NEWYORK: New York city Mayor Eric Adams said that our core mission, protect public safety, rebuild our economy, and make the city more livable for hard-working New Yorkers.
Talking with media, Mayor Eric Adams said that the air quality health advisory has been issued for New York City.
“The advisory is for ozone, which is invisible and not like the wildfire smoke. We were able to see that, but this is a real issue,” he said.
“We want to tell people that are dealing with health issues to take necessary actions,” he said.
“Our core mission, protect public safety, rebuild our economy, and make the city more livable for hard-working New Yorkers,” Mayor Adams said.
He said that they also announced plan to support those who work on our city’s public safety efforts at 16 different agencies by building the city’s first ever Public Safety Academy.
“That is going to encourage the cross collaboration that we’re seeing over and over again. A perfect example of that was on Friday, we had Emergency Management, the Department of the Aging, and Department of Parks, the Department of Environment Protection, and Office of Animal Welfare, and all working together to deal with the extreme weather over the summer,” he said.
He pointed out that 10,000 people signed up for small business expo and they have a record of 183,000 small businesses that employ nearly a million working-class people, the largest number of small businesses in our history.
To a question about asylum seekers, Mayor Adams said that 200,000 people entered our city which is larger than other cities. “Whatever could be done to slow the flow, give us the resources, allow people to work, I’m all for,” he said.
“The sanctuary cities, people should have a right to be here without being fearful of being turned over to immigration. I’ve been very clear on that. I thought Koch had it right many years ago. I thought the other mayors had it right. I think the big mistake is that those who commit serious crimes should not be allowed to stay in our city after they served their time and they went through the judicial process.
To a question about migrants being caught with guns multiple times in NYC, Mayor Adams said that an illegal gun dealer does not say let me see your immigration status.
“We’ve removed over 15,000 of them off our streets. These are the guns that we are going after. These are the guns. Yesterday, we had a shooting in Brooklyn where two young children were shot. The day we buried Jonathan Diller I had to go up to the Bronx where a two-year-old was shot. These are the guns we’re talking about. This is what all of us should be rallying around because public safety is the pathway to prosperity and far too many people are not saying… I don’t see, how many tweets did you see on social media saying thanks to these officers. How many tweets? That’s the irony of it,” he said.
“Our intelligence is looking into it to see the small number of those who are committing these crimes. The overwhelming number of migrants and asylum seekers are just trying to take their next step on the American journey but there’s a small number that are violent and we are really leaning into them,” he said.
“Do we have those robbery pattern stats? Look at this for a moment. Pattern street robberies and grand larceny, moped crime. Okay? It’s not, we’re not saying it’s all migrants so don’t write this story that all they’re saying is the migrants, the migrants. No. What we want to show you, 2022, now a pattern crime is not one crime. It’s a bunch of crimes that are looped together that creates a pattern.”
“In 2022, we had 44 total complaints. We had 10 patterns with 44 incidents. In 2023, we had 22 patterns with 104 complaints. Now look at 2024. 79 patterns, 416 actual complaints. This is what we’re up against,” Mayor said.
To a question about state legislature considering a bill that would compel the NYPD to open up encrypted radio to accredited members of the media, Mayor Adams said that he always find it interesting when people say accredited members of the media, that is to me that’s coded language because far too long to small minority ethnic medias have not really been allowed in.
“Even when I read their stories often, their stories are really different from some of the mainstream media. They seem to stick to the topics. I want to make sure that everybody could have access to speak to their constituency.”
“My biggest concern, I’ve said this over and over again, bad guys get access to this information. You know, bad guys that commit crimes. This technology, if not used properly, it could be harmful. If you know [that] a police officer is responding, how they responded, how they communicated, we need to get it right. I think we can find the right balance. The New York City Police Department is going to do that.”
Regarding question about the violence among youth, Mayor Adams said that seriously they are concerned about some of these recent violence.
“As I said, two young people were shot yesterday. It just really tore me up when I spoke to the dad who lost his son to the shotgun shooting. Young people are mischievous in nature.”
“We didn’t have all these guns when I was growing up. As a young person, you do, you do dumb things. That’s what being young means, as you experiment. We have been very clear on our investment in foster care, our summer youth jobs, 110,000, our Summer Rising program we announced today with the speaker.”
“We don’t want to be overly punitive, but we have to give these young people the care. We have been investing in those young people who have interaction with law enforcement. We need to, we want to continue to do that. We want partnership. That’s what some of the stuff Sheena and her team and Almanzar is doing around internship. The more alternatives we do, we believe that we can sort of, get these young people out of harm’s way. But it’s, trust me, it’s concerning us as well,” he said.
To a question about permitting process for street vendors, Mayor Adams said that he personally don’t believe no matter how many permits we put out, there’s still going to be some illegal activity and we have to make sure we address that illegal activity.
‘It’s not healthy for someone who’s selling food that they made in their kitchen that’s not at the right temperature, but they’re selling it in the subway station or on the street corners,” he said.
“It has not been fair in the past, but this is a complicated city and if you just open the city up to people selling whatever they want, whenever they want, we are creating a level of disorder that we can’t accept.”
