Get-tough plan may work

MAYOR Adams’ long-promised plan to make New York safe landed on the table with a big fat plop Monday. It’s dauntingly complicated, it’s overstuffed with concessions to grasping social activists and it’s impossibly dependent on actors far beyond the mayor’s control.

But it just might make a difference.

Urban America’s public-safety debate — absolutely unhinged two years ago — seems to be coming full circle.

Back then, the radical battle-cry was: “Get cops off the street!!”

Lately it has become “get guns off the street” — and this is the theme of the Adams plan. But confiscation is never going to happen, at least not soon, and certainly not in sufficient numbers.

So now we are hearing the first faint hints of a return to commonsense law-enforcement — an acknowledgment that it’s now time to get actual criminals off the street. Or, to quote Adams speaking from City Hall yesterday, “We’re going to [target] the trigger-pullers.”

To that end, he promised that the NYPD’s hugely successful anticrime patrols — dissolved by Bill de Blasio — will be reinstated. And that they’ll be deployed to 30 violence-wracked police precincts within three weeks.

Strong words and a promise of swift action, just 24 days into a new administration. This is a hopeful combination.

It’s true that the plan comes with obscure details, beside-the-point gun-trafficking rhetoric and pedestrian pledges to address social concerns linked to crime — and so on and so forth.

Indeed, the lard is so thick that it gets in the way of what seems to be a clear-eyed exposition of what really enables violent street crime: weak-willed policing complicated by wrong-headed penal-code “reforms” driven by deeply problematic radical state and local politicking.

This isn’t limited to New York, of course. It’s driving urban chaos across the country — and the effect is not limited to gun violence. Outof-control vagrancy, publicly expressed untreated mental illness, organized shoplifting/looting and so on all need to be addressed. Happily, the Adams plan seems aware of these challenges.

NY has won before

But first, the guns.

The mayor makes much of the fact that the NYPD confiscated 6,000 illegal guns last year, and has collected 350 more since Jan. 1. These are impressive numbers.

But here’s the thing: New York was awash in illegal guns in the ’80s and ’90s — and then all of a sudden it seemed that it wasn’t. And that was because vigorous anti-gun law enforcement and stiff penalties suddenly made it too dangerous for criminals to carry — and so they largely stopped doing so.

When the de Blasio administration abandoned those policies, the heat came off, the guns came back, violence flared and suddenly some New York neighborhoods were war zones.

In a nutshell: More gun confiscated simply means more guns present in the first place, which is a function of lame law enforcement. That’s why targeting the trigger-pullers, as the mayor promises, is so important.

But let’s not diminish the degree of difficulty here. Adams, for all of his judicious phrasing, certainly doesn’t. He may or may not need much help from Washington — he certainly shouldn’t count on it — but he definitely needs Albany, the City Council and the city’s five district attorneys to step up smartly.

The plan details necessary changes in those wrongheaded bail and criminal-procedure “reforms” Albany adopted two years ago. And that means Gov. Hochul has to engage on more than the rhetorical level.

And is there any reasonable person left in New York who doesn’t see Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s approach to law enforcement for the sick joke that it is? Bragg, the city’s full complement of like-minded judges, and its battalion of radical-activist lawyers are overdue for reform themselves. But they won’t sit down without a fight.

This leaves Adams in need of broad shoulders, steady focus and a whole lot of allies. Plus the support of New Yorkers of good will.

You know — the folks who elected him.