Republican New York City mayoral candidate Curtis Silwa called out democratic challenger Eric Adams for shifting away from his remarks about rejecting the White House’s call for beefing up the NYPD.
After Biden urged NYC officials to inject $350 billion in pandemic relief funds into bolstering the NYPD to combat the city’s spike in violent crime at a presidential powwow, Adams contended that the department needed to assess how to utilize their current force by optimizing officer deployment.
“I was a transit police officer. I rode the trains alone. I don’t know why I have four or five police officers congregating around a booth area,” he said at the time. “So let’s look at how we’re using our police officers and then make the determination, do we need more?”
Silwa, who wasn’t invited to the White House event on July 12, had a different take.
“I’m saying take the money now,” he said on Wednesday. “Washington rarely offers money. The president may take it off the table. Bank it, hire the cops, train them, get them out there so that we could have a graduating group of cadets in the streets by October and then continue the process.”
Days later, Adams shifted his stance on accepting the funds. “We should utilize the money to stabilize crime in the city,” Adams said at a press conference. “We could use the money for additional resources on the transit system to ensure our tourists are really safe as well as the passengers.”
“There are also hotspots in the city that many people are not aware of where there are upticks in crime. We could have officers cover those hotspots and really stabilize the fear,” he concluded.
Silwa blasted Adams for changing his tune and said his approach to policing is flawed.
“Eric Adams is trying to attack the problem from the top down, which won’t work,” Sliwa contended. “You’ve got to attack the problem from the bottom up. And we saw that it worked with Rudy Giuliani, who turned the city around in 1993. Why wouldn’t you use the same set of principles that worked in the ’90s? Why are you trying to reinvent the process?”
He also touted his 42 years of work in the city as an unarmed violence interrupter with his non-profit the Guardian Angels, as why he would be a better leader of the Big Apple than Adams.
“I have the hands-on experience that Eric Adams does not,” he remarked. “And I have the compassion that Eric Adams does not in this regard. So even though I crack down on crime in a much tougher way than Eric Adams would ever do, I’m also far more compassionate, not only to the emotionally disturbed homeless.”
Eric Adams is a DINO plays for Law & Order BUT defunds police