On crime, Democrats should follow Eric Adams

The U.S. economy is rebounding vigorously from the COVID-19 recession. That ought to be lifting the public’s spirits, but Americans instead are increasingly preoccupied by two distressing pandemic legacies — soaring prices and gun violence. 

In New York City, for example, serious crimes jumped by nearly 39 percent in January, prompting civil rights leader Al Sharpton to call the situation “out of control.” President Biden traveled to Manhattan last week for a high-profile confab with newly-elected Mayor Eric Adams, who has made public safety his top priority.

It was a smart move, because Adams is just what Biden and his party need now to refurbish their credentials as credible crime fighters. He’s a pragmatic Black mayor and former police officer who has been an outspoken critic of both police brutality and racial profiling as well as the activist left’s demands to “defund the police.”   

From the early 1990s to 2014, the U.S. murder rate fell by more than half, easing public alarm over crime. But the homicide rate jumped 27 percent in 2020, the largest one-year increase in 60 years. It continued to rise last year, though more slowly. Murders have climbed to their highest level since 1996.

If there’s any political leader with the requisite background and experience to confront this new spasm of gun violence, it’s Biden. In his long Senate career, Biden earned a well-deserved reputation as a “tough on crime” liberal. 

That came back to haunt him, however, during the 2020 presidential primaries. Activists assailed Biden as the chief architect of the landmark 1994 crime bill, which they claim led to jailing too many Black men. He won the nomination anyway, but not before having to fend off insinuations that the bill was racist in intent and result — even though it enacted a raft of progressive policies such as the Violence against Women Act, an assault weapons ban, background checks for gun buyers, more money for community policing and drug courts to steer offenders into treatment rather than jail.   

The “defund” idea bubbled up amid the national outrage over the killing of George Floyd. Black Lives Matter and white “social justice” protesters insisted that police departments were so infected by systemic racism that the only cure was to cut their budgets or even eliminate them. Public safety funding then could be diverted to social workers, mental counselors and community services.

Now, as the nation’s mayors plea for help to cope with the upsurge of shootings and slayings, these ideas appear dangerously naïve. While public support for reforming the police remains high, U.S. voters, including solid majorities of Blacks and Hispanics, strongly oppose reducing funding for police departments.

This should surprise no one. Black Americans are rightly fed up with police abuse. At the same time, they were eight times as likely to be murder victims in 2020 as whites. What they want, says Adams, is more protection, not less. Shouldn’t this be a social justice imperative too? Yet as the mayor remarked after an encounter with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), “we don’t hear people on the left talk about right now, what we should be doing” to make people in crime-ravaged communities safer.  

Adams, a centrist Democrat in a deep-blue city, has unveiled a detailed “Blueprint to End Gun Violence,” which Biden praised last week. It would increase street patrols; dispatch “Neighborhood Safety Teams” to high-crime areas; make greater use of facial recognition technology to identify suspects; and deploy thermal imaging cameras to scan for weapons in schools. It would allow city judges to evaluate defendants’ criminal history and detain those deemed a threat to the community. 

In addition to better community policing and vigorous law enforcement, the mayor wants to make big public investments to alleviate social conditions that reflect entrenched inequities and breed disorder and crime. It would create a massive summer youth jobs program; challenge city businesses to create job opportunities for people in low-income communities; and target more mental health resources to distressed neighborhoods struggling with homelessness and trigger-happy juveniles.   

Adams’s two-pronged strategy for public safety brings to mind former United Kingdom Prime Minister Tony Blair’s pithy distillation of a truly progressive approach to public safety: “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.”

Embracing this approach will help Biden and his party counter Republican demagoguery about anarchy in “Democratic cities.” By falsely smearing all Democrats as closet defunders, Republicans hope to obscure their deep complicity in today’s violent crime wave. Conservative pro-gun absolutism is the reason that criminals, street gangs and aspiring mass shooters can get quick and easy access to guns. 

Instead of helping mayors get guns off the streets, Republican governors and legislatures pass laws “preempting” local ordinances aimed at restricting guns. Many observers expect the U.S. Supreme Court, now packed with conservatives, to shoot down New York laws limiting carrying guns in public places. 

Social science research confirms common sense: Where there are more guns, there are more shootings. Republicans claim that’s the price of freedom. Try telling that to parents who have lost a child in a mass school shooting or to a stray bullet.   

Following the lead of Adams and other Black mayors, Democrats should champion a different kind of freedom — freedom from fear.

Will Marshall is president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI).