Mayor Eric Adams nixed the idea of moving asylum seekers from the Clinton Hill emergency shelter complex to other locations across the city, following two separate shootings on July 21, during his weekly press conference in City Hall on Tuesday.
Two men were killed and another was left in critical condition after shootings occurred minutes from one another in front of the Ryerson Street migrant shelter and in Steuben Park. The city has now launched a manhunt for the suspect who the police believes to be responsible for both shootings.
“We're still investigating if this was connected to a gang. That is still unclear at this moment. We are on top of it,” said Adams.
Despite the eruption of violence in the area and swift rebuke and outrage among residents calling for the city to reduce the shelter population, Adams support for the shelters remained ironclad.
“When they say move the shelter, my question to them is where? Which community should I move it in? Those who are already oversaturated? Or should we all share the burden of this,” asked Adams. “I have yet to have one community that raised their hand and said, ‘Eric, bring them here’ because we know you guys have to house them. We've stated we're out of room folks.”
The mayor shared his plan to better deal with asylum seekers coming into the country and continued calling for increased work authorizations for people in the city awaiting approval.
“We should identify our municipalities who are losing populations…We should tell those we are paroling in, you go there for three years, deal with those population issues, employment issues, and after three years, you can travel throughout the country,” said Adams. “We need all of these entities, yet we have people who can fill these positions and they're not allowed to work. I mean does that make sense? That just doesn't make sense.”
The mayor also addressed last week's global technology outage. The administration assured critical services and “things that are most essential” to the city are still up and running after last Friday’s outage that occurred from a faulty update deployed by cybersecurity company Crowdstrike. More than 300,000 desktops and servers may have been impacted and the city has “remediated that down to less than 40,000 machines,” according to New York City Chief Technology Officer Matt Fraser.
CrowdStrike and Microsoft have produced an automated fix to deploy and bring machines faster online, but it will be tested by the city before being pushed out to machines still affected by the update.
The mayor also said the city will start installing AI-powered metal detectors on subways on either Thursday or Friday in an attempt to curb weapons to be brought into the subway system.
"... it's good technology. I'm really excited about this, just the potential that we could identify someone carrying a gun before they enter the system,” said Adams. “I like the results from the testing. They did several thousand tests.”
The mayor first mentioned that the pilot program will be using machines from Evolv, but also noted that if and when the program will be adopted in full, other companies can be chosen to provide the gun detectors.
Evolv is currently in the midst of a class action lawsuit with shareholders who have accused the company of making misleading and materially false claims regarding the capabilities of their technology. There is also a fact finding investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission into the company, which followed a probe by the Federal Trade Commission last year regarding its marketing practices.
"I think this is going to become a norm for us. I think the turnstiles are going to change. Eventually, every turnstile is going to be able to identify if someone is carrying a gun. I think it's a game changer for the transportation system across the globe," he said.
