Schumer to Sessions on NYC safety: Ride the Subway with me at 4 a.m.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D - New York, ribbed Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Monday, encouraging him to ride the New York City subway at 4 a.m. in an effort to debunk the Department of Justice’s claims about crime in the Big Apple.
During an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” the senior senator from New York denounced a statement released last Friday by the Department of Justice, which lambasted New York, among other counties and cities, for its sanctuary city policy, gang violence and “soft on crime” law enforcement.
“My daughters, you know, they’re young adults, but they ride the subway at 4 a.m., and I’m perfectly happy about it,” Schumer said. “We are a safe city.”
“By the way, New York has grown from 7 million people in 1990 to 8.5 million today, the largest of any city, because crime went down,” Schumer added. “Mothers from Denver and Dallas were not sending their daughters and sons to New York in 1990. Now they’re happy to do it.”
Schumer later said he would be “happy to ride the subway at 4 a.m. with Jeff Sessions.”
On Sunday, Sessions eventually distanced himself from attacking New York City law enforcement after Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio and New York Police Commissioner James O’Neill rebuked the statement.
“That statement was focused on the sanctuary city policy, but look, for four decades, New York has been a fabulous city for law enforcement,” Sessions said on ABC’s “This Week.” “They’ve developed some of the best techniques ever. They’re so far ahead of many other cities. I think we should all study the tactics that have been developed.”
Sessions continued: “Rudy Giuliani and others over the decades have really transformed New York. They’ve proven community-based policing, broken-windows policing can make cities safer, save lives, and other cities need to be studying what they’ve done.”
In March, Schumer called on Sessions to resign after The Washington Post reported that he had failed to disclose to the Senate that he had met with Russian envoy Sergey Kislyak during the 2016 presidential election.
