Season’s greetings from Grinch City
It would be hard to imagine that 23 months ago, when he rode around on his bike in a pink helmet, talking about swagger and nightlife and ending an eight-year streak of seriousness and earth tones in City Hall, the bicycle came in. it would be Eric Adams playing the role of Scrooge, while Bill de Blasio, newly divorced, is out there dating a married woman and wearing cobalt blue brought the heat. At one level, Eric Adams’ promise was that he would restore energy and charisma to a city emerging from a pandemic, that New York would become more assertive. pleasure. But in many ways it just seemed more Dickensian.
Consider the candlelight vigil held last week, eight days before Christmas, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, to commemorate the last day of Sunday service for the local branch of the library. Budget cuts ordered by the mayor, which he says are inevitable in light of the burdens imposed by the migrant crisis, have meant that almost all libraries in the city will be closed on Sundays. They have also been forced to reduce spending on books, programs and building repairs. Emily Gallagher, a member of the State Assembly who attended the funeral meeting, mentioned the reductions “cruel and unnecessary.”
This week is one report from Columbia University’s Center for Justice outlined the dangers of solitary confinement, which is ubiquitous in the city’s prison system. Despite promises to end it, the report said, the Department of Correction simply rebranded the practice as “structurally restrictive housing.” It still isolated the prisoners 23 hours a day, just in slightly larger cells. In one case, the investigation found, prison guards forced an inmate to make sexually explicit comments while he sat naked in a squatting position, then placed him in solitary confinement for several months in an attempt to cover up their abuse.
The report urged the council to adopt a law that would ban solitary confinement and allow people in custody to leave their cells for at least 14 hours a day, with limited exceptions after outbursts of violence. The law was passed on Wednesday. But Mr. Adams opposed the bill all along and has threatened to veto it, arguing in a radio interview after the vote that the value of a disciplinary tactic that the United Nations has labeled torture essentially misunderstood by the ‘far left’, indifferent to the law. public safety.
There is no doubt that the steady flow of migrants from the border to a city mandated to shelter everyone has exponentially complicated the issue of its governance. Mr. Adams has repeatedly said the crisis is out of control in the absence of more funding and strategic assistance from the federal government. This week, he angered New Yorkers over billions of dollars in proposed cuts to direct their outrage at Washingtonmarch there demanding more money, a gesture that political observers immediately registered as overly aggressive because it would likely further alienate the Biden administration.