Mayor Eric Adams on Wednesday blamed the perception that New York City is unsafe and its sprawling homelessness crisis squarely on the Democratic challenger in the 2025 NYC Mayor’s Race who says he is best positioned to fix those issues: former Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
Adams, during a Wednesday morning interview on the Reset Talk Show with host JR Gittens, took aim at Cuomo — the current frontrunner in the mayoral race — for signing off on criminal justice reforms in 2019 which Hizzoner claims make it hard for the city to crack down on repeat offenders.
“When you look at the problems we are facing around public safety, it was born out of Albany; it was the laws that he passed, and he wanted to see move forward,” Adams said of the former governor, who resigned in 2021 amid nearly a dozen allegations of sexual misconduct that he denies.
“You can’t come back later and try to reinvent your life when you were in office already,” he added. “The recidivism we’re seeing in our city is because of the laws that were passed by him.”
Adams said this in response to a question about the Cuomo campaign’s focus on addressing anxieties around crime, including a plan to hire 5,000 more NYPD officers.
‘The people will judge’
Rich Azzopardi, Cuomo’s spokesperson, simply responded, “The people of New York City will judge performance.”
The former governor also introduced proposals to put more recidivists behind bars, address quality-of-life concerns, and double the number of cops patrolling the city subways.
Adams has ramped up his criticisms of Cuomo over the past few days as the former governor has nabbed endorsements from several of his close political allies and raised far more campaign cash in the first 13 days of March than Adams brought in since mid-January.
In his campaign launch video earlier this month, Cuomo said the city feels “threatening, out of control and in crisis” because of a “lack of intelligent action” by its leaders. While Cuomo has refrained from directly attacking Adams by name, his statements are a clear indictment of the mayor’s leadership.
In 2019, Cuomo signed a package of criminal justice reforms that eliminated cash bail for most misdemeanors and non-violent felonies — though the law has since been tweaked several times to once again give judges more discretion to set bail. He also signed changes to the state’s discovery laws that year, which require prosecutors to quickly share evidence in their possession with the defendant’s counsel on a strict timeline.
Both the changes to bail and discovery were aimed at addressing inequities in the criminal justice system, such as those accused but not convicted of a crime languishing in jail pre-trial and defendants going to trial without seeing much of the evidence prosecutors will present.
However, many elected officials have said that while the reforms were well-intentioned, they went too far and made it harder to keep repeat offenders behind bars before trial. Too many cases are tossed on technicalities.
Earlier this month, Cuomo defended signing the bail reform laws, saying “it righted a terrible social wrong.”
Homelessness problem
Adams also blamed Cuomo for making certain decisions that he said precipitated the city’s current homelessness crisis—though he did not go into specifics. Furthermore, he blasted the former governor’s handling of COVID-19 in nursing homes and years-long feud with former Mayor Bill de Blasio.
“When you look at the homeless crisis that we’re seeing, it was some of the programs that he shut down,” Adams said. “When you look at what happened under COVID, a report is being released of the bickering that took place between him and the previous mayor that didn’t allow New York to get the resources that they deserve. We look at the deaths in the nursing homes.”
Azzopardi also pushed back on those claims, saying that while Cuomo cut funding to a now-defunct rental assistance program known as Advantage in 2011, he replaced it with other housing subsidy programs that received more funding. Those included a program to develop 20,000 supportive housing units, he said, 80% of which were slated for the city.
Azzopardi also defended Cuomo’s response to COVID-19 as governor and how his administration communicated information about the pandemic to the public.
When it comes to allegations that Cuomo’s actions as governor led to the high COVID-19 death rate in nursing homes, Azzopardi pointed to a January Justice Department Inspector General report he says found that New York followed federal guidelines and that Trump’s first DOJ went after Cuomo for purely political reasons.
