NY mayor feels heat over shootings

NEW YORK－Gun violence has rocked the first three weeks of Eric Adams' tenure as New York mayor, piling pressure on the former police officer to deliver on his promise to improve public safety in the US' largest city.

A shooting in Harlem on Friday left one police officer dead and another in critical condition.

It was the latest flashpoint of the Democratic mayor's nascent rule, in which he has yet to present a comprehensive plan to rein in the crime he has decried.

"It is our city against the killers," said Adams, a retired police captain, on Friday night at Harlem Hospital, where the officers, who had been responding to a domestic disturbance, were taken following the shooting.

Recent shootings include one in which a girl, 11, was hit in the cheek by a stray bullet in the Bronx as she was in a parked car with her mother.

They are seen as part of a broader trend of gun violence fueled by the accessibility of firearms, against the backdrop of the social and economic toll of the pandemic.

And they are testing the new mayor's tough-on-crime campaign message while setting up a potential showdown with the left flank of his party over police funding and crime reduction strategies.

On Friday Adams urged federal action on gun control and called on New Yorkers to work with police to stem violence.

"No matter how painful this moment is, don't give up on these people in this city," he said.

"Twitter and Instagram and social media－they're not the people you're protecting," he said, in an apparent rebuke of his critics, many of whom are vocal online and have pushed to "defund" the NY Police Department, the country's largest.

Now that call may be coming to a head as Adams prepares to negotiate a new city budget.

Last week he said he would consider exempting the police force, with a budget exceeding $5 billion, from citywide cost-cutting.

Last year police recorded 488 homicides in the city of nine million, 4.3 percent more than in 2020, but Jeffrey Butts, director of the research and evaluation center at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said that 25 years ago the number of homicides in New York was quadruple what it is today.

While he said he disagrees with the notion of "defunding the police," he also told Agence France-Presse that "more police funding is not an appropriate response".

Agencies via Xinhua