Mayor Adams Clashes With Albany Democrats Over His Crime Plan

For the mayor of New York City, it is customary to face the occasional hostile question from a lawmaker during his annual pilgrimage to the State Capitol in Albany to ask for money, a tradition known as “Tin Cup Day.”

But typically, those prickly questions come from lawmakers of the opposite party.

On Wednesday, Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat with more centrist views than his predecessor, Bill de Blasio, caused the script to be flipped.

With crime-fighting at the core of his agenda, Mr. Adams used his virtual appearance before the State Legislature on Wednesday to argue that changes to bail laws and other measures designed to make the criminal justice system more fair have overreached, allowing more dangerous criminals onto the streets.

Latrice Walker, an Assembly Democrat from Brooklyn and one of the authors of recent changes to the state’s bail laws, took issue with the mayor’s comments and challenged Mr. Adams to a debate about bail reform and its impact on crime in New York City.

“We are seeing crime on the rise all across the country, even in states where bail reform is not a thing,” Ms. Walker said, adding that the Legislature is aware of “the Jim Crow remnants of criminal justice in our country.”

“I don’t think you should debate me, you should debate the 11-month-old baby’s mother,” Mr. Adams replied, referring to a child who was shot in the face last month.

“No, it’s you who are making this a political issue,” Ms. Walker said, talking over the mayor. “I lost a brother at the age of 19 years old to gun violence.”

The tension between the new mayor and his legislative colleagues highlighted the ongoing fight within the Democratic Party over how to grapple with rising crime and demands for criminal justice reform after the death of George Floyd sparked nationwide protests.

Mr. Adams repeatedly argued that legislators should trust his instincts, given his history as a former police captain and a reformer who protested police violence. (He also asserted that he had a criminal conviction; his staff later said that he had misspoke, and was referring to his arrest as a teenager.)

That he is uniquely qualified to tackle this issue is perhaps the central tenet of his mayoralty: “God made me for such a time as this,” he says often, citing Esther 4:14 from the Bible.

He asked for changes to state law so that prosecutors can try some teenagers as adults in cases involving firearms and judges can have more discretion to consider “dangerousness” when setting bail.

At several points, the mayor held up placards to illustrate his argument, including one saying that last year, 10 percent of people under 18 who were arrested by the New York Police Department had a gun and that “six years ago, that was only 1 percent.”

Mr. Adams’s demands were met with condemnation from left-leaning Democratic legislators — who chided the mayor for proposing laws they say disproportionately hurt people of color — and a warm embrace from several Republican legislators and centrist Democrats.

Assemblyman Edward P. Ra, a Long Island Republican, thanked Mr. Adams for his leadership on fighting crime and commended his choice of Keechant Sewell, the former Nassau County chief of detectives, as police commissioner.

James Gaughran, a Democratic state senator from Long Island who has supported changes to the bail reform laws and has received support from police unions, said that he found “both the tone and the initial agenda, your administration, very refreshing.”

And Diane Savino, a Democratic senator from Staten Island and a former member of a now-defunct breakaway coalition that shared power with Republicans, announced she was sponsoring a bill that would make some of the changes that Mr. Adams has requested.

A poll released Wednesday by Quinnipiac found nearly 75 percent of New York City voters believe crime is a “very serious” problem — a significant increase from years past. In fact, crime ranked as New Yorkers’ No. 1 issue, with 65 percent saying they worried they would be targeted.

A report by the Criminal Justice Agency found that in the year after New York stopped prosecuting most 16- and 17-year-olds as adults — with a law known as Raise the Age — nearly 50 percent of 16-year-olds arrested were later rearrested. But comprehensive data on the broader implications of criminal justice reforms remains elusive.

The state has begun to release its own data on recidivism, which suggest that a relatively small percentage of people released as a result of the bail laws are rearrested for violent crimes while awaiting trial. But that data is incomplete and lacking in detail, making it impossible to assess the specific impact of reforms at this time.

Criminal justice reform advocates expressed concern about Mr. Adams’s continued push to revise bail laws and change the way courts treat young people charged with serious crimes, policy shifts that took decades to make. The city’s public defenders said the mayor’s push for adding a dangerousness standard to bail decisions was “guesswork” that would “ensnare” Black and Latino communities in the criminal legal system.

“Rising gun violence is not about Raise the Age, it’s about the pandemic,” said Jennifer March, the executive director of the Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York, a nonprofit.

With American flags to his back and a green smoothie to his right, Mr. Adams touched on other topics, too. He requested more money for child care, foster care and mental health services. He asked for changes to the earned-income tax credit, and an additional $19 billion in bonding authority.

He also signaled a softening of his embrace of cryptocurrency. Mr. Adams, who converted his first paycheck into Bitcoin and Ether, has championed the industry, which backed his campaign for mayor.

Environmentalists have been working to put a moratorium on certain types of crypto mining, which can use a substantial amount of energy, much of it from gas-fueled power plants.

Pressed to address their concerns on Wednesday, Mr. Adams said, “I support cryptocurrency, not crypto mining.”

Bitcoin is particularly notorious for such mining operations, and other currencies have the potential to use much less energy, according to Anna Kelles, the assemblywoman from Ithaca sponsoring the moratorium bill. She took Mr. Adams’s comments as a win.

In an interview, she said Mr. Adams’s comments were “beautiful,” because they recognized that cryptocurrency and crypto mining are not synonymous, and other digital currencies can use other forms of validation.

“You can absolutely thrive in crypto without engaging with cryptocurrency mining,” she said.