He’s already moved NYPD desk jockeys back to the streets — now Mayor Eric Adams is calling on some of the city’s top bean counters for help fighting crime.
Adams and police brass privately appealed to employees of the city’s Big Four accounting firms Thursday to support law enforcement in the wake of the random subway shooting that claimed the life of a Goldman Sachs employee on his way to brunch.
Adams, NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell and Chief of Department Ken Corey held a closed door webinar for employees from Deloitte LLP, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young and KPMG Thursday morning, asking them to join his pro-police public relations campaign.
“We’re going to keep doing our job. But we need your voices to advocate, to ensure that our courtrooms are open, our DAs are prosecuting and our judges are giving proper sentences and not this revolving door justice that we’re doing,” pleaded Adams, reiterating his consistent criticism that the state’s bail reform laws and backed up court system are hindering his efforts to clean up violence in the city.
Adams even tried recruiting the “brightest” workers from the Big 4 for city jobs.
“We need the right people. If you said: “Eric, we’re going to give you two of our brightest to work on a particular project. That’s a win for us…It’s being done in many of the cities, we’re going to put two of our brightest to be on your team to help you with a specific problem that we’re seeing,” said Adams.
Adams later billed the move as a way to save taxpayer dollars by getting private workers to “volunteer” for the city.
“So, by you placing some of your best and brightest on loan to the city, let’s save the taxpayer dollars,” he explained further during a separate event at One Vanderbilt in Midtown.
“That is the way we’re supposed to do it. We should recruit from these large corporations to come in give time to government, I should say volunteer – volunteer these are the things I’m asking for.”
Adams, who in February called for an “immediate redeployment” department-wide of cops on desk duty, held a second separate, emergency meeting Thursday afternoon hosted by the Partnership for NYC, making a similar pitch to Goldman Sachs CEO David Soloman – shooting victim Daniel Enriquez’s boss – as well as real estate executive Rob Speyer of Tishman Speyer and Steve Swartz, CEO of Hearst.
The meetings come as Adams has been pushing for more NYPD funding in his upcoming city budget as well as pleading to get workers back to the Big Apple to boost the economy that had lagged since the pandemic.
The mayor is trying to combat an unrelenting crime wave that is still above pre-pandemic levels addressing everything from subway violence to how Gotham city will keep kids safe in schools.
But just one week ago he lamented in an interview with Fox5 that he’s never seen crime at these levels, despite serving as an NYPD cop in the 1990s.
Major crime has been up compared to the last few years but it is a far cry from the levels of the bad old days. Crime levels so far this year are akin to when Adams’ predecessor, Bill de Blasio, took over the city.