NYC Mayor: Our prosecutors are "a laughingstock" of the country

AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews, FIle

The Mayor of New York City held a press conference yesterday that was full of fire and brimstone. The cover of the New York Post really says it all. “Mayor’s plea: We took 2,600 guns… But the shooters are back on the streets.” Eric Adams stood strong for the men and women of the NYPD, praising their efforts to work quickly to investigate gun crimes and make arrests. He was particularly impressed with the work of the recently restored gun crimes task force. (Which the former mayor had abolished because it was “racist” or whatever.) But he lashed out publicly at the District Attorneys, prosecutors, and judges who continue to operate the jails as if they have revolving doors.

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Mayor Eric Adams lashed out at prosecutors and judges Monday for cutting loose suspected shooters to unleash more gunfire on the Big Apple’s streets — saying the “bad guys no longer take them seriously.”

The clearly frustrated mayor also fumed that soft-on-crime policies were turning the city’s criminal justice system into “a laughingstock of our entire country.”

During a news conference with NYPD officials in Brooklyn, Adams praised cops for being “laser-focused on the shooters” and making arrests but demanded that “the other team must do their part.”

The Mayor is clearly frustrated and it’s reached the point where he feels compelled to point out the obvious. He said, “after the shooting, after the arrest, after being let go — You know what they do? They go do another shooting.” The NYPD is already aware of this because they keep arresting the same people over and over again.

He pointed out that criminals in New York City “no longer believe you can’t do a shooting.” He continued, saying that criminals don’t take criminal justice seriously anymore.

While the Mayor didn’t mention him by name, he was clearly making a reference to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. The DA came into office promising to put fewer people behind bars and proceeded to make good on that threat. He later walked back some of his initial directives in response to public outrage, but prosecution and conviction rates remain woefully low even as the number of arrests is rising. Adams also blasted the judges who are handing down lenient sentences for gun crime convicts.

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The timing of this tirade was probably not accidental. He did it on the same day that Californians went to the polls in their primary and ousted Chesa Boudin in San Francisco. It appears that Adams is seeking to leverage the anger and frustration of New York voters to apply some pressure on Bragg, the City Council, and the judges in the Big Apple’s criminal courts.

Nothing that the Mayor is saying requires an advanced college degree to grasp. His cops are doing their jobs. The prosecutors and the courts are not. And far too many voters are furious over the lack of progress. Perhaps we are approaching the point where some actual progress can be seen on the horizon.

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