New York mayor tackles crime as war

New York City Mayor Eric Adams called himself a "wartime general" as he seeks to grapple with a spike in crime and homelessness that he says has made the city "the laughingstock" of the world.

"Anything goes in the city of New York," said Adams during the annual Mass and Communion Breakfast of the New York Police Department in a Midtown hotel on Sunday.

"The most important city on the globe has become the laughingstock of the globe. And the dysfunctionality of our city has cascaded throughout the entire country."

Adams, a retired NYPD captain, called on the 500 police officers in attendance at the function to reclaim the city's streets.

"There are wartime and peacetime generals. I'm a wartime general," he said. "I'm going to be on the front line. Those of you in transit, I'm in the subway system at 2, 3 am with you. I'm going to your precincts. I'm going to call you up when you make those arrests."

To highlight the need to combat crime across the city, Adams uploaded a video to social media on Sunday night showing two masked people robbing a woman who was with her 3-year-old child.

One of the suspects forced the mother against a wall with the child next to her. Another suspect appeared to say something to the woman as he held his hands over her mouth.

Adams' push to tackle crime comes as the NYPD's February crime statistics showed overall crime saw an almost 60 percent increase in felonies compared with the same time last year.

Crime increased in the subway system by 73.3 percent compared with last February, going from 105 incidents to 182.

Car theft jumped 104.7 percent from 2,099 to 3,762; robberies increased by 56 percent from 818 to 1,276; and theft increased by 79.2 percent, according to the data.

Hate crimes jumped 189 percent compared with February last year.

Adams also cited two separate Brooklyn shootings from last week that left children aged 7 and 3 injured.

He likened the city's crime status to a high school science experiment in which a frog was put into water, boiled and left in the water until it died.

"Let's acknowledge that the heat is being turned up," he said. "We want to turn it down, so we don't watch our city boil to death."

Adams blamed petty crime and homelessness as contributing factors to the widespread "dysfunction" as his administration said on Friday that the mayor has ordered that every homeless encampment in the city be taken down within two weeks.

"We're going to rid the encampments off our street and we're going to place people in healthy living conditions with wraparound services," he said in an interview with The New York Times.

He did not specify where the people now living in the encampments would go to.

The most recent official estimate in January 2021 put the number of people living in parks and on the streets at around 1,100, which was widely seen as an undercount, the Times reported.