NYC Mayor’s Nearly $500 Million Gun Violence Plan Doesn’t Include More Police

New York City Mayor Eric Adams unveiled his $485 million plan to combat gun violence on Monday, but critics noticed one thing was missing — more police officers.

The “Blueprint for Community Safety” gun violence plan will spend most of the nearly half a billion dollars on efforts to steer young people away from gun violence before it happens.

New York will invest millions in housing, employment, mental health programs, parks, and community centers, among other preventative approaches, according to the plan, which was released by the city’s gun violence task force.

“Our city must start intervening earlier, focusing on positive youth development, before it’s too late,” Adams said Monday at a press conference announcing the plan.

“We’ve buried too many Black and Brown boys, particularly boys, the number one cause of death for Black boys is homicide, the number one cause,” said Attorney General Letitia James.

The gun violence plan will prioritize the six precincts in the city that saw the most gun violence last year. Those six precincts had a quarter of all shootings in 2022, authorities said.

However, zero dollars from the plan will be spent on putting more cops on New York’s streets — in the problem precincts or elsewhere.

The city does plan to spend $2.6 million on community and police relations, however.

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Meanwhile, the NYPD is seeing an alarming wave of officers resigning.

In January and February, 239 officers resigned, up from 176 officers who left in those months last year, and more than double the 110 who left over that period in 2021, according to NYPD pension data.

The exodus at the beginning of the year is the highest since 2007, when 250 officers quit over a contract dispute.

“The NYPD staffing emergency is approaching the point of no return,” said Police Benevolent Association President Patrick Lynch in March.

Also this year, the NYPD lowered its fitness standards in order to bring more women onto the force, a decision the mayor reportedly had to approve.

Crime, including shootings, spiked in New York City during the pandemic. The numbers have started to come down, but shootings still remain higher than they were in 2019.

So far, there have been 592 shootings in the city this year. By this time in 2019, there had been only 448 shootings, and in 2018 there had been 426 shootings.

In 2020, shootings nearly doubled to 1,531 shooting incidents, up from 777 in all of 2019. Murders also spiked from 319 to 462 for the year.

Last month, Adams downplayed New Yorkers’ concerns about crime, saying all the media coverage of crime in the city “plays on your psyche.”

“They start their day picking up the news, the morning papers… and they see some of the most horrific events that may happen throughout the previous day,” Adams told Fox 5.

However, even Alvin Bragg, the city’s progressive district attorney who has been accused of being soft on crime, said he worries about crime on the subway.

“I know the statistics that transit crime is down, but when one of my family members gets on the train, I, too, get a knot in my stomach,” Bragg said last month.