Politico published a story today with the headline, “Eric Adams’ war against crime sparks Democratic unrest.” Despite the promise that the story itself will contain lots of whining from NYC progressives, it actually makes the case that Adams is following through on exactly what he promised to do during his campaign: Focus on crime.

By Jan. 14, Adams seemed to be consumed by the issue as he headed to police headquarters to announce the arrest of an armed robber who fatally shot a 19-year-old Burger King cashier. Four days later, he spoke at the vigil of a woman who was shoved to her death in front of a Times Square subway train in a random attack. And just 24 hours after that vigil, Adams attended a late-night briefing in the Bronx after an infant was struck in the face with a stray bullet.

“Doesn’t matter to me if it’s a police officer shot, or if it’s a baby shot. I’m going to stay in these streets until this city is safe,” the mayor vowed, days before two police officers were shot and killed this past weekend.

The former 22-year NYPD veteran has likened himself to a “general” tackling the city’s crime wave head-on — an approach that supporters say is critical to showing the public he’ll make good on his campaign mantra that the “prerequisite to prosperity is public safety.”

As one Queens Borough president put it, “Showing up is a critical part of the job.” So far, that’s what the Mayor is doing. He’s siding with the police, literally wearing a police jacket as he speaks. Eventually, we do get to a couple of complaints, the first about Adams’ efforts to bring back a plainclothes unit that was disbanded by Mayor de Blasio.

“One shooting is too many. Don’t get me wrong, this is a crisis, and we have to address it. But this has been historically the most violent of police units,” said City Council Member Tiffany Cabán, a progressive Democrat, casting doubt on Adams’ claims that his plainclothes cops could avoid the abuses of the past. “We always see a call for increased training, and there is zero empirical evidence that any form of increased training reduces the violence.”

Another critic says he sees too many police officers and not enough care providers:

Jeremy Saunders of the progressive social advocacy group VOCAL-NY said, while the cops have been out in force, the increased services for homeless New Yorkers have not materialized.

“He’s publicly talking about investing money in police and investing his personal time in police, while cutting these services,” Saunders said. “We don’t need big investments in law enforcement. We have a massive police force. We have an army of cops. We barely have a platoon of care providers.”

New York does indeed have an army of cops and so far this month five of them have been shot, two of them fatally. So long as even police aren’t safe on the streets, I don’t think the left’s whining about police abuses that haven’t happened yet and care providers is really going to sway many people. 

What may be most striking about this story about “Democratic unrest” is how little unrest there is in it. The three paragraphs above are literally all the criticism in a story that is 40 paragraphs long. Frankly, even the little that is there is weak sauce. There must be a lot more angry progressives in New York City than this article would suggest. You get the feeling they are laying low, waiting for an opportunity to reemerge into their comfort zone, i.e. attacking the police.

The city had a wide range of choices in the last election, including candidates who were promising to defund the police even as violent crime went up. The majority voted for a former police officer promising a return to safe streets. Hopefully the residents of NYC will get what asked for instead of listening to the activists who got the city into this mess in the first place.