Mayor Eric Adams attacked his election rivals Sunday for ripping his plan to build a pricey public-safety facility — saying the “defund-police, bail-reform candidates” simply don’t know what they’re talking about.
Hizzoner’s Democratic primary-race opponents have used the blueprints for the new $225 million complex as a campaign-trail bludgeon against the incumbent mayor, saying the 16-agency training ground would be a waste of money that won’t help the NYPD retain and expand its police force.
The mayor brushed off the criticism Sunday, saying after a brief sermon at New Mount Pisgah Baptist Church East in Jamaica, Queens, that his foes fundamentally misunderstand both the need and the process.
“We’ve heard several of the defund-police, bail-reform candidates who are talking about why we should not have the public-safety academy,” Adams said. “This once again, it just shows the lack of full understanding of how to ensure the city’s number one issue: public safety.
“It shows their lack of understanding of the budget,” he continued.
“These are capital dollars, they cannot be used for retention” of law enforcement.
“But this administration took one of the goals of the law-enforcement academy and turned it into the use for several of our agencies — park police, sheriffs, corrections, all of them coming together, dismantling the walls that we had in our law enforcement community previously to unify our law enforcement communities,” he said of the project, which has been derided by lefty critics as “Cop City.”
“And so we’re not gonna listen to those defund-the-policers,” he added, referring to many candidates’ previous support for defunding the cops in the wake of George Floyd’s 2020 murder.
Adams has said grouping public-safety training facilities together will be more efficient and save taxpayers money.
His opponents disagree. Mayoral candidate and state Sen. Jessica Ramos (D-Queens) argued the money would be better spent on increasing cops’ base pay, among other things.
“It’s another Eric Adams boondoggle of taxpayer dollars,” she said.
Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo — who is running for mayor — also criticized the plan through a rep.
“This appears to be an unnecessary expenditure at this point when the issue is not training capacity but recruitment and retention,” Cuomo’s campaign spokesman, Rich Azzopardi, told Politico.
A law-enforcement source asserted that the training facility project is meant to distract from the NYPD’s persistent staffing crisis.
“If you make a ‘Cop City’ and pack it with all these minor-law-enforcement agencies, it gives the appearance that we’re not short-staffed of police officers,” the source said.
“Meanwhile, the reality is the NYPD will continue to do the job of all the other agencies and now, with a new facility, train all of them too. The problem still remains – we don’t have enough police officers to do the ever-evolving and expanding duties of NYPD police officers.”
Adams struck back at Cuomo on Sunday, saying that if “he’s one of those who stated that the money should have been used for recruitment, it shows a lack of understanding of city budgeting.
“[These are] capital dollars,” he said, adding that it can only be used for capital costs.
“These are challenging times of recruiting officers, everyone is aware of that,” he continued. “And you can’t just say, ‘I’m gonna bring on 5,000 officers’ without knowing how you’re gonna recruit them.
“He doesn’t have the knowledge and ability to do so. We do, and we’re gonna accomplish that.”
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