Outgoing New York City Mayor Eric Adams dismissed Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani's pledge to end police sweeps of homeless encampments, calling the proposal "idealism colliding with realism" in an ABC7 interview.
"I appreciate the idealistic view he has of life because you need that as a mayor," Adams told ABC7 in an interview at Gracie Mansion, the New York Post reported.
"But the realism is — imagine if we said that you are allowed to sleep on the streets of our city in tents and encampments with 230,000 people coming to our city.
"You know what that would look like? All you have to do is go look at other cities that are having that take place."
Mamdani vowed last week to halt all sweeps unless stable housing is provided — a rebuke of Adams' policy, which a 2023 audit found pushed 95% of displaced people back onto the streets.
Adams defended the practice as the more humane option, warning that abandoning it would lead to unsafe, sprawling encampments like those seen in other major cities.
"We stated it was inhumane for people to live on the streets, human waste, drug paraphernalia, schizophrenic, bipolar, living on our subways, living in our streets," Adams, who leaves office at the end of the month, added. "We said, no, you deserve to be inside. We care.
"Now, if he's stating he's no longer going to implement a smart policy on our part, New Yorkers are going to see the repercussions of that."
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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