The shootout of a New York City man in the 1960s: The role of the police in the fight against a gun-armed attacker
The shooting marked the second time Zeldin has been thrust into the headlines by an act of violence. The first came in the summer, when the man holding the object accosted him on stage at the campaign event. Zeldin was not hurt, and the alleged attacker was quickly subdued and arrested.
Zeldin’s daughters were inside of his Long Island house, terrified but uninjured, after a random incident on Sunday and he was able to sharpen his message on an issue that concerns both cross party lines and potential solutions.
“This is day after day after day,” Zeldin told Fox News on Monday. “And there are a lot of parents, there are a lot of families, dealing with this reality of rising crime in New York. For us, fortunately, my daughters knew exactly how to respond. But listen, they were just sitting there at the kitchen table doing homework and bullets started going off all around them.”
Zeldin entered the election with a clear disadvantage. Republicans have been destroyed by a generation of cascading defeats, but there are more registered Democrats in New York than there are Republicans. In 2002, Gov. Pataki was re-elected, his third term in office. Hochul has been an incumbent since Andrew Cuomo resigned following a sexual harassment scandal, but has not competed with Zeldin in donations or in raising money.
Zeldin has followed that roadmap. It might be too closely for a candidate whose path to an upset win requires a strong performance in the suburbs and upstate but also a damage to the blue wall of New York City.
But Zeldin and Adams break sharply on gun violence, with the mayor – along with Hochul – pushing for stricter regulations on firearms. Zeldin disagreed with a new round of gun control measures signed by Hochul that sought to circumvent a recent Supreme Court decision striking down some restrictions on concealed carry outside the home.
Hochul told reporters that her office had given them a message that the state police would be made available to assist in the investigation.
She said it was a reminder to work to get guns off the streets. I have been on this journey as governor, so I will keep on trying to make our streets safe. That is one of the top priorities for me.
The NYPD is worried about the state of the city: The story of the “tough-on-crime” New York Mayor and congressional candidate Lee Zeldin
Democratic strategists in New York are bracing for huge losses in the governor’s race and also in contests for at least four US House seats, according to CNN.
It was only a year ago that Adams was elected mayor on a slogan of “tough-on-crime” and was quickly welcomed as a hero by many in the Democratic party. In office he has talked about the bad shape of the city, citing statistics that show there is a correlation between the rise in crime and a state law change that prevented judges from setting cash bail for most serious offenses.
He was an essential validator for the city to make their attacks seem more legit and less partisan, according to one Democratic operatives working in New York.
Other Democrats argue this has it backwards. They accuse Republicans of cynical, racist and taking advantage of a situation that has arisen from the swine flue, but insist candidates would be in better shape if they had followed Adams in speaking to the fear and frustration voters feel.
But going into Election Day, New York Democrats worry about a double whammy from how they’ve struggled to address crime: Swing voters turned off by Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul and suburban House Democrats go vote Republican, while base Democrats in the city, dejected by talk of how awful things are, don’t turn out at all.
“Crime today has been compared to the ’80s and the ‘90s, and the fact of the matter is that crime is lower now than it was then,” said Crystal Hudson, a Democratic New York City councilwoman from Brooklyn. “That’s emboldened the right to use crime as their narrative and put Democrats in a bad spot for these midterm elections.”
Rep. Lee Zeldin, Hochul’s GOP opponent, has taken to regularly invoking Adams on the campaign trail, to the point that some Democratic operatives have grimly joked that Zeldin could just run clips of Adams talking about crime as his closing ads.
There are national ripples: Democratic groups like the Democratic Governors Association are moving in millions of dollars to prop up Hochul in a deep-blue state instead of spending that on tight races elsewhere, with Vice President Kamala Harris flying in on Thursday in one of her own last campaign stops and President Joe Biden heading to Westchester County, north of New York City, on Sunday to rally with the governor. Democrats had been counting on seats in the House to be safe and Republicans were seizing on opportunities to pad a potential majority.
That’s fed an increasingly tense relationship in the campaign’s final weeks, though Adams recently appeared with Hochul at both an official government event announcing she’d allocate state money to pay for overtime for police patrolling the subways and at a campaign stop in Queens as she seeks to prove to voters that she’s taking crime seriously. Adams has also shifted to blaming the media for sensationalizing the crime problem.
Rep. Kathleen Rice, a retiring moderate Democrat from just outside New York City and a former Nassau County district attorney, said at first she was encouraged by Adams. She said that he understands the problem, but he hasn’t shown that he has focused on the issue enough for it to make a difference.
Rice said she’s heard from constituents from just outside the city who are turned off by reports of Adams spending late nights at pricey private restaurants juxtaposed with stories about murders on the subways and other horrific incidents.
Democratic-held seats on Long Island are being seen as vulnerable. Democrats are also in danger of losing two seats north of New York City – one held by Rep. Pat Ryan and the Lower Hudson Valley district of Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, the chair of Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Months ago, Maloney warned other House Democrats, in conversations and in a March memo sent around by the DCCC and obtained by CNN, to be ready to respond and rebut attacks for being weak on crime. The guidance started with telling candidates to be firmly against calls to “defund the police” but also to talk about the more than $8 billion Democratic lawmakers had secured for law enforcement in bills such as the American Rescue Plan.
Maloney pointed to his votes for legislation to fund programs for body cameras and plate reading technology for local police departments in his district, as well as for the gun control measures enacted over the summer.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/04/politics/eric-adams-new-york-crime-midterms/index.html
Eric Adams is a rock on which I can build a church: an open debate on New York crime and its midterms in the House of Delegates
He also stood by a remark he made last July – catching several Democratic operatives’ attention at the time – when he stood with Adams on the steps of the Democratic National Committee headquarters and called him “a rock on which I can build a church.”
“What I meant is that I like his combination of respecting good policing and understanding the need for public safety with a genuine passion for justice and fairness in our system,” Maloney said in an interview. “He may not get everything right, and it may not be everything I would do. But he recognizes that we’re not where we should be. I support the efforts to clean it up.
Conversations about crime in New York are bound up in the debate over reforming the bail laws, and in well-worn internal political power struggles among officials. Adams urged officials in Albany to change the law at the beginning of the year, warning them that the crime would make them a political liability during the fall.
One of the partial reductions supported by Hochul was already passed by legislative leaders. But they have resisted doing more, despite warnings from suburban members.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/04/politics/eric-adams-new-york-crime-midterms/index.html
New York City crime statistics show that bail laws aren’t the only way for criminals to get back on the street – Mayor Alexis Majorana says the city can handle it
Adams said that bail laws put criminals back onto the street who tend to get back into crimes. According to figures from the New York Police Department, in the first half of the year, 211 people were arrested at least three times for burglary and 899 people were arrested at least three times for shoplifting, increases of 142.5 percent and 88.9 percent, respectively, over the same period in 2017. The mayor’s office also pointed to statistics that show double-digit jumps in recidivism for felony, grand larceny and auto theft.
Still, crime statistics don’t tell as simple a story as what shows up in political ads. Suburban counties are reporting safer streets and communities – a report in February by the Westchester County executive from just north of New York City, for example, showed a 26.5 percent drop in its crime index.
Murders and shootings are down in the city from last year, but rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny and auto theft are all up, by over 30 percent from 2021 in several categories, according to New York Police Department data.
But Adams spokesman Maxwell Young said the mayor’s job isn’t to put a rosy spin on things in a way that could benefit Hochul’s or any of the other candidates’ campaigns.
“We can’t, and won’t, ignore the reality,” Young said. “Those who claim we aren’t making progress or, conversely, that we’ve been crying wolf aren’t paying attention and have no idea what they’re talking about.”
“You have to convince people you’re worthy to lead by following their lead on issues and meeting their urgency, not by disagreeing with them,” Thies said. The mayor has advocated for the people in high-crime communities so he is not going to abandon them now.
Democratic Rep. Adriano Espaillat, whose district covers Upper Manhattan and parts of the Bronx, points to how many systemic, as well as larger societal and economic issues, are involved in making a real impact on crime – and that Adams has only been on the job for 10 months.
Biden had his own bromance with Adams, from hosting him in the White House weeks after he won his mayoral primary to offering him half of his peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich as they rode together in the limo in February during a presidential visit to New York to talk about gun violence. White House chief of staff Ron Klain praised Adams for tapping into the same coalition of pragmatic, working-class and African American voters, which won Biden the 2020 Democratic nomination.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/04/politics/eric-adams-new-york-crime-midterms/index.html
Do you need to be active in protecting the gun-related laws? An open question for the New York City councilman and the counsel of a moderate congressman
There are some parts of the country where the gun safety laws are weak and crime is high. We needed to tell that story and done so loudly to neutralize the issue. Charlie Kelly, an adviser to former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg and a Democratic-aligned House Majority Political Action Committee, said that you have to be active in ensuring gun safety.
In New York and beyond, some Democrats are already hoping for a post-election recognition and realignment that pushes their party both toward a tougher attack on Republicans and a more forceful deflection of their own left flank.
Brannan is a New York City councilman with a moderate district in Brooklyn. It’s a thing to be a Republican and say, “If you go outside, you’re going to die.”