Time to get ready to start judging Eric Adams

Each new mayor here has to take a dizzying, ominous leap from whatever smaller thing they’d been doing over to what John Lindsay famously called “the second toughest job in America.” And each time, the city holds its collective breath as that man (and so far it’s always been a man) who appears for a terribly long moment out of a cartoon or a dream to be suspended in mid-air, pumping his legs and running his mouth and never looking down, tries to defy gravity and make it across the canyon.

This summer that man is Eric Adams, the former borough president and state senator and gadfly inside the NYPD who offered himself to voters as the native son who could meet the city’s moment and restore public safety and spread prosperity and who’s now responsible for what he likes to call his 36,000 police officers, nearly 9 million souls and a $100 billion budget at a time when, like the song says, Things Aren’t What They Used To Be.

A city whose economy depends on “The City” feels more like a donut now as Manhattan office buildings remain largely empty, along with the street-level businesses there to serve them, the trains remain full of people living in the system rather than commuting through it, and the violent crime rate remains much higher than it had been before the pandemic.

That’s despite many billions of dollars in federal aid — an accidental parting gift from President Trump as his disgusting refusal to accept his defeat in 2020 helped Democrats win upsets in two runoff elections in Georgia and claim control of the Senate — that won’t come again.

I kept writing during last year’s election about how the city’s problems were much more serious than the outgoing mayor or any of the candidates vying to replace him wanted to acknowledge as they spent 2021 acting as though things would just revert to their 2019 norms any day now.

They have not.

So there was Adams in an interview with the Financial Times aimed at jawboning “our business leaders” and JPMorgan boss and fellow lifelong New Yorker Jamie Dimon in particular into riding the trains to work to set an example, saying almost as a side note in the article that “We thought by the middle of February we were going to turn the corner on crime ... But our entire equation was disrupted because of the flow of guns into our city, the ready accessibility of guns and the reluctance of prosecuting people who are carrying guns.”

The new mayor isn’t wrong about the gun problem here (which will get much worse if an imminent Supreme Court decision knocks down New York’s tough permitting law) or about a justice system that’s made it too difficult to get even the most predictably dangerous people out of circulation after the police arrest them.

But the idea that he was going to turn things around in six weeks, and that he’d publicly say so now after having failed to do so, is a sign of a new mayor intoxicated (as each new mayor inevitably is) by his win and still mid-leap. It’s one thing to talk your way out of a tight corner in the mostly ceremonial job of borough president, and quite another as the mayor. Either stuff gets done, or you get held to account.

There’s a reason that the same polls that show most New Yorkers are with him, and against the lawmakers he’s railed against, on the need for a tougher approach to public safety also show that most New Yorkers aren’t happy with how he’s handled public safety — with that number plummeting since February.

What’s more, Adams is simply wrong to claim that the factors he cites “disrupted our equation.” In fact, nothing in that equation changed between when he won the Democratic primary last June and was all but certain to become mayor and this February. Except that the problems Adams inherited on his promise that he could fix them are his problems now.

In a Channel 5 interview Thursday morning, Adams declared that “I have never in my professional career, have never witnessed crime at this level.” As Ben Max, the editor of Gotham Gazette, gently noted, that “is a very strange thing to say for someone who came up in the NYPD in the ’80s and ’90s.”

And, Max continued, “It’s also a very strange thing to say for a mayor of a city who is pitching workers on going back into offices, tourists to visit, businesses to open/expand, etc, & committed to traveling the country to make those pitches.”

Adams was brilliant as a candidate at putting himself on both sides of an issue, and he’s been adamant as mayor in fighting for control — of the city’s schools, jails and streets — while asking to be held accountable for the results. By the end of the summer, it won’t be soon to judge whether or not he’s made the leap.