New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” lawmakers who voted against President Joe Biden’s massive spending package are “defunders of the police.”
Anchor George Stephanopoulos said, “Mayor Adams, you promised to focus on crime in your campaign. Major crimes have continued to rise on your watch. How do you explain it? What more can be done?”
Adams said, “It’s a national problem. I say over and over again that many rivers feed the sea of violence. It’s a national issue. It’s not a red state, blue state. In fact, red states are experiencing a higher murder rate than blue states. Tulsa is three times the murder rate of Los Angeles. Mississippi, Kentucky, Louisiana — those are the highest murder rates in our entire country. I think the president has done an amazing job.”
He added, “You heard the narrative beforehand about defunding the police. Let me tell you what the defunders of the police are, those who didn’t vote on the Build Back Better bill. Money was in that bill for police officers. We have 2,400 ATF agents in our country. Only 80 are in New York. We need to double that amount. We need to go after the ghost guns. Then we have to be preventive. Many of these generational social problems have become the pipeline to violence.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN