Crime and public safety are top of mind for most New Yorkers — and Mayor Eric Adams wants to blame the news media.
Sorry, Mr. Mayor: It’s not us, but the reality the press reports and the reality New Yorkers live in.
A new Siena poll finds that 70% of city residents worry they’ll be a crime victim.
They have reason to fear: The survey says that statewide, 9% have suffered a physical assault this past year; a similar 9% have been burglary victims.
Yet Adams on Fox 5 suggested that reading about crime in “the morning papers” simply “plays on your psyche.”
He notes that overall crime was down 4% in June year over year, with major crimes, including shootings and rape, down across the board.
What he’s missing is how the randomness of crime (still above pre-COVID levels, by the way) truly eats at the psyche. Just look at some recent news:
- Last week, a 67-year-old woman was hit in the head with a rock in an unprovoked attack in Chelsea. And on the Upper East Side, a stranger assaulted a 72-year-old woman on the street, viciously dragging her to the ground in a robbery attempt.
- Saturday saw an 87-year-old Yemeni father of six shot dead, with three others in Brooklyn and Queens wounded in a scooter-riding madman’s random spree of gun violence.
- Tuesday evening, two masked, scooter-borne gunmen shot four more New Yorkers — including two little boys — in a Bronx park.
- Later that night in another Bronx park, a stray bullet hit a 17-year-old in the torso.
- The city saw at least three more people shot over Tuesday night, one of them fatally.
- Wednesday brought a knife-wielding man roaming Times Square threateningly — happily apprehended before anyone got hurt thanks to an eagle-eyed civilian who alerted cops.
Seniors and children slain, shot and beaten out of the blue; lunatics and thugs firing away recklessly: These are facts of life all over the city.
Not to mention the scary disorder plaguing even a trip to the drugstore, as Nicole Gelinas outlined in Wednesday’s Post.
Or the subway crime (more than 30 fatalities since the pandemic began) that even has hyper-progressive Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg confessing to “a knot in my stomach” whenever a family member gets on a train.
We have to give Bragg some credit here. The fear is real, even for him to admit publicly. Many politicians insult New Yorkers’ fear by spouting statistics like “there is a one in a million chance” of being a victim of crime.
But that soundbite entirely misses the point, as New Yorkers set out to The Post elsewhere in their own words.
Nobody wants to be that one in a million, but given the levels of chaos on our streets from unhinged vagrants, zombified drug users and stray-bullet shootings, there is no way to know when you will be.
Stop blaming the messenger. Listen to New Yorkers.