Mayor Eric Adams has called an emergency meeting with the Big Apple’s top business leaders for Thursday afternoon in the wake of the fatal Q-train shooting of a Goldman Sachs executive on his way to Sunday brunch in Manhattan.
“[Adams] asked us to convene a meeting of corporate leaders on Thursday afternoon,” Partnership for New York City CEO Kathy Wylde told The Post.
“I texted him saying yesterday’s subway shooting is going to cause more negative reverberations and he came back and agreed. Then he said let’s set up a meeting with corporate leaders,” she explained of the pair’s Monday morning text conversation.
Wylde said she expects at least 100 business leaders to join the call with Adams, including Goldman Sachs CEO David Soloman – shooting victim Daniel Enriquez’s boss – real estate executive Rob Speyer of Tishman Speyer and Steve Swartz, CEO of Hearst.
Adams hinted at the hastily scheduled meeting earlier in the day, admitting he’s worried the weekend killing will have a “chilling” effect on his efforts to get workers back into offices.
“We already have pre-existing relationships with my corporate leaders,” he said.
“Now we’re going to get on either face to face or a zoom and give them an update. This is what we have, so that they’re not in the dark so they can go back to their employees and give them information. That is what we have been doing.”
Wylde told The Post that right now, public safety is an even bigger concern than COVID-19 for employers.
“The concern about irrational, dangerous behavior is far more prevalent than the concern about the COVID,” she said.
“We thought it reached a crescendo with Michelle Go, then the Sunset Park subway event happened and then yesterday – on a Sunday morning – was bizarre. The statistics show shootings going down in the city as a whole, but clearly the dynamic with the subways is serious.”
“Every New Yorker can identify with the terror of being trapped on a moving subway with a deranged gun man because we all take the subways and when they’re not moving – you can’t get off,” she said.
Subway crime has also increased since the start of the coronavirus pandemic – according to NYPD and MTA data – up from 1.47 felonies per million riders in 2019 to 2.11 felonies per million riders in April 2022.
[Written in collaboration with other media outlets with information from the following sources]
