Nicole Gelinas
Opinion
Adams’ laxity on City Hall corruption
could wreck his public-safety agenda
By Nicole Gelinas
42 Comments
Published Sep. 8, 2024, 6:14 a.m. ET
Columnists
Nicole Gelinas
Adams' corruption laxity threatens his
public-safety agenda
Mayor Eric Adams' laxity on City Hall corruption could wreck his public-safety agenda.
Erik Pendzich/Shutterstock Michael Goodwin
Mayor Adams has always had a startlingly over-casual attitude toward the appearance of corruption. New York Times’ AG Sulzberger gives
us another reason to search
His mayoral campaign and administration have been dogged by federal investigations and press reporting elsewhere for fairness
of irregularities from the start.
But they’ve always been peripheral to his election and re-election platform: cutting crime. David Christopher Kaufman
The latest round of federal raids, at the homes of his three top public-safety officials, changes that, and From Kamala to Hamas, Summer 2024
was the Season of Complicity
thus imperils Adams’ only already fragile claim to mayoral success.
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Last Wednesday, federal investigators executed search warrants at the homes of Police Commissioner
Edward Caban, Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Phil Banks, and Tim Pearson, a top Adams aide in charge
of migrant-shelter security operations (plus a couple of other City Hall high-ups, but that’s already
enough).
No one is under indictment, and the feds often mess up.
And yet: Nobody is shocked by this development, and this cynicism is entirely Adams’ fault.
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Upon taking office in 2022, he tapped Banks — even though a decade previously Banks, then the top
uniformed police official, had been caught taking high-dollar gifts from influence peddlers. (Banks wasn’t
charged with a crime, but others were, and were convicted.)
The Post’s editors warned that hiring Banks would “hobble” Adams’ “war on crime.”
Pearson, too, is cavalier with the rules: Early on in the Adams administration, he tried to keep both his
new City Hall gig and a casino security-chief job , even though City Hall helps regulate casinos and will
have a role in awarding new casino licenses.
Then there’s Caban, who takes an awful lot of luxury trips paid for by third parties, including the
government of Qatar, which harbors Hamas leaders.
As a younger cop, Caban was once punished for lying about his shifts and for using his government car
for personal use.
Because Adams didn’t heed early skepticism about this crew, his entire public-safety leadership
infrastructure is now distracted by a sweeping federal investigation.
And that’s when Adams’ only credible argument for reelection — that he’s cut crime — is already weak.
After the federal raids last week, Adams went on FOX 5 to tout his “decrease in crime,” and vowed that
“we’re gonna continue to drive down crime.”
He dismissed the fatal gang shooting at Brooklyn’s West Indian Day Parade over Labor Day weekend,
saying that at the parade, “you saw police officers, community groups, crisis management team, you saw
an amazing response.”
But crime is actually not consistently down during Adams’ administration.
The numbers are now out for the year through Sept. 1, Adams’ third mayoral summer, and the last
summer before he has to win a June primary next year.
Yes, felony crime is down 2.4% from last year, and that puts it down 2.4% from 2022, as well.
But this flat trend leaves felony crime 33.8% higher than was in 2021, the last year of the previous
Covers
it
administration.
We haven’t seen felony crime rates this high since 2006 — and back then, crime was steadily falling. Today's Cover
Front Cover
The tiny little declines Adams can tout aren’t the reversal New Yorkers expected when the elected him in
2021, especially since robbery and felony assault rates keep going up: Both have risen this year. Flip for back cover
Adams has mostly done well directing the NYPD to focus on gang murder — murders are down 25%
since 2021.
But they’re still 17% above the record lows New York achieved between 2017 and 2019.
Adams keeps talking about how subway crime is down — but the city has suffered nine subway murders
this year, three in the past two weeks.
That puts New York on track to exceed the 11 transit murders clocked in 2022, a level not seen since the
city started cutting underground crime in the early 1990s.
Browse Covers
And Adams is in denial about the level of disorder on city streets — including disorder spilling out from
poorly policed migrant shelters in core Manhattan. Trending Now
on NYPost.com
So it’s not a great time for Adams’ hand-picked public-safety chiefs — all of them — to be worried that
they, themselves, have been caught on the wrong side of the law. 63,322
42 What do you think? Post a comment.
In tolerating all his deputies’ low-level sins, Adams seems not have heeded the rule of broken-windows
policing: Small crimes, if not kept in check, risk leading to bigger crimes. Con artist-turned-doctor is practicing
NJ gynecologist -- despite being
outed as chronic catfish in bombshell
Adams’ failure to impose discipline at City Hall threatens his already fragile — and in some areas, book
nonexistent — public-safety improvements for all of us.
49,580
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
Filed under city hall eric adams FBI investigations public safety 9/8/24
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