NYC Mayor Adams unveils nearly $500 million anti-crime plan focused on preventative solutions

NEW YORK — Mayor Eric Adams rolled out a multi-tiered plan Monday focused on taking preventative steps to combat gun violence in the city — but it was not immediately clear how his administration will gauge the success of the initiatives.

The “Blueprint for Public Safety,” which Adams unveiled during a morning press conference with Gov. Hochul and State Attorney General Letitia James, is going to pump nearly $500 million into a range of programs related to housing, mental health, job training and other efforts that the mayor said will help nip gun violence in the bud.

“We sought out to answer a key question over and over again that we heard: How can we stop the violence before it happens on our streets?” Adams, flanked by members of his administration and other city officials, said at City Hall. “Our city must start intervening earlier, focusing on positive youth development, before it’s too late.”

According to the blueprint, the Adams’ administration will start with targeting the efforts in six police precincts where NYPD data shows a staggering 25% of all shootings in the city occurred in 2022. The precincts — which also have disproportionately high rates of poverty, unemployment and school absenteeism — are all in the Bronx and Brooklyn and include neighborhoods like Mott Haven, Morrisania, Brownsville and East New York, the blueprint states.

The Adams administration will evaluate the impact of the initiatives in the six precincts by looking at “performance indicators,” such as whether the number of shooting incidents and rates of hospitalizations for assaults in those areas start dropping. The administration will also look at whether unemployment, school absenteeism and poverty rates start improving in those areas, among other data points.

However, Adams, a retired NYPD captain who made public safety the top priority of his 2021 campaign, said he’s not going to set specific numerical targets that would constitute success in any given area of action.

“We don’t have that,” he told reporters before taking a shot at media outlets over what he characterized as a lack of coverage about his administration’s public safety wins so far. “We already dropped in the percentage decrease in shootings, percentage decrease in homicides ... We are giving you those percentage decreases, and for some reason it’s not finding its way on your pages.”

After the press conference, First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright told reporters the administration is going to set some performance benchmarks for issues like school absenteeism. She said those targets will be announced in coming weeks.

The blueprint was put together by a task force formed by Adams last year and spearheaded by Wright and AT Mitchell, a gun violence prevention activist who was tapped by the mayor last year to become the city’s “gun czar.”

Among the 51-page blueprint’s intervention efforts is a commitment to invest $57.5 million in improving housing conditions, especially in NYCHA complexes.

There is also commitments to spend $118.5 million on job training programs for youth; $106.66 on bolstering mental health resources for young people; $118.3 million on providing “mentorship opportunities” for them, and $67.8 million on assisting low-income New Yorkers with accessing public benefits like food assistance. A more modest $2.6 million is also earmarked in the plan for programs aimed at improving “bonds of trust between police and communities.”

Most of the near half-billion-dollar plan is being bankrolled by funds from city agencies that were allocated as part of this fiscal year’s municipal government budget adopted in June, Wright said. The only new funding for the plan appears to be a $6 million allocation from the state.

Addressing the fact that the plan does not include a significant amount of new funding, Adams said city agencies have historically not been “zeroing in on using their existing budgets to go after the holistic approach of ending the feeders of gun violence.”

“We now have given a new charge that you are to look at your budget and make sure that you are buying into this overall plan and what are the feeders of ending gun violence,” he said.