Mayor Eric Adams will need buy-in from prosecutors, judges and a Democratic-led State Legislature that may balk at some of his tough-on-crime prescriptions.
ALBANY, N.Y. — When Mayor Eric Adams released a wide-ranging plan to tackle crime in New York City, one formidable obstacle became clear: He would need cooperation from all levels of government to attack the root causes of gun violence.
While the mayor oversees the Police Department and city agencies that will implement many of his proposals, some of the most significant portions of his plan hinge on his ability to win over forces outside his control — and signs of resistance are already emerging.
In Albany, Mr. Adams dived into one of the most searing debates in the State Capitol: He asked lawmakers to revise the state’s recently reformed bail law, which has divided Democrats and has been used by Republicans to stoke fears of rising crime.
The mayor called on judges to tackle a growing backlog of gun cases and urged Congress to implement universal background checks and ban assault weapons, legislation that remains in limbo because of Republican opposition.
He also asked district attorneys to prioritize gun-related cases — a vague directive that left some officials unsure if the mayor was aware of what their offices were already doing.
The response so far has been lukewarm, especially from Democratic legislative leaders in the Capitol. They passionately defended the 2019 legislation that seriously restricted the crimes for which judges could set bail. Though judges can still set bail for certain felonies, they are compelled to set it at the lowest level necessary to ensure defendants return to court.
But the Democratic leaders still appeared open to a dialogue.
“Can we stop blaming bail reform when the sun comes up?” Carl E. Heastie, the Assembly speaker, said last month. “Please stop just trying to make political fodder because we think it’ll make for good campaigns.” But he later allowed that “there’s a lot of discussions that have to happen.”
Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the majority leader in the State Senate, said on Tuesday that she was open to broad conversations about criminal justice. “We are concerned, as everyone is, about a spike in crime,” she said. “But there is no connection between our bail reform and the national spike in crime.”
On Wednesday, Mr. Adams is scheduled to testify virtually before state lawmakers about the city’s needs and his agenda during annual budget hearings in Albany. Mr. Adams still has not met with Ms. Stewart-Cousins and Mr. Heastie on his proposed changes around bail, even though he is planning a trip to Albany soon and his City Hall staff has been in touch with the Legislature about his crime plan, city officials said.
The ability of Mr. Adams, a moderate Democrat, to establish a relationship with Albany is seen as a highly consequential test — one that bedeviled his predecessor, Bill de Blasio, throughout his eight-year tenure.
The mayor quickly signaled he would be unafraid to use his bully pulpit to pressure lawmakers. Days after releasing his crime plan, he issued a forceful statement calling on lawmakers to give judges more discretion in sentencing after the release of a teenager whose bullet grazed a policeman’s leg in a scuffle. Although the teenager posted bail, Mr. Adams raised a different issue: whether judges should be free to deny bail to defendants they thought were dangerous and keep them in jail.
Mr. Adams’s stance has placed state Democratic leaders in a conundrum, especially in an election year.
On the one hand, the legislative leaders want to be courteous to the recently elected mayor, whose profile continues to rise. But they are also wary of lending credence to Republican attacks that the bail law Democrats passed is flawed or helped fuel crime, an assertion that is not supported by any reliable data.
“He understands that this is going to be a process and that he’s going to have to spend time talking to the Legislature and talking to new members,” said State Senator Diane Savino, a moderate Democrat from Staten Island who supports revising the bail law. “We need to get off the soapbox and get back to the legislative chambers and develop solutions to these particular problems with precision.”
The city’s district attorneys have signaled their willingness to work with Mr. Adams. All five met with the mayor last week to discuss gun crime, robbery and shoplifting and agreed to continue meeting regularly.
There is already significant coordination among city agencies in combating gun violence, including a daily meeting with representatives from the district attorneys’ offices, the New York Police Department, federal prosecutors in Manhattan and Brooklyn and other law enforcement agencies.
But Mr. Adams may have trouble uniting the five local district attorneys, who have starkly different visions.
In one recent instance, the Staten Island district attorney, Michael McMahon, wrote an editorial criticizing the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, who upon taking office said he would incarcerate people for only the most serious crimes. Mr. Bragg has since moved away from strict adherence to the policies he announced in his first week.
A key change to the bail laws that Mr. Adams has embraced concerns a proposal many judges support that would give them discretion to consider a defendant’s “dangerousness” in deciding whether to set bail.
Proponents point to the fact that New York is the only state in the country that does not give judges this authority. But critics point out that current bail laws do allow judges to set bail for violent crimes and for certain repeat offenders.
The prohibition on considering dangerousness predates the changes to bail laws in 2019. Bail defenders worry that including such a provision could fundamentally undercut the intention of the changes and reintroduce racial disparities into the process, potentially leading judges to hold people of color without bail at higher rates than white defendants.
“It’s really hard to come to an objective measure of dangerousness that is not burdened on some level by racial bias,” said Ames Grawert, a senior counsel with the Brennan Center for Justice.
The crux of the debate centers on whether the changes to the law have led to a spike in crimes committed after people were arrested and then released.
In late December, two years after the law took effect, the state began to publish data that documented the rates at which defendants were rearrested. In the year after reforms were fully implemented, the available data appears to show that roughly 20 percent of those released after being charged with crimes ineligible for bail were rearrested before trial. About 2 percent were rearrested for violent crimes.
The data is incomplete and limited, making it impossible to draw a complete picture, however, and some researchers say that it could be years before the full impact of the bail law can be properly assessed.
Even so, some Democrats say the preliminary results vindicate bail reform, pointing to the low rate of recidivism in violent crimes and citing the positive effects of allowing those facing trial to remain in their jobs and homes while they wait for their day in court.
Studies from other localities where similar reforms have been introduced have found that such laws do not “lead to a meaningful increase in crime,” according to an analysis released by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Republicans, for their part, have largely argued that any preventable crime is a public policy failure.
State Senator Zellnor Myrie, a left-leaning Democrat, said that it was “important that we acknowledge that whether or not the statistics bear it out, people feel afraid.”
“The mayor’s tone addressing people’s anxiety and fears is welcome,” said Mr. Myrie, whose district in Brooklyn was represented by Mr. Adams from 2007 to 2013. “But I think that any decision that we make as it pertains to criminal justice reform has to be rooted in justice and data, not fear and fearmongering.”
Mr. Adams has also asked for changes to a 2017 law that raised the age of criminal responsibility to 18. He has argued that gang members are manipulating the law, having teenagers “take the fall” for gun crimes because they can evade punishment. He cited statistics showing that the rate at which children were arrested on gun-crime charges quadrupled between 2019 and 2021.
Defenders of Raise the Age, as it is known, including Ms. Stewart-Cousins, say it was crafted with scientific considerations of human brain development in mind, and point out that a majority of states had previously implemented similar laws.
The biggest question mark in the bail reform debate appears to be the views of Gov. Kathy Hochul, who took office in August following former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s resignation. So far, she has refused to weigh in on whether judges should be given more discretion, and she has defended the principles of bail law reform, while saying that she is open to discussing changes.
“If reforms are needed based on data that is still being gathered, I’m willing to have those conversations,” Ms. Hochul said last month.
Ms. Hochul has reason to tread carefully: At stake are her ties to Mr. Adams, with whom she has sought to establish a working relationship. She is also hoping to rely on his base of city voters as she runs for a full term as governor this year. Both her Democratic and Republican challengers have sought to pressure her by making the bail law a campaign issue.
For now, Ms. Hochul appears to be keeping an open mind. She met in recent months with a group of moderate Senate Democrats who represent Long Island, where Republicans have relentlessly centered their campaigns against Democrats around the bail law,.
Latrice Walker, an Assembly Democrat from Brooklyn and one of the architects of bail reform, said she believed Ms. Hochul was “hearing the arguments from both sides before she comes to a full determination.”
“It’s up to me to ensure that the tenets of a bill that I believe very strongly in are understood,” Ms. Walker said. “And that people aren’t allowing six-second sound bites to dictate their displeasure with a policy that has helped hundreds of thousands of people across the State of New York.”
Bianca Pallaro contributed reporting.
