s 2025 was the safest year on record for gun violence, with record-crushing low shootings, a dramatic drop in homicides and, as Mamdani’s office crowed, the “safest year on the subways since 2009.”
- Shootings hit a record low of 688 incidents — a 24% drop from 2024 and 10% below the previous low set in 2018.
- The number of shooting victims shrank to 856, another historic low — 247 fewer people than in 2024
- Homicides fell to 305 — a 20% drop from 2024
- Robberies declined by nearly 10% with 1,600 fewer incidents than 2024
- Major crimes in the subway fell 4%, while transit robberies reached record lows and shootings down 62.5%.
Overall, though, the city still has a ways to go to get all major crime back below 2019 levels, with no sure sign the positive trends will continue under the new mayor.
Yes, Mamdani talked Tisch into staying on, but refuses to increase the NYPD headcount (now funded at 35,000 cops) and may well see the force shrink if retirements and resignations remain high.
After all, his history of cop-bashing suggests he won’t have officers’ backs if something goes wrong, or when ideologues second-guess solid, proactive policing.
And he’s promised multiple “reforms” that will make cops’ work harder, such as eliminating the NYPD’s gang database.
That’s particularly ominous when the most troubling crime trend is rising youth violence: Last year, 18% of shooters were under 18, as were 14% of shooting victims — a 5% increase over 2024.
The NYPD was able to protect the city’s students, focusing on school-safety zones and student-commuter corridors, areas where it was able to bring shooting incidents and victims down by more than three-quarters.
With data-driven redeployment of school-safety agents, including patrols of blocks around the schools, kids brought fewer weapons to school, and in-school reported crime fell 22%.
If Tisch has a free hand, those innovations should continue, but protecting kids beyond school gets a lot tougher.
One huge plus would be fixing the Raise the Age law — which steers nearly all under-19 perps into the Family Court system, but never bolstered that system to handle already-violent youth dumped into it.
Hochul’s reportedly aiming to repair Raise the Age this year; Mamdani could show he’s wised up on crime by supporting her.
Yes, that means backing off progressive pieties about “cops bad” and “teen thugs misunderstood” — but surely the mayor’s earned some trust from his base.
By keeping Tisch on, Mamdani has shown he doesn’t want to mess with the success of her data-driven, precision-policing approach; will he throw it all away anyway out of misplaced loyalty to progressive fantasies about crime-fighting?
