WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 26: U.S. President Joe Biden speaks during a meeting with private sector CEOs in the State Dining Room of the White House on January 26, 2022 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Drew Angerer / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / Getty Images via AFP)
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden will address the soaring US crime wave during a trip next week to New York, where five police officers have been shot this year, the White House said Wednesday.
Rising urban violence is a major political liability for the Democrat, with a January study by the Council on Criminal Justice showing homicides in 22 cities increased five percent in 2021 — and a whopping 44 percent over 2019 levels.
Biden will meet next Thursday with Mayor Eric Adams, who took over the Big Apple at the start of the year and was immediately confronted with a spate of high-profile crimes. Two police officers have been killed and three others wounded just this month.
They will “discuss the administration’s comprehensive strategy to combat gun crime, which includes historic levels of funding for cities and states to put more cops on the beat and invest in community violence prevention and intervention programs, as well as stepped up federal law enforcement efforts against illegal gun traffickers,” the White House said.
The crime wave — which still leaves US cities far safer than they were in the 1990s — has been connected by experts to a combination of social disruption linked to the Covid-19 pandemic and fallout for police departments in the aftermath of a spate of botched arrests in which Black people were killed or badly injured.
Biden faces pressure from the right, which blames him for presiding over rising disorder, and from the left, which has campaigned for police reforms — at times, going as far as the “defund the police” movement.
Biden has stressed the need to control the flow of unregistered weapons, such as so-called ghost guns that cannot be traced after use in a crime.
Adams, himself a former police officer, echoed Biden’s message this week when he called gun violence “a public health crisis.”
The mayor, a Democrat, has proposed more aggressive policing, with deployment of undercover officers.