#Eric Adams needs to take action against crime, not just talk about it

It’s all very well for Mayor Adams to stroll around Harlem with an entourage, mouthing video platitudes for social media, as the city laments the slaying of NYPD Officer Jason Rivera and the grievous wounding of his partner, Wilbert Mora.

But Hizzoner was elected to bring back law and order, and we need more than motherhood statements.

So far, Adams has not said anything to allay our concerns since taking office.

He does not appear to have a plan, despite having had almost three months to figure out how to address New York’s exploding crime-and-disorder problem.

Everything he says is straight from the useless Democratic political playbook, rather than using his mandate to set the city straight the way former Mayor Rudy Giuliani did.

The Giuliani way is straightforward, but it requires a strong will to apply the broken-windows theory to eradicate signs of disorder, to allow police to stop and frisk suspects and get weapons off the street, to prosecute crimes to the full extent of the law, to lock up bad guys inhumane prisons, forcibly rehabilitate drug addicts who commit crimes and detain the mentally ill in secure medical facilities where they are given the treatment they need.

False compassion

There is nothing compassionate about abandoning the mentally ill to the streets and making the rest of us live in their bedlam.

Adams is mayor because he was the only Democrat who acknowledged that Gotham is out of control, thanks to years of deliberate policies pushed by his feckless predecessor, radical leftist pols in Albany and progressive prosecutors.

Albany’s bail-reform laws came into effect Jan. 1, 2020, right as the coronavirus was starting to circulate, so the pols responsible conveniently blamed the pandemic for the escalating crime it caused as recidivists were left on the street.

Anti-police protests demoralized New York’s Finest and culminated in the City Council stripping the NYPD of $1 billion of funding in 2020.

As a result, New York is now very familiar to anyone who lived here in the bad old days of the 1980s and 1990s.

It’s been barely a week since Deloitte executive Michelle Go was pushed to her death in front of a train by a homeless ex-con at Times Square, after which Adams staged another empathetic media performance. Yet on Sunday a 61-year-old man also was shoved onto the subway tracks at Fulton Street station, thankfully managing to scramble back to safety.

Being shoved in front of trains has become a regular hazard we are supposed to live with.

Expensive barriers are not the answer, as some pols are saying. That only admits that we have to live with violent psychopaths roaming free to menace us forever.

Exploding crime is not something that rights itself. It does not go away with subway barriers, or gaslighting claims that the real problem is a “perception of fear,” as Adams said after Go’s murder, before realizing his error and admitting he feels unsafe on the subway.

Tell the 11-month-old girl shot in the face in The Bronx last week that she is suffering from a “perception” of crime.

If you have to pick your way through human excrement on the sidewalk outside Penn Station, for instance, or avert your eyes from men with their pants down in Hell’s Kitchen, or walk past open drug taking, or cross the street when you pass a homeless hotel in Midtown stacked with felons prematurely released from Rikers, you are not suffering from a “perception” of crime and disorder. You are living in it.

To add insult to injury, we have saddled ourselves with Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, whose campaign reportedly was funded by billionaire George Soros to the tune of $1 million as part of the “progressive prosecutor” movement. Bragg’s first action was to downgrade felony charges and his only remorse is that he says he got the messaging wrong.

But with five cops shot in the first three weeks of his reign, Adams should have had a better answer on Saturday at the Harlem Hospital than to urge Congress to pass the Democrats’ “Build Back Better” boondoggle.

Seriously, did President Biden ask him to leverage political capital for his party as Mora, 27, was struggling for his life after surgery to deal with the bullet lodged in his brain?

It got worse. “Many people often talk about bail reform,” Adams said. “But . . .”

It doesn’t matter what his “but” is. There are no ifs or buts when it comes to reversing the disastrous bail-reform laws that went into effect on January 1, 2020 which eliminated cash bail, removed judicial discretion and tilted justice away from the victim and toward the perpetrator.

Adams and state Attorney General Letitia James also used the NYPD tragedy to divert the topic onto the Dems’ pet talking point of gun control.

“It is time for us to save our city,” said Adams at the hospital.

“We need Washington to join us and act now to stop the flow of guns into New York City, and cities like New York.”

Gun-law red herring

New York already has some of the strictest gun laws in the country. That doesn’t stop criminals from using guns. The stolen Glock that one-eyed, cop-hating, ex-con Lashawn McNeil allegedly used to shoot Rivera and Mora on Friday night was illegal.

Guns last forever, pretty much, so you could ban every gun sale in the country and not make a dent on New York shootings.

As NYPD union boss Pat Lynch said: “Perps have always had access to illegal guns . . . The difference now is that criminals are carrying more firepower and using it more frequently, because the message on the street is that there are no consequences if they get caught. [Friday night] that message cost a hero officer his life.”

We used to have an NYPD plainclothes squad dedicated to removing guns from the street. But after the council defunded the police by $1 billion, and the unit was disbanded.

Homicides soared in the wake of that genius move.

Adams promised some sort of “real plan” Sunday to curb gun violence and claimed he would reinstate a “modified” version of the anti-gun unit. The devil will be in the details.

The mayor must defy his party’s progressive wing which has done so much damage, and impose solutions that really will save New York.

Refund the police, give them back their qualified immunity, reverse Albany’s bail “reform,” pressure DA Bragg to do his job and spurn every council member — such as Kristin Richardson Jordan — who trash-talked the police and voted to defund them.

As for the rest of us, we should turn up at Rivera’s funeral, as Lynch has asked. Start showing support for our cops.

Penalizing only the law-abiding

In the middle of the supply-chain crisis, the Biden administration has come up with another brilliant policy. It has banned unvaccinated truck drivers from Mexico and Canada. The Department of Homeland Security is warning of delays at the border, for law-abiding businesses only.

Illegal immigrants who are unvaccinated are free to stream across our borders illegally and fly around the country at our expense on secret charter flights to undisclosed destinations. And the only identification they need to board airplanes, Fox News reported last week, is an arrest warrant, which most of them never abide by anyway.

It’s a curious way to run a country.