Mayor Eric Adams insisted Tuesday that New York City first responders wouldn’t mishandle a school shooting like last week’s massacre in Texas — declaring that NYPD officers and medics would “go in with an active shooter,” unlike police in Uvalde.
“That is not going to happen in New York. We go in with an active shooter,” he said during an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“Not only would the police go in with an active shooter, but the FDNY, EMS, they’re trained to go in with an active shooter,” the mayor added. “It appears as though this was treated more like a barricaded armed person or a hostage negotiation scenario instead of an active shooter.”
“Here in New York City, well-trained, deep intelligence — the goal is to go in and stop the immediate threat right away.”
During the morning TV appearance, Adams also revealed that he plans to speak to Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin later on Tuesday.
“I’m going to call him today, because this is a mayors’ battle,” he said in reference to gun violence. “Mayors are being impacted by that.”
In the days after the May 24 school shooting, Uvalde authorities have come under intense scrutiny for their handling of it. Police did not enter Robb Elementary School for more than an hour after arriving at the campus, where a teenager fatally shot his innocent victims with an AR-15-style rifle.
Texas state Sen. Roland Gutierrez revealed on CNN that the mother of one of the young massacre victims recalled to him how a first responder told her the child might have lived if cops hadn’t been slow to move in on 18-year-old Salvador Ramos as he gunned down 19 fourth-graders and two teachers.
School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo allegedly instructed police to remain outside the school for 78 minutes while young students inside called 911 for help and frantic parents begged cops outside to storm the school. Days after the shooting, police revealed the existence of harrowing 911 calls made by several students while they were trapped inside with the gunman, as one kid pleaded with a dispatcher, “Please send police now!”
Former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton lamented in an interview that aired Sunday that it’s “mind-boggling” how much Texas authorities mishandled the deadly rampage.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department announced it would conduct a probe of the police response to the mass shooting.
Due to the blowback, Uvalde officials on Monday canceled Tuesday’s planned City Council meeting, when Arredondo was set to be sworn in as a new member.
On Friday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott fumed that he was “livid” that law enforcement “misled” him about their response to the rampage at the elementary school. Abbott — who earlier last week praised police for their “quick response” to the mass shooting — said initial information police provided to him about it was inaccurate, causing him to release misleading details to the public Wednesday.
On Monday, McLaughlin insisted that local law enforcement had not misled anyone.
Later Tuesday morning, Adams marked the start of Gun Violence Awareness Month with a group of mayors in the Empire State that included Buffalo’s Mayor Byron Brown, Mount Vernon’s Shawyn Patterson-Howard and Albany’s Kathy Sheehan, along with faith leaders and gun control advocates.
During the Zoom news conference, Adams — whose city saw 19 shootings with 23 victims over the long holiday weekend — reiterated his calls for the federal government to crack down on ghost guns, to more broadly enact stricter laws on firearms, and for social media companies to flag people who post content on their platforms that indicate they may be a threat to others.
“This is something that we’re all dealing with in our cities,” he said to the seven mayors. “The shooting that took place in Buffalo is no different than the shootings that take place on Buffalo Avenue.”
“We know as New York mayors that we have an obligation to protect the families and children of our city,” he added during his brief address. “Let’s continue to align ourselves in the mission of keeping our cities safe.”
Earlier on MSNBC, Adams touched on similar points.
Earlier in his cable hit, Adams emphasized, “This is a national crisis, and we have not been tackling this as a national crisis.”
As for the online component, “We need the social media industry to be part of this, using artificial intelligence to identify those who are using dangerous terms,” said the mayor.
Asked by MSNBC’s Willie Geist how he can improve safety in the subway system, which has been home to four homicides in 2022, Adams pointed to a crackdown on rule-breaking and sleeping in the subway, sweeping of homeless encampments and adding cops to patrol underground.
“Omnipresence is the key,” he told the “Morning Joe” hosts. “We’re going to continue to evolve, get more and more officers out of desk duty into the subway system to deal with the feeling of disorder, and then zero in on those who are impacting our quality of life.”
“We stopped going after people who are jumping the turnstile — wrong thing to do,” he added, referring to district attorneys who have opted in recent years to not prosecute those caught fare-beating. “We’re dealing with quality of life, zeroing in on those dangerous people in the subway system, and we’re going to see the results of that.”
