NEW YORK — President Joe Biden praised NYC Mayor Eric Adams’ crimefighting agenda Thursday and unveiled a new federal initiative to stem the flow of illegal weapons from southern states that has contributed to a recent surge in violence in New York.
Marking his first visit to the city since Adams’ inauguration, Biden gave his seal of approval to the mayor’s anti-crime push 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, Gov. Hochul, Attorney General Merrick Garland, members of the state’s congressional delegation and various police officials.
Vowing to be Adams’ “partner” in public safety, 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.
The NYPD confiscated a record number of the eerily-named weapons in the city last year, and Biden said the Justice Department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are deploying teams of specialized prosecutors and investigators to every district in the country to help local law enforcement track down the weapons and catch those who use them in 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.
Adams, who has politically aligned himself with the president, vowed to work hand-in-hand with the commander-in-chief on the anti-ghost gun program.
“Mr. President, Eric Adams is reporting for duty and ready to serve,” Hizzoner 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.
Last summer, the president released a comprehensive anti-crime blueprint that called on Congress to earmark $300 million for local police departments to hire more cops. Adams, for his part, announced 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,” the president added.
Adams, who often calls himself the “Biden of Brooklyn,” said the president was right on target.
“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.
But local progressives, who have clashed with Adams on various issues since he took office, slammed the tough talk on crime as a rehash of failed policies.
“We cannot continue to throw policing at every problem. We have the largest police department in the entire country, and we can’t keep doubling and tripling down on these same strategies and keep thinking that we’ll get different results,” Queens Councilwoman Tiffany Caban told the Daily News.
Caban, a former public defender and democratic socialist, specifically referenced the newly reinstated plainclothes units, which were involved in some of the city’s most infamous police killings, including the 2014 death of Eric Garner.
“That’s the style and legacy,” Caban said.
Biden and Adams visited a public school in Long Island City, Queens, following the meeting at NYPD Headquarters. They met with community violence interrupters who use deescalation techniques to reduce crime.
Adams’ public safety plan called for more funding for violence interrupters and community-based public safety solutions.
But NYPD Commissioner Keeshant Sewell signaled that the Adams administration views the NYPD as the top priority.
“This violence is not acceptable against our citizens or our police officers, and we know it has to be stopped, and we know this starts here, at the NYPD, with action,” she said at the department’s headquarters.
Biden’s visit comes at a perilous time for the Big Apple.
According to NYPD data, shootings overall in the city spiked by 31.6% last month compared with January 2021.
Among last month’s shooting victims were six NYPD cops. 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.”
On ghost guns, Hochul noted that it’s illegal to sell, produce or possess them in New York under a bill she signed into law last year.
But the problem lies in illegal guns coming into New York from mostly Southern states via the so-called “iron pipeline,” the governor noted.
“It is an American crisis,” she said.
Federal strike forces were deployed last year to New York and other big U.S. cities to hunt down traffickers of illegal firearms, and Biden said those teams have confiscated thousands of weapons since then.
The president conceded that New York and other states with strict weapons laws will likely continue to see an influx of illegal guns due to a refusal by congressional Republicans to pass long-stalled gun control bills, like mandating background checks for all firearms purchases on a federal level.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the dean of New York’s congressional delegation, shared Biden’s frustration over the lack of action on the issue in Congress.
“Legislation that we’ve passed in Congress is wholly inadequate,” Nadler said.
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