Attack tests mayor's promise to curb gun violence

NEW YORK • Mr Eric Adams ran for mayor of New York City with campaign ads featuring old photographs of him in his police uniform and a vow to secure a pandemic-scarred metropolis against the gun violence that surged alongside Covid-19.

On his 102nd day in office, Mr Adams, a former police captain, faced the latest challenge in his efforts to allay New Yorkers' fears: A gunman opened fire on a subway car on Tuesday morning, shooting 10 people.

Violent crime has risen across the United States during the pandemic, and New York City has been no exception.

Mr Adams, a Democrat, has set himself the challenge of balancing New Yorkers' anxieties about crime with the distrust some have of a US$10 billion (S$13.6 billion) police department that continues to reckon with a history of brutality and racism.

While the city remains one of the safest in the country and far less dangerous than it was in the 1990s, when Mr Adams was rising through the New York City Police Department's ranks, the new mayor has revived some of the tough-on-crime policing tactics associated with that era under the Republican mayor Rudy Giuliani.

These include a crackdown on low-level "quality of life" offences such as public drinking and the revival of a plainclothes police unit disbanded in 2020 over complaints of deadly violence and unaccountability.

To civil rights groups alarmed that police might again disproportionately target poor, Black and Latino New Yorkers, Mr Adams has pointed to his own experiences with police brutality growing up as a Black man in Brooklyn's poorest corners.

"I became a police officer to bridge the gap between us and to take on systemic racism from within," Mr Adams, 61, said in an ad. "To revitalise our city, New Yorkers need to feel safe and secure that our kids can play without getting hit by a stray bullet."

Since he took office on Jan 1, 363 people have been shot in the city as at last week, up about 9 per cent from the same period last year. Rapes have increased 17 per cent, assaults nearly 20 per cent and robberies 48 per cent. Murders have fallen 11 per cent from early last year, to 103 so far.

Some crimes have been front-page news: A woman pushed to her death onto the tracks at the Times Square subway station in February; a man who stabbed two workers at the Museum of Modern Art. Just last week, Mr Adams stood beside a mother whose 12-year-old son was killed by the kind of stray bullets he had worried about in his campaign ads.

A few weeks earlier, Mr Adams was defending police officers who shot an 18-year-old man in the head, leaving him critically wounded, after they said he tried to flee a traffic stop.

Mr Adams, who often visits crime scenes and has made a point of riding the subway, was stuck in the mayor's residence on Tuesday after testing positive for Covid-19. In a recorded video statement, he said: "We will not allow New Yorkers to be terrorised, even by a single individual."

Mr Haitham Taher, 20, who was waiting to pick up his brother from a school near the subway station where Tuesday's shooting occurred, said he felt the police were at best ineffective.

"You feel you are not protected," he said, as hundreds of police officers milled around him. "If there is a parking ticket violation, they will catch you right away, but a person with a gun, they won't catch for hours."

REUTERS