‘The answer is not to defund the police’: Biden embraces New York’s mayor and his approach to crime

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 to New York City and embraced 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.

“You know, Mayor Adams, you and I agree. The answer is not to abandon our streets. That’s not the answer,” Biden said Thursday at the New York Police Department’s headquarters in Lower Manhattan. “The answer is to come together; police in communities building trust and making us all safer.”

The last two years have seen a rise 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.

The violence has occurred mostly in urban areas such as New York City, where five police officers have been killed since the beginning of the year. Just Wednesday, police officers laid to rest Wilbert Mora, who was shot to death after responding to a domestic disturbance call at a Harlem apartment last month. It came just days after the funeral for Mora’s partner, Jason Rivera, who was killed in the same incident.

Biden said he spoke with the families of the fallen officers and decried their killings, saying that “their loss for the city is also a loss to the nation.”

The uptick in violence has prompted Democrats to showcase a new seriousness about an issue that has been advanced by Republicans and Fox News. But they’re attempting to reconcile a tougher stance on crime with calls for police reform in response to numerous high-profile cases of excessive and deadly force by white officers against unarmed Black people.