Big-ego Blasio leaving a mess
New York City has come undone in Bill de Blasio’s final year as mayor, with even his big-ticket initiatives proving disastrous while Hizzoner continued to focus on his public image with daily briefings about a pandemic even he acknowledged the city was ready to put in the rearview, stunning new statistics show.
The Mayor’s Management Report, released late Friday, reveals a city that is fundamentally unsafe due to police cuts and failure to enforce laws already on the books — all against the backdrop of a big dip in school enrollment amid a push to scrap advanced classes for gifted children.
The revelations in the report, prepared by City Hall, include:
Major felony crimes increased for a third consecutive year
City streets — the mayor’s No. 1 priority under his keystone initiative, “Vision Zero,” are less safe as 275 people — including 133 pedestrians — were killed in traffic accidents, a 30 percent jump over the previous year and the most since 2014.
The NYPD managed to arrest just 13 drivers for striking pedestrians with their cars, despite recording nearly 1,800 such collisions. And the number of speeding and failure-to-yield summonses issued by cops dropped by more than 27 percent and more than 63 percent, respectively.
Despite the mayor’s frequent pronouncements about the urgency of fighting climate change, the city added no new Select Bus Service miles this past fiscal year – and the number of new bike lanes was the lowest since 2016.
Presiding over the chaos is de Blasio, whose daily briefings, begun amid the throes of the pandemic in 2020, have devolved into often sideshows seemingly aimed at bolstering his personal brand as he weighs his future and reportedly mulls a run for governor next year.
When asked about the report during Thursday’s virtual briefing from City Hall, the mayor continued to blame the pandemic.
“The traffic fatalities, for example, some of what we’ve seen with crime, some what we see in terms of Department of Correction, all of that is because COVID set a whole series of things in motion,” Hizzoner insisted.
“There are other problems, always. I’m not trying to say COVID is the only problem. I’m saying the numbers you’ll see in the report that are not satisfying at all have, in many cases, a basis in the disruption of COVID. It doesn’t mean anything, but we have to keep working with every tool we’ve got to fix it.”
That drew a rebuke from City Councilman Bob Holden (D-Queens). “COVID’s been the mayor’s convenient excuse for the failures of his administration since the very start of the pandemic,” Holden told The Post. “And that has been repeated by almost all of his staff and commissioners. Everything else is to blame for his poor management skills and bad decisions. He should look no further than the mirror.”
Here’s a look at where the report says the city is coming up short:
While the number of major felony offenses in the city increased just 0.6 percent over last year, some crimes were far more prevalent than others. There were 489 cases of murder and non-negligent manslaughter in fiscal year 2021, a 38.9 percent jump over the same 12-month period last year.
Fiscal year 2021 was also a bad time to bring your car into the city, as the number of grand larceny auto cases increased by 47.2 percent.
Housing developments proved to be more unsafe than the rest of NYC, as major felony crimes there increased 10.9 percent. Meanwhile, the number of major felony crime arrests dropped 14.5 percent over the previous year.
The news wasn’t all bad, as the number of reported rapes, robberies and grand larcenies dropped over the previous year.