NEW YORK — President Joe Biden praised New York Mayor Eric Adams’ crime-fighting agenda Thursday and unveiled a new federal initiative aimed at stemming a flow of illegal weapons from southern states that has contributed to the city’s recent spike in violence.
Marking his first visit to New York since Adams’ inauguration, Biden gave the mayor his seal of approval during a press conference at the NYPD’s downtown Manhattan headquarters, where they also received a classified briefing from the department’s joint gun violence task force.
“I want to help every major city follow New York’s lead,” said Biden, who was flanked by Adams, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, Attorney General Merrick Garland, members of the state’s congressional delegation and various police officials.
Vowing to be Adams’ “partner,” Biden said his administration is embarking on a new crackdown on so-called “ghost guns,” homemade weapons that typically aren’t subject to background checks and lack traceable serial numbers.
A record number of the eerily-named guns were confiscated in the city last year, and Biden said the Justice Department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are deploying teams of specially trained prosecutors and investigators to every district in the country to help local law enforcement track down the weapons and catch those who use them for crimes.
“If you commit a crime with a ghost gun, not only your state and local prosecutors are going to come after you, but expect federal charges and federal prosecution as well,” Biden said.
Like Adams, Biden has distanced himself from progressives in their party who have advocated for scaling down police departments in favor of finding alternative solutions for public safety.
Instead, Biden and Adams have pushed a muscular approach for addressing an uptick in violent crime in the U.S. during the pandemic, with the president dropping a sweeping anti-crime blueprint last summer that called on Congress to earmark $300 million for local police departments to hire more cops.
Adams, for his part, released his own public safety plan last month, replete with stipulations for beefing up the NYPD, including by reintroducing a modified version of the department’s controversial plainclothes units, which were disbanded in 2020 in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd.
“The answer is not to defund the police,” Biden said at Thursday’s event. “It is to give you the tools, the training, the funding, to be the partners, to be the protectors communities need.”
“We are not about defunding. We are about funding,” he added.
Adams, who often calls himself the “Biden of Brooklyn,” said the president’s proposals mirror his and vowed to “stand shoulder to shoulder” with him.
“The president is here because he knows what the American people want: justice, safety and prosperity, and they deserve every bit of it. He wants to end the gun violence in our city and in our country,” said Adams, who served in the NYPD for over two decades before turning to politics.
Biden’s visit comes at a perilous time for the Big Apple.
Shootings overall in the city spiked by 31.6% last month as compared to January 2021, according to NYPD data.
Among last month’s shooting victims were six NYPD cops. Two of them, Officers Jason Rivera and Wilbert Mora, died from their injuries after a gunman attacked them in a Harlem apartment where they were responding to a call of a domestic dispute.
Biden said he spoke to the families of the two slain officers and called them the personifications of “the who and what law enforcement ought to be.”
“Their loss for the city is also a loss for the nation,” he said.
———
