Last Thursday, over 100 chief executives of the city’s business community logged onto a Zoom meeting with NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell, and Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Phil Banks to discuss an ongoing obstacle to the city’s recovery.

As major companies, including American Express, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, urge their employees to return to the office, a recent survey suggested that commuters are concerned about public safety on the subways.

However, during the hour-long meeting — which was arranged by the influential business group which commissioned the survey, the Partnership for New York City — Sewell and Banks assured corporate leaders that the NYPD was making progress on their efforts to remove illegal guns from the street as well as improving safety on the subways.

“Everybody came away from that session with very positive feelings about going back to their employees and communicating specific efforts that are going on to restore safety in both the subway and on the streets of the city,” recalled Kathryn Wylde, the president of the Partnership for New York City, who attended the meeting.

Now, on the heels of Tuesday’s shooting where at least 23 people were injured inside a subway in Brooklyn, Mayor Eric Adams faces questions about whether his signature campaign promise of reducing crime is slipping away from his grasp three months into his mayoralty. The attack has drawn national attention, with President Joe Biden expressing his condolences and offering full support for the city during an event in Iowa.

People increasingly will be asking, ‘What have you done, what have you got to show for your efforts?
Joseph Viteritti

Overall, the spate of unsettling violent crime has unnerved New Yorkers and jeopardized the city’s economic comeback amid another surge in coronavirus cases. At nearly 8%, the city’s unemployment rate is the highest among major U.S. cities.

Citywide, shootings are up slightly — around 8% — compared to the same period last year. But transit crime, which had been an area of focus for the mayor, is up around 68% over the last year, according to crime statistics.

Adams marked his 100th day in office on Sunday, a milestone that traditionally prompts both experts and the public to make an early assessment of the mayor.

“People increasingly will be asking, ‘What have you done, what have you got to show for your efforts?’” Joseph Viteritti, a public policy professor at Hunter College said. “The 100-day mark is the point at which people will reflect. And so this is very inopportune in terms of the timing.”

Similarly, Wylde said that the subway incident will likely undo the optimism that the business community had come away with from the recent meetings with the mayor and his officials. A week before that virtual meeting, Adams and Sewell attended an in-person event with corporate leaders at the Rainbow Room, the restaurant atop Rockefeller Center, to convey the same message.

The subway shooting will now require “a whole new level of reassurance and specific action plans” from the mayor, Wylde said.

Complicating his on-the-ground approach to governing, Adams tested positive for coronavirus on Sunday and has been unable to attend public events. As the incident unfolded on Tuesday morning, the 61-year-old former NYPD captain was forced to monitor the situation while isolating at Gracie Mansion. He has said that he would be cleared for outdoor events, provided he wears a mask, as early as Friday.

At around noon, he tweeted a roughly two-minute video statement in which he told the public that he was in constant communication with the city’s first responder agencies as well as state and federal officials about the evolving crisis.

The mayor later conducted a string of interviews with the media in which he briefed New Yorkers on the situation. He called the shooting a premeditated act designed to “bring some form of terror” to the city, although he said there was no evidence of political terrorism.

Adams said the city was doubling the number of officers in the subways.

“I believe that we're going to apprehend this person,” Adams told WNYC’s Brian Lehrer. “And we're not going to allow anything to get in the way of our recovery.”

The reasons for crime tend to be multifaceted. Some experts have linked the rise in shootings to the pandemic, which is once again resurging due to the BA.2 subvariant of omicron. Because of the public health crisis and the broader protests around aggressive policing tactics, many experts have said that Adams faced a far tougher challenge than previous mayors in lowering crime.

Ridership on the transit system had recently climbed back to more than 3 million riders — down from the peak of 5.5 million prior to the pandemic. Experts say the latest attack could undo that progress.

Jeffrey Fagan, a Columbia University law professor who studies policing, said there is not enough information about the latest incident to say what preventative measures the city should apply going forward.

Emergency crews outside the 36th Street station following the shooting.

Mass subway shootings are rare events. High profile attacks involving mass transit include a 2017 incident in which a man detonated a pipe bomb during rush hour in the passageway between Times Square and Port Authority subway stations. More recently, in 2020, a fire that police said was an arson attack killed an MTA worker and injured 16 others. The most deadly shooting in recent history occurred in 1984, when Bernhard Goetz shot four Black teenagers on a Manhattan 2 subway train.

“These are rare, and it might not be good policy to focus on preventing rare events,” Fagan said.

However, he added that a “serious regime of gun control would be the most effective way to stop mass shootings.” As an example, he cited the Federal Aviation Administration’s response to airline hijackings in the 1960s and 1970s, which triggered much tighter security restrictions at airports.

During interviews, Adams was asked several times if he would consider installing metal detectors in the subway system. He told WCBS-TV on Tuesday that he was open to pursuing new technology. “We found a few ways that it could be used and we have identified some of that technology and we want to make sure we do everything within legal means,” he said.

Maxwell Young, the mayor’s communication director, later clarified in a tweet that the mayor was not referring to airport-style metal detectors.

Meanwhile, at least one of the cameras at a nearby station where the shooting had apparently malfunctioned, according to the mayor.

In the first three months, Adams has ramped up police presence in the city, especially on subways and directed the police to crack down on quality-of-life crimes. The strategy has drawn criticisms from progressives and criminal justice advocates, who say the mayor is returning the city to a “broken windows” era of policing.

Richard Aborn, president of the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City, argued that the mayor alone cannot reduce the violence. 

“These chaotic times we are experiencing require a whole of government, and indeed a whole-of-society approach,” he said. “We all have a role to play.”

On Tuesday evening, the mayor argued for stronger gun control laws when he joined NYPD officials via teleconference during a press briefing at police headquarters.

“Ending gun violence means changing gun laws,” he said. “You cannot clean up a flood when the water is still pouring into the basement. And we can never stop the killing if we cannot stop the guns.”

Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky contributed reporting.