New York Mayor Eric Adams will allow history to repeat itself if he goes ahead with the crazy idea of ​​cutting the NYPD budget.

Insanity is popularly defined as doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.

As an example, let’s look at drastically reducing the number of police officers in the NYPD and believing that public safety will not be affected.

History proves the opposite.

In the extremely bloody era of the early 1990s, when the city had more than 2,000 murders a year, the force had been reduced to just 29,000 officers.

If Mayor Adams has his way, it will hit that number again next year due to attrition, a drop of about 13% from the current 33,500.

Is it possible that a new wave of crime is far away?

As Republican Councilman Joe Borelli put it, “the police crowd’s dream of defunding has come true.”

There’s more than a little irony that this is happening under Adams, who ordered cuts across all agencies while canceling the NYPD’s next five recruit classes.

Adams, a former police officer, was elected in 2021 on an anti-crime platform and there has been real progress in reducing murders and shootings.

But overall crime reports continue to rise, and no one who lives in the city believes it is safe.

So this is a bad time to tempt fate by not replacing officers who retire or resign.

If anything, the city should expand the NYPD.

That’s what officials did during a crime wave 30 years ago, and within three years, in 1996, the count reached a record 38,310 officers.

Additional troops, combined with aggressive “broken windows” policing under Mayor Rudy Giuliani, saved Gotham.

Crime declined for two decades, ushering in a remarkable era of public safety and prosperity that continued throughout Michael Bloomberg’s three terms.

Amnesia of bad days

But Adams and the City Council didn’t learn, so here we go again.

Worse, reducing the force now poses a double problem because the city’s population in the early 1990s was about 7.3 million.

Today there are at least 8.5 million, so 29,000 police officers will be a proportionally smaller force than it was then.

Even more worrying is the main reason the budget is out of control.

More than 125,000 asylum-seeking migrants came to the city to take advantage of free housing, food and medical care.

Adams, calling for 5% cuts in each agency, estimates the total cost of immigrants will exceed $12 billion in three years, but for months he was encouraging more immigrants to come.

Although President Biden is primarily to blame for his open border policy, the mayor foolishly boasted about the city’s sanctuary status and launched the Welcome Wagon.

In a memorable example of his inconsistency, he made a deal with a Texas mayor to accept numerous busloads of newcomers, even as he criticized the Texas governor as racist for busing other immigrants to New York.

Adams also had officials pick up many of the buses and welcome each newcomer with a goodie bag and help getting gifts for taxpayers.

The surprising thing is not that so many people came to New York.

The thing is that millions of people that Biden let into the United States did not come here.

If they had, the city would be invaded and already ruined.

As things stand, the mayor is telling public school parents that they may have to replace security guards the city can’t afford and asking wealthy New Yorkers to increase their charitable donations to fill the gaps. empty coffers.

Might as well tell them to get out of Dodge while they can.

If you do, wherever you go, you will find many former New Yorkers who have resigned from the city and the state.

The budget disaster comes at a time when Adams is already in a delicate situation.

A federal investigation into his ’21 campaign fundraising includes the FBI serving search warrants on three associates.

And in an extraordinary moment, officers stopped the mayor on a street and ordered his security team to stand aside while they confiscated his three electronic devices.

Bad conditions for re-election

Even if charges are not filed against him, it is difficult to see the city reversing its continued decline and recovering before Adams faces re-election in 2025.

Look at it this way: When he took office, New York had numerous problems and one genuine crisis: public safety.

Two years later, the city still has the same problems, including painfully high levels of crime, and is also facing two new crises: immigration overcrowding and a financial calamity.

Good luck defending that record to voters.

Meanwhile, there’s plenty of money in the budget, which is now pegged at $110 billion.

A decade ago, it was $49 billion.

But Adams has proven to be much better at adding cronies to the payroll than at keeping tight control over spending and setting priorities.

His agreements with municipal unions are more expensive than necessary because he did not demand rebates to reduce costs for taxpayers.

While it is true that he has received little help from fellow Democrats Biden or Governor Hochul, it is also true that Adams wasted his influence.

His support for Hochul was fundamental in his tight re-election, but he gave it without achieving the criminal justice reforms he wanted.

As for Biden, Adams could have joined the chorus of governors, mostly Republicans, who attacked the flood of migrants across the open border.

Instead, he chose to play like a loyal Democrat, assuming Biden would shoulder the city’s costs.

Once again, he got nothing for his support. No matter the time, it’s always amateur time.

What could be a turning point in his tenure came on November 2, when his personal interest and his civic duty collided.

While waiting for his plane to take off, he touted a long-sought meeting with White House officials about the costs of immigrants.

But when he landed, he learned of the FBI raid on the home of his top fundraising assistant and left the meeting to catch the next plane back to New York.

His excuses were lame, but revealing.

The city is alone.

‘Anti-Zionism’ is just a hate makeover

An excerpt from a 2015 speech by the late British rabbi Jonathan Sacks:

“And so let me explain to you what makes the new anti-Semitism different from its predecessors.”

“Three things. Number one, in the Middle Ages, Jews were hated for their religion. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, they were hated for their race.”

“Today they are hated by their nation-state, and that is radically new, and that is what constitutes anti-Zionism.”

“It is not criticism of Israel. I mean, for God’s sake, I don’t know any Israelis who don’t criticize Israel, so criticizing Israel doesn’t make you an anti-Semite, it makes you an anti-Zionist.”

“The idea that just Israel… I mean, there are 102 United Nations countries where the majority of the population is Christian.”

“There are 57 members of the [Organization of Islamic Cooperation].”

“For Jews to have their own country is too much; that is the new form of anti-Semitism.”