He’s going off about the rails.
Borough President Adams blasted Mayor DeBlasio and Gov. Cuomo for snubbing Brooklyn when they took short subway trips to emphasize that the transit system is safe from terror attacks, following word of a possible terror plot on Thursday.
“Their symbolic subway rides followed the typical pattern of ignoring the impact that terror concerns have on Brooklyn and the other boroughs, which are also potentially at risk,” Adams said in a statement.
The mayor’s brief ride with police chief Bill Bratton from City Hall to Union Square in Manhattan followed Iraqi prime minister Haider AlAbadi telling reporters that his government had intelligence showing the Islamic State is planning attacks on the New York and Paris subways. Cuomo took his own trip from the World Trade Center to Penn Station.
In a phone call, Adams explained that the gestures were important, but said the officials should have made stops in his borough to show residents they care.
“If a threat is against the system, it’s against the whole system,” he said.
Adams noted the 1997 pipe-bomb plot targeting Atlantic Terminal as evidence that Brooklyn is a target, adding that many of the city’s emergency command centers are housed in Downtown’s MetroTech Center office campus.
“We should take a look at these high-profile areas,” he said. “We need to deploy safety measures citywide.”
In his outrage, Adams seemed to overlook Bratton’s Thursday pledge to beef up police presence in subway stations throughout the five boroughs, including deploying so-called “Hercules Teams” made up of heavily armed officers wearing body armor and helmets.
This is not the first time Adams’s take on terrorism has differed from the city’s.
In July he called the replacing of the American flags on the Brooklyn Bridge with white flags terrorism and offered a $5,000 reward for the culprits, whereas police brass dismissed the switcheroo as “somebody’s art project.” The latter turned out to be true.
