WASHINGTON — President Biden, in the midst of a political reset aimed at getting him out of Washington to emphasize the Democrats’ case to voters ahead of November’s midterm elections, traveled Thursday to New York City to embrace its new mayor — and his approach to handling crime and public safety.
The election last year of Eric Adams, a Black former police captain whose focus on public safety propelled him to the top of a crowded mayoral primary field, underlined the broadening salience of the issue with swing voters and even Democrats amid a national surge in violence since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The last two years have seen a spike in homicides, shootings, brazen “smash mob” robberies of luxury stores and shoplifting, as economic shutdowns devastated poorer communities and the public health crisis left many police departments understaffed. The country’s homicide rate, the crime metric most closely tracked by criminologists and police officials, rose 30% from 2019 to 2020, the highest one-year increase in modern history, according to federal statistics.
