New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) can save the city if he focuses almost solely on cutting crime, welfare, and homelessness, documentary filmmaker Matthew Taylor, whose film Gotham: The Fall and Rise of New York is out now, told Breitbart News on Saturday.
Taylor spoke exclusively with Breitbart News’ Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle on SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Saturday, detailing how Adams can save New York City before the quality of life dips to lows not seen since the 1990s.
In particular, Taylor said it is crime, welfare, and homelessness that Adams ought to be determined to bring down with crime-fighting measures such as cleaning up the subway system and getting New Yorkers off of welfare and into jobs.
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“New York City is nowhere near the level of the ’90s but the problem is that we don’t want it to get to the point of the ’90s before people make that decision,” Taylor said, noting that he believes Adams’ election was a rebuke of former Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) who sharply departed from the tough-on-crime policies imposed by former Mayors Rudy Giuliani (R) and Michael Bloomberg (R,I).
Watch “Gotham: The Fall and Rise of New York” trailer here:
Adams, a former New York City Police Department (NYPD) officer, campaigned on resurrecting the stop-and-frisk policy to get criminals off the city’s streets before they commit violent crimes.
Most recently, he has defended the policy amid criticism from the federal government and establishment media such as the New York Times.
“I do think that the election of Eric Adams … New Yorkers really were making that decision to unwind what had happened,” Taylor continued. “And, of course, everyone at first thought it was COVID but it’s not just COVID — it’s the bad policies under [Bill] de Blasio for eight years and now bad policies under the city council.”
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In addition to crime, Taylor said Adams should take a similar approach to the city’s welfare rolls as well as homelessness — both of which can be crime contributors.
“He is making efforts and crime has gone down slightly across the board, it’s gone down in the subways where he’s had the authority to implement these things but still, they’ve got to focus on the welfare numbers, they’ve got to focus on these housing numbers … and he’s going to have to push back against the city council which has defied the mayor,” Taylor said.
Without a dramatic cut in crime, Adams faces a tough reelection bid, Taylor said.
“Eric Adams is halfway through the term. He’s got to get it together because New Yorkers will throw him out … and again, New York is bad but it’s not the ’90s,” Taylor said. ” They’ve rolled back a number of these policies that helped save the city.”
Taylor said the success story of the Giuliani and Bloomberg years of New York City, where crime, welfare, and homelessness reached all-time lows following decades of dangerous streets as a result of soft-on-crime policies from the likes of former Mayor John Lindsay (R,D) and others, is what drove him to make his film.
“That’s why we made this movie, to say, ‘Hey, it can be done. It was the hardest to do before, we can do it again,’” Taylor said.
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“I set out to make a film that commemorated the achievements of the ’90s and find the people that changed New York City — what I think is the greatest American turnaround story,” he continued. “It was the most difficult, destroyed city in America, and turned around to be the best and saved the city.”
Gotham: The Fall and Rise of New York follows city life from 1966 to 2013, chronicling how Lindsay’s time as mayor plunged New York City into a freefall of crime, drugs, homelessness, welfare abuse, blight, and overall despair.
“John Lindsay came in during a period when the American economy was raging and roaring, doing great,” Taylor described. “And he had a lot of money. He comes in and he puts it toward massive amounts of social programs, welfare explodes to over a million people. And crime shoots through the roof because he doesn’t want to arrest anybody for crime.”
“When you take these things — welfare and law enforcement — what you got was people leaving the city … there were 600,000 people lost their jobs,” Taylor said. “The crime rate went from 600 to 1,700 murders per year. And this number would not dissipate until literally the ’90s.”
“The city, essentially, was ungovernable after Lindsay. I would say Lindsay is probably one of the worst mayors the city has ever had. A lot of people think it’s [Democrat David] Dinkins but it’s actually Lindsay that sets the table for this entire collapse that people had to live through for almost 30 years.”
It was not until Giuliani became mayor in 1994 that the city began its comeback.
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“When he came into office, he implemented a lot of things like ‘broken windows’ … he went after welfare numbers, and he added accountability to the system,” Taylor said. “So under Giuliani, welfare numbers went from 1.2 million people down to 425,000 people. Crime dropped by nearly 70 to 80 percent.”
“They just went after little things, you know, no more graffiti, no more using the restroom in the middle of a public park, just little things, cleaning up Times Square,” he continued. “And when you cross that over with the welfare numbers, people going back to work, people had more things to do. Public spaces were returned to the people of New York City.”
Perhaps most consequential was the passage of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, signed into law by then-President Bill Clinton and negotiated by then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R). Guliani, Taylor said, championed the crime bill and used it to New York City’s advantage.
“Giuliani actually went on the road to help pass the crime bill which then gave more police to the city, gave them more money, and he judiciously used them to fight crime and bring down welfare numbers,” Taylor said.
As Giuliani did, Taylor said Adams should monitor all aspects of the city the same way crime is monitored, through the highly effective CompStat tracking system used to target and reduce crime on a precinct-by-precinct basis.
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“What Giuliani would do is he would take this Comstat system that he used for police, and he started applying it to everything,” Taylor said. “He applied it to garbage, he applied it to welfare … he started applying analytical thinking to all aspects of the city, and for the most part it was successful.”
In 2022, Adams’ first year as mayor, his record on crime and homelessness has been a bit of a mixed bag. While murders decreased more than 11 percent compared to 2021, overall crime rose more than 22 percent due to a spike in robberies and burglaries.
Likewise, those in shelters across the city went from about 46,500 at the beginning of January 2022 to more than 83,000 by the end of May of this year — an increase of almost 80 percent. A large portion of that increase, though, is spurred by waves of illegal immigration to the city.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.