New Yorkers haven’t felt nearly as safe on the subways since the pandemic, and each time public officials try to convince them otherwise the rift widens between the official narrative and numbers on the one hand and popular perception on the other.
Like they say across the pond, “mind the gap.”
That’s the gap between the Adams administration’s messaging about how major felonies in the system remain rare as “we are delivering safety every day” and waves of headlines about nightmarish crimes.
And the gap between the bosses sending surges of additional officers on mandatory overtime to cluster at entrances or on platforms and the people often ignored inside the city’s circulatory system who are plainly suffering and unable to care for themselves along with those — sometimes the same people at different moments — acting erratically and smoking, drinking, ranting, fighting.
The mayor started talking a lot during the week about how officers on his watch have been proactively engaging with people underground who appear severely mentally ill instead of leaving them in a state of supposedly benign neglect.
I don’t think that’s true, but good for him if he can jawbone it into reality.
Adams has been stressing the need for those interactions and interventions quite a lot since I wrote about the issue, not for the first time, last Sunday, in a column that clearly struck a nerve.
It was about the NYPD transit chief and its deputy commissioner for operations telling a pair of stunned morning news hosts — including one who said her producer had seen a woman defecating on her commute hours earlier — that there’s nothing officers can do about people behaving erratically unless they’re committing a crime at that moment.
The column was mostly just me quoting these bosses’ own words and noting that they were, in my opinion, nuts.
You can read it for yourself here, straight through to the correction at the end — I screwed up and wrote there have been 10 killings in the train system so far in 2024 when in fact there are four homicides on the books, the most to this point in the year since the early 1990s — and judge for yourself.
(The error, of course, was corrected as soon as the Daily News became aware of it).
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My mistake didn’t impact the point of the column but NYPD bosses, with the active blessing of their boss, Mayor Adams, have been on a rhetorical rampage ever since.
That’s part of a sloppily aggressive new approach to official police communications — including a chief challenging a woman who conducted an unusually tough interview with the mayor to a debate at the funeral last Saturday of slain Detective Jonathan Diller — that’s replaced courtesy, professional and respect with go CPR yourself.
Like with so many things in this administration, it feels like a tactic and talking point in search of a strategy.
In my case, the attacks aren’t about what I wrote last week or when the piece appeared online, but a response to what I’ve been writing over the past two years about the sullied records and dubious ideas of this administration’s police brass, including many of Adams’ old friends in the department who he brought in and elevated to clean house and settle old grudges.
Several of those people are reportedly acting from inside and outside of the department as shadow commissioners, controlling promotions and transfers and with their own direct lines to the boss. This crew has rewarded allies and settled old grudges while setting an amp-to-11, make-more-arrests leadership tone as many cops and others with a broader view of police work left the department.
Putting the pedal to the metal hasn’t succeeded in restoring the crime numbers to their pre-pandemic levels or in convincing New Yorkers the mayor has delivered on his signature promise to restore public safety without resorting to the overuse of the sort of policing dragnets the great Jack Maple warned long ago catch dolphins along with sharks.
These bosses — public officials appointed to roles with significant power — clearly haven’t appreciated me writing about the sundry finds and claims of them abusing their authority, behaving badly toward women, and in a couple cases both at the same time.
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Last week, the bosses found a pretext for hitting back at all my previous reporting that has dug into their records and leadership, with chiefs and a commissioner retweeting each other’s official accounts as they slung insults my way. The NYPD’s main account rather pathetically nicknamed me “Harry ‘Deceitful’ Siegel.”
The deputy commissioner for public information, who claimed credit for that tweet, slanderously lied about “this individual’s history of intentionally putting out wrong information.”
That was in an appearance along with the chief of patrol, who’s been going on TV and radio all week to talk about the department attacking me as if it’s something many New Yorkers care or even know about.
It’s a naked intimidation campaign.
But I’m not a cop whose career depends on the whims of these bosses, or a skell whose future may be in their hands.
I’m a New Yorker with a platform who wants to make the most of it, and have it serve New Yorkers who don’t have one.
Some of the bosses and the mayor also attacked me because of when my column appeared online — on Saturday evening, which is the same time it usually goes up every week, before appearing in print on Sunday.
I heard from an awful lot of people, including cops, about this column but not one person who said I was bashing cops by writing about bosses or who was upset about the column going online Saturday evening, which happened to be hours after Diller’s funeral, except chiefs, commissioners and the mayor.
These men — and it’s all men — have turned in a New York minute from talking in indoor voices about “your police” to snarling about how “we’re the police [and] you are a gadfly” and growling about how “some of the people we’re talking to only understand that kind of language.”
The bosses want to pretend that criticizing them amounts to slamming cops. Nope.
It’s my job as a columnist to speak with all sorts of New Yorkers, in all kinds of language. And to report on public officials, especially the ones who lose track of the “public” part.
Gadfly (n): “one who provokes others into action by criticism.”
Siegel (harrysiegel@gmail.com) is an editor at The City and a columnist for the Daily News.
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