February 7, 2025

New York politics this year has been defined by three big questions: How local leaders react to Donald Trump, whether Mayor Eric Adams will beat corruption charges, and if or when former Gov. Andrew Cuomo will enter the race for mayor.

That's the political backdrop for a growing field of mayoral candidates who are trying to navigate the public's shifting priorities. And this newsletter will focus primarily on their plans, and on how scholars here at the Manhattan Institute and elsewhere think they will work to make New York a global model for a vibrant, prosperous city.

This week, we’ll start looking at public safety and quality of life, a topic I expect to revisit multiple times leading up to the primaries on June 24. 

Public safety in mayoral races is like the economy in presidential elections—the key issue where perceptions and reality don’t need to align for an election to be lost. (I was going to add corruption into the mix, but we live in strange times.)

A majority of the city's voters—66%—believe the city is headed in the wrong direction. Crime and public safety are the top concern for 49% of respondents, followed by the cost of housing (29%), and, interestingly,  jobs and economy at 28%. Immigration was a top concern for 22% of voters, according to our polling data from late January.

The mayor ran on a law-and-order campaign touting his NYPD credentials, and convincing a nervous public that the city is safe is high on the agenda. That pitch was on full display during Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch’s State of the NYPD address last week. 

But the police aren't the only key players. Prosecutors have complained about 2019 rules that make it hard to do their jobs, and there's movement in Albany to reform the discovery rules that have contributed to the persistently high levels of recidivism in the city. My colleagues Hannah Meyers and Rafael Mangual have been advocating for some of these changes for years, and now the devil is in the details of competing plans. 

What the City is Doing

The NYPD plans to double down on quality-of-life issues, as well as more targeted "precision policing," Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch—Mayor Eric Adams’ fourth commissioner in three years—announced last week.

“When neighborhoods are plagued by issues such as aggressive panhandling, unruly street vending, public urination, abandoned vehicles, it gives the impression of an unsafe community,” said Commissioner Tisch.  

She highlighted zone-based policing and is creating a Quality of Life Division to track quality-of-life data and performance. 

What's Next: Discovery Laws

Police Commissioner Tisch needs help from Albany, and Gov. Hochul is going all in on changing the discovery laws.

While fair and speedy trials are important, the 2019 reforms went too far, Gov. Hochul said last Friday. She's looking to amend the laws to prevent unnecessary case dismissals, reduce (expensive) bureaucratic delays, and improve evidence-handling procedures. Those changes are supported by all five of the city's district attorneys and other law enforcement officials seeking to reduce recidivism.

Sen. Zellnor Myrie, a mayoral candidate from Brooklyn, introduced a bill in January to make it easier for prosecutors to comply with the discovery law, without making any other changes, something that advocates and public defenders like the Legal Aid Society support.  

"New York's 2020 discovery law has severely damaged public safety and critically harmed both the fairness and the very functioning of the state's criminal justice system," my colleague  Hannah Meyers says. "The Legislature must pass this amendment as is, so that tens of thousands of criminal cases stop being tossed out annually for meaningless, clerical reasons."  

Would Sen. Myrie support the governor's bill?  "My colleagues and I have always followed the data and put public safety first. I look forward to engaging in discussions in the coming weeks with stakeholders about proposed changes to our discovery law," he told The Bigger Apple in an email.

Progressive lawmakers running for mayor have shifted toward the center when it comes to policing. City Comptroller Brad Lander told The New York Editorial Board, of which I am a member, that he wanted to “acknowledge that progressives, including myself, were slow to respond to the growing sense of disorder coming out of the pandemic.”

Now, former City Comptroller Scott Stringer and Sen. Zellnor Myrie both promise to hire 3,000 more cops. Only Socialist Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani has proposed cutting some police units. 

Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo will dominate the race if he jumps into it, our polling confirms, with a caveat that most voters don't know who the candidates are, something that will change as campaigns start in earnest.

And if Cuomo does get in, City and State's Tom Allon asks: Should Mayor Adams run as a Republican? 

Attack ads are already running against Cuomo. A six-figure campaign, aimed at Black voters, started running last Monday across media channels attacking his COVID record, Politico first reported. Since he’s not officially running, they don’t have to disclose who’s funding the effort. 

"Whether we like it or not, disorder still matters," Manhattan Institute Fellow Charles Fain Lehman wrote in Vital City last week, examining the politics of broken windows policing and arguing that we need to reframe the debate:

"[But] arguing about whether or not disorder causes major crime sidesteps and sometimes obscures a more important fact: Voters intrinsically care about disorder. Experiencing graffiti or public drug use or loud music on the subway is not as bad as being murdered. But it is unpleasant. And it is a denial of everyone’s right to enjoy public spaces equally — a foundational principle of modern urban life.

Without policy to preserve quality of life, cities struggle. They become less friendly, less innovative and less desirable places to be. With the rise of remote work, it’s easier than ever for residents to leave disorderly cities. Indeed, they appear to be doing so, with major cities seeing double-digit declines in the number of young children — an index of a mass exodus of families."

Our new series on good places to talk politics: The Bar at Quarters is a hidden second-floor space in Tribeca, with quirky food (pickled things on a toothpick) and superb wine and coffee. Half cafe, half luxury home store, it's one of those well-kept New York secrets ... shared only with the kind of devoted New Yorker who makes it to the bottom of this email.  

State Sen. Zellnor Myrie (D, Brooklyn), a mayoral candidate and the new Codes Committee chair, discusses New York’s discovery laws: his bill and Gov. Hochul's. Via Capitol Press Room.