Public safety mayor must make the public safer

The Map is not the Territory, the Menu is not the Food, and the Word is not the Thing. The Map is Mayor Adams boasting about how he’s delivering on his promise to fairly restore public safety. The Territory is a dozen cops milling about, racking up mandatory overtime, just inside the turnstiles at the Fulton St. station while a guy with a mean mug paces up and down the crowded platform directly below them blowing out smoke from the cigarette between his lips — one of the aggressively anti-social people throughout the system lighting up various substances in tunnels and train cars much more frequently than at any point in at least the past three decades.

The Menu is Adams vowing “we’re not going to stand idly by and we won’t stop until every illegal smoke shop is rolled up and stubbed out,” while Gov. Hochul pushes a ban on flavored and menthol cigarettes and an additional tax of another dollar on each pack that would bring the price in the city up to nearly $20.

The Food is unlicensed weed shops opening up in pretty much every available storefront and $11 packs at pretty much every smoke shop, with no worries about enforcement to the point where my go-to cigarette store in lower Manhattan has chocolate shroom bars behind the counter with a buy-10-get-one-free punch card.

(I like shrooms, and wrote for a quarter century before New York got there about why pot should be legal and how its criminalization inevitably punished young men in high-crime neighborhoods who police should have been protecting, not punishing.

But it’s no good to have rules intended to put money back into those communities and then let people openly break those rules. One could say that these new storefronts are themselves broken windows.)

The Word is Adams talking about how the crime numbers in 2023 so far are down from the same stretch in 2022 as the city has turned a corner on his watch.

The Thing is that the numbers were 22% higher overall in Adams’ first year in office, and are still mostly way up from the 2021 numbers he’d vowed to bring down as a candidate in 2021.

Adams is up against farther-left lawmakers in the city and the state who are fundamentally skeptical of law enforcement. But he’s also hiding behind those lawmakers, like when he keeps pivoting between vowing to do something about the unlicensed pot stores and saying he’d love to be doing more if not for the state laws that supposedly handcuff his cops.

In fact, the mayor has a tremendous amount of discretion interpreting the law and using law enforcement and has chosen to interpret things in a way that lets him complain his cops have been handcuffed.

Adams has put himself in this bind because, like the lawmakers he says he’s up against, he’s rhetorically committed to the admirable idea — easier said than done — that New York can maintain safety and a sense of order without excessive police enforcement.

One place where the rhetorical rubber met the road of New Yorkers’ lived perceptions in the previous two administrations was at the monthly press conference where the police commissioner would answer questions from the press about the crime numbers, whether those were up or down.

More than a year after quietly ending those, Phil Banks just started holding online briefings that supposedly let him speak directly to New Yorkers and answer their questions.

Actually, the questions are pre-selected and there’s no sign that New Yorkers outside the press corps are logging on to hear from the deputy mayor for public safety who was hardly seen in public during year one of the Adams administration what with how the new mayor created that job for his old friend who’d abruptly quit his top post at the NYPD and ambition of being the commissioner himself not long before it came out that the feds named him as an unindicted co-conspirator for getting taken out by and opening his office at 1 Police Plaza to a pair of crooks who’d been bribing Mayor de Blasio and Banks’ friends in the NYPD while flying those cop bosses to a Las Vegas Super Bowl weekend on a private plane with a prostitute on the flight and more at the hotel.

Banks said Friday that New Yorkers should “get used to my ugly face” in each weekly “episode” of his streaming show in the Eric Adams’ Extended Universe that gives him a tightly controlled setting for interacting with reporters.

As mayor, Adams picks the players, draws the map, sets the stage and delivers a daily script.

New Yorkers will navigate the city and judge the thing for themselves.