Crime issue likely to dominate New York mayoral election

If the results from Tuesday's New York City mayoral primaries hold, the issue of crime is likely to take center stage in the November election.

Eric Adams, 60, Brooklyn borough president and a former NYPD captain, held a nine-point lead over progressive lawyer Maya Wiley and a 12-point advantage over former city sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia in the Democratic primary as of 10:30 pm Wednesday.

The city went this year for the first time to "ranked choice" voting, in which voters pick five candidates in descending order. The purpose of that is to avoid a runoff if no candidate exceeds 50 percent of the votes. Adams has almost 32 percent of "first choice" votes.

"There are still ballots to be counted and votes to be reallocated, but I'm humbled and proud to be New Yorkers' first choice for Mayor!" Adams tweeted Wednesday.

According to the nyc.gov website: "If no candidate earns more than 50 percent of first-choice votes, then counting will continue in rounds. At the end of each round, the candidate with the fewest votes will be eliminated. If you ranked that candidate first, your vote will go to the next highest ranked candidate on your ballot. This process will continue until there are two candidates left. The candidate with the most votes wins."

On the Republican side, Curtis Sliwa, 67, a radio host who also founded the neighborhood watch group Guardian Angels in 1979, won the party's nomination with nearly 72 percent of the vote over Fernando Mateo, a businessman who in the past has advocated for taxi drivers.

Democrats outnumber Republicans 6-to-1 in New York City voter registration, with current Mayor Bill de Blasio, a progressive, having been elected twice. Many pundits consider the winner of the Democratic primary the next mayor.

And while the city's politics seemed to have moved further left, before de Blasio's two terms New York had Republican mayors the preceding 20 years－billionaire Mike Bloomberg, who served three four-year terms, and his predecessor Rudy Giuliani, who served two terms.

Adams, who is looking to become the city's second black mayor, grew up in Brooklyn and Queens. He walked a fine line on the issue of policing, looking to balance a strong anti-crime stance with community concerns about the use of police force, an issue heightened in the summer of 2020 following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, police custody. The international uproar over Floyd's killing gave rise to the "defund the police" movement.

"I don't hate police departments－I hate abusive policing, and that's what people mix up," Adams told The New York Times. He has said he was motivated to join the NYPD after he was beaten by police as a teenager.

For Sliwa, born in Brooklyn and of Polish and Italian descent, perhaps his best attribute in the contest is his name recognition, particularly among baby boomer New Yorkers.

"He's a hardcore New Yorker," Juan Pagan, a 65-year-old retiree from the Lower East Side told The New York Times on Tuesday night during the candidate's victory party at a Manhattan steakhouse. "It's in his veins, it's in his blood."

At a news conference Wednesday in Manhattan, Sliwa, wearing the Guardian Angels' signature red beret, said: "This is going to be a campaign, clearly, in which I talk about cracking down on crime, supporting the police, refunding our heroes, the police, hiring more police, taking the handcuffs off the police and putting it on the criminals, and restoring qualified immunity to the police so that they can't be personally sued."

New York's next mayor will have a full plate on Jan 1.

The city experienced a summer of protests last year that at times became violent, leading to instances of looting and subsequent boarding up of retail stores.

New York has also watched crime soar in certain categories, such as shootings and hate crimes. Asian Americans in particular have been attacked in some high-profile incidents caught on video.

In May, overall major crime rose 22 percent compared with May 2020, led by a 46.7 percent increase in robbery and a 35.6 percent rise in grand larceny, according to an NYPD release. Felony assault increased 20.5 percent, and shooting incidents rose to 173, up 73 percent.

As New York gradually reopens－Broadway theaters will raise their curtains in September－how things go in the city this summer could be a factor in the November election. Many tourists and former residents are taking a wait- and-see approach to the Big Apple.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the hard-hit city saw more than 33,000 New Yorkers die of the virus, and some 300,000 leave town, at least temporarily. The metropolis also has taken a blow to its morale and international standing.

New York has lost more jobs than any other major US city during the pandemic－a nearly 12 percent drop between February 2020 and April 2021, according to the Center for New York City Affairs. Many commercial office buildings remain vacant or sparsely populated, as the pandemic led to a national work-from-home boom.

The city's economic engine is also revved by its commuters, who ride its transit system and frequent its restaurants, bars and stores. Subway travel, which before the pandemic had reached an all-time high but plummeted during it, is rebounding.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced Tuesday that the New York City subway and suburban Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North Railroad broke pandemic-era ridership records. On June 18, the MTA subways carried 2.57 million riders, the Long Island rail had 122,848 customers, and Metro-North had 104,304 customers.

The combined subway and bus ridership of more than 3.7 million is close to 50 percent of pre-pandemic levels.

"The subway's ridership return continues to gather momentum," said Sarah Feinberg, interim president of MTA New York City Transit. "The subway is essential to New York, and higher ridership is the surest sign of New York's post-pandemic recovery."

The issue of homelessness, long a dilemma in the city, appears to have grown larger, with more homeless people setting up on streets and in the transit system.

In April, there were 53,199 homeless people, including 16,390 children, sleeping each night in the city's municipal shelter system, according to the Coalition for the Homeless, an advocacy group. The coalition said that the single-adult homeless population has increased more than 100 percent in the past decade.

On the lighter side, one thing is certain in the next election. The two likely contenders, Adams and Sliwa, are bona fide New Yorkers. De Blasio and Bloomberg, although longtime city residents, grew up in Massachusetts, sometimes a sore point for fans of the New York Yankees baseball team, whose archrival is the Boston Red Sox.