It’s Not Enough
Complaining won’t get action from Albany
ANOTHER day, another dreary tale of near catastrophe on the streets of New York City. Police Officer Dennis Vargas was recovering Wednesday from a line-of-duty gunshot wound suffered in the early-morning hours during a Bronx shoot-out.
Not so fortunate was 25year-old Rameek Smith, fatally wounded after opening fire on officers who were attempting to arrest him. Police said one of his bullets struck Vargas, who is expected to recover.
It wasn’t long before Mayor Adams — freshly returned from A-list socializing in Los Angeles — weighed in. He correctly noted that Smith, who had a lengthy criminal record, was on the street because of Albany’s permissive approach to violent crime.
“The number of shootings we respond to every night is despicable,” declared Hizzoner — never at a loss for combative rhetoric when the occasion calls for it. Which might not be every night — but close enough. And hot-weather bloodletting is fast approaching.
Yet Adams has been mayor for four-plus months; while it’s too soon to expect a turnaround, there’s not a lot of evidence that his promised crime crackdown has advanced beyond the combative-rhetoric stage.
Talk is necessary, sure, but it’s also cheap. Results, always elusive, require discipline, determination and the focused application of pile-driver political force — and if any of those elements are present in the Adams administration, they are well-hidden.
Which has consequences. Rameek Smith had been convicted of robbery in 2016; he was sentenced to five years’ probation. In 2020, he was arrested on gun-possession charges in a Coney Island subway station.
This alone should have been enough to put Smith behind bars for probation violation — but it gets worse. After pleading guilty to the Coney Island gun charges last year, he remained free pending sentencing — which was repeatedly delayed.
“Here’s the problem,” Adams said early Wednesday. “The arrest was March 2020, and for 20 months after the arrest he remained on the streets.”
Then came the fatal shoot-out. While nobody wants anybody dead, it could just as easily have been Rameek Smith recovering from a non-life-threatening gunshot wound Wednesday morning — and New York City preparing another inspector’s funeral for a murdered officer.
Which, for those who may have forgotten, would have been the third this year. And which would have been accompanied by more combative mayoral rhetoric.
Which would have changed nothing. Such was made clear this week by The Post’s Nolan Hicks and Bernadette Hogan, who laid out in depressing detail this administration’s inability to define — let alone to defend — the city’s interests in Albany.
There’s not much of importance to Gotham that New York’s capital city doesn’t have outsized influence over. Penal-law reform, school governance, subsidized housing, tax structure — even the authority to maintain traffic-control cameras — are all decided in Albany. And, as Hicks and Hogan recount, all are twisting in the wind right now for lack of mayoral attention.
Certainly the three-year-old criminal-justice “reforms” imposed by then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the Legislature are hitting the city particularly hard.
Yet there is no indication Albany crime coddlers have any interest in public safety. Just as there is no evidence that Cuomo’s handpicked successor, Gov. Hochul, has the good sense or courage to insist on reforming the “reforms.” So what’s a mayor to do? Something other than complain, one would hope. But so far that’s pretty much all Adams has been doing.
Yes, talk matters — especially if it is properly focused and names the right names. Adams needs to call out Hochul for her refusal to engage; he needs to note the blood on the hands of Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, too.
Beyond that, as Hicks and Hogan reported, the mayor needs to assemble an effective Albany lobbying effort aimed at promoting the city’s interests generally — and on winning criminal-justice change in particular.
Mayors and governors are always on the outs because their political and policy interests rarely coincide. But Adams seems to be surrendering the field without a fight; this is hard to understand.
More is at stake than penal-law reform, for sure. But there’s nothing more important than safe streets — and if Adams concedes that point up front, not
much else is going to matter.