NYC Mayor Eric Adams's Crime Plan Is Loathed by Liberals. But It Might Work.

Earlier this week, Mayor Eric Adams released a 15-page document, “The Blueprint to End Gun Violence,” with the purpose of alleviating a “public health crisis that continues to threaten every corner of the city.” It was work, the introduction maintained, that “will take all of us.”

The plan was prompted by the rise in violent crime that has accompanied the pandemic, afflicting cities around the country and made vivid by the deaths of two police officers in New York who were shot last week in a Harlem apartment in the middle of a routine domestic-dispute call. In 2020, the number of shootings in New York more than doubled to 1,531 over the previous year; then they climbed again, to 1,877 in 2021, the highest figure in decades.

One problem for the mayor is that these statistics are not imprinted on all New Yorkers — particularly those still working at home in moneyed neighborhoods to which they have more or less retreated, untouched by the recent disturbances. The pandemic, among its many effects, has left the city feeling far less fluid; gun crime has been concentrated in low-income, minority communities, where Covid has also caused the greatest physical and psychic damage.

Not every quarter of the city is likely to respond to Mr. Adams’s call for “all of us” to fight mounting violence. A civic group in Fort Greene (a part of Brooklyn where gun violence hasn’t been front and center) fixated on preserving zoning laws “reflective of the existing rowhouse character” in the neighborhood was, a few days after the mayor’s summoning, calling for a “brunch-hour march and rally” to oppose dining sheds. (“Noise forever. Rats forever. Trash forever,” read a post on its Twitter feed, “Lives disrupted forever.”)

In effect, Mr. Adams is left selling aggressive policing policies in a post-George Floyd world to a host of constituents who do not necessarily recognize the urgency.

In the 1970s through the early ’90s, when the fiscal crisis and the crack epidemic produced an epic period of crime in the city, there was broad acceptance that the situation was unsustainable because violence did in fact “threaten every corner.” Although high-poverty areas of the city were disproportionately affected, as they are now, schoolchildren on the Upper East Side were routinely mugged for money or bus passes, leaving mothers to send them out the door with a few extra dollars in case they encountered an assailant.

By 1982, nearly 150,000 New Yorkers were engaged in citizen-driven anti-crime programs in neighborhoods like Lenox Hill and Riverdale. Nearly half of them were registered as “block-watchers,” volunteers trained by the local precinct to identify problems and catch them before they escalated — a codification of Jane Jacobs’s “eyes on the street.” In 1979, after community leaders in Midwood, Brooklyn, organized this sort of program, felony crimes dropped there by 17 percent.

“What we are trying to do, literally, is to organize every block and every building in this city and to give people the tools with which to help themselves,” the Police Department’s director of civilian participation unit told The Times in 1982.

Mr. Adams’s blueprint includes a series of community-based approaches, among them an expanded use of violence interrupters — outreach workers, often with a history of gang involvement, who can intervene in conflicts before they become unmanageable — enhancements to the mental-health system and an “unprecedented” summer youth employment program that will deliver paid internships with businesses and corporations around the city.

Nevertheless, the mayor’s plan was immediately met with controversy, landing in a moment when liberals have perhaps never been so divided in their philosophies about crime reduction. Proponents of criminal-justice reform immediately criticized the plan for what they perceive as a regression to some of the most harmful practices of law enforcement. In a joint statement, the city’s leading public defender groups said they did not support the “focus on discredited punitive and surveillance-based strategies.”

Falling under particular scrutiny is the plan to resurrect and rebrand the police department’s plainclothes anti-crime unit, which was shut down in 2020 but held a major role in gun searches involving young Black and Latino men at the height of the stop-and-frisk era. The mayor’s plan vows that the unit will operate differently and more responsibly now — although it fails to say how it would do so. Nor does it acknowledge that at the height of stop-and-frisk, in 2011, the city still recorded 1,511 shootings, an increase over the previous two years.

As Alex Vitale, a sociologist at Brooklyn College who studies policing, put it, the plan “is almost completely lacking in evidentiary basis.”

Bail reform, which eliminated the option of cash bail for low-level, nonviolent offenses and took effect two years ago, is another target of the mayor’s plan, even though there is no conclusive research linking it to the recent rise in violent crime and even though violent crime has gone up in cities where bail reform has not been enacted. Given that the mayor has no real ability to reverse course — reform is a matter of state law, and Assembly Speaker Carl E. Heastie quickly called the attack a scapegoat — Mr. Adams’s rhetoric is serving only to further alienate progressives when instead they might be brought along.

Where reformists and serious law-and-order adherents easily find common ground is in the need to reduce the influx of guns into the state and city, which the new mayor is committed to doing. Here the plan calls in part for collaboration with state police to implement spot checks at bus and train stations, which may turn out to be a big success although it’s hard to imagine how many gun runners are moving their arsenals via the Megabus from Philadelphia.

Absent from the blueprint is any discussion of how to handle domestic violence, which is especially curious given that it is devastating in itself and often the precursor to other crimes. Had there been some kind of protocol for resolving an argument between a mother and her son in Harlem last week, the outcome might well have been different, and the two officers who were killed might have never met gunfire.

Liz Glazer, a former federal prosecutor who ran Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office for criminal justice for several years, said she believes the path forward rests on a “robust infrastructure of prevention” that includes significant improvements to public housing and conditions that aggravate frustration and despair. “The thing about Adams’s plan is that it does both,’’ she said. She was encouraged that the plan accommodates prevention but was cautious about the department’s zealous history of intervention. “The question is which way will it tip?”