Mayor Eric Adams urged state legislators in Albany on Wednesday to toughen bail laws and make changes to Raise the Age legislation as he advocated for the needs of New York City.
Testifying during a remote hearing on Gov. Kathy Hochul’s $62 billion executive budget plan — on what has come to be known as “Tin Cup Day” in Albany, when the mayor presses the state on city budget priorities — Adams reiterated his calls for changes to the state’s bail laws to allow judges to send dangerous perps to jail.
He said the “targeted amendments” to the law should be aimed at those “accused of perpetrating gun violence.”
Hizzoner also threw his support behind changes to the state’s Raise the Age law, which increased the age of criminal responsibility from 16 to 18 statewide in 2019, saying it is currently being “used to victimize our youth.”
“Too many New Yorkers in their late teens and early 20s have abused this change, demanding young people under 18 take the fall for guns that are not truly theirs,” he said.
The mayor called for the state to provide urgent funding to expand mental health resources and provide additional beds for those in critical need of mental health care — particularly for “New Yorkers that are a danger to themselves and others.”
“Too many of our fellow New Yorkers are cycled through temporary care and released before they are ready, often due to the limited availability of long-term support and housing,” Adams said.
“We now face a humanitarian crisis in our streets and on our transit system that threatens our city’s safety and recovery, and we cannot afford to let this issue go unaddressed any longer.”
He pointed to his anti-gun violence plan released last month, saying the crackdown on surging crime would “require both intervention and prevention.”
“As I said then, the sea of gun violence in our city does not have one single point of origin. It flows from many rivers, each contributing to the problem,” Adams said.
Adams has repeatedly said he wants to change the 2019 bail law that eliminated cash bail being mandated for defendants accused of most misdemeanor and “non-violent” felony crimes.
But Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins (D-Yonkers) had already pushed back against Adams ahead of the hearing, arguing she didn’t see a compelling reason to change the bail law that eliminated cash bail for most misdemeanor and “non-violent” felony crimes.
“We do not want to criminalize poverty,” Stewart-Cousins said Tuesday, referring to defendants who can’t afford to post bail.
She expressed concern about a spike in crime that has plunged the Big Apple into violence, but insisted “there is no connection between our bail reform and the national spike in crime that I think we all want to tackle and we should tackle collectively.”