Mayor Adams, AOC square off over response to Jordan Neely chokehold death

The chokehold death of a Manhattan subway busker at the hands of a U.S. Marine is sending shockwaves through the city’s political firmament, with Democrats who’ve denounced the tragedy setting their sights on Mayor Adams and Gov. Hochul over their more tempered responses.

Though the city Medical Examiner ruled the death of Jordan Neely a homicide Wednesday evening, Adams and Hochul have not called for the Marine’s arrest.

Speaking on CNN after the examiner’s ruling, Adams said he thought it was not “very responsible” for local elected officials to denounce the killing as the incident remains under investigation — prompting an outcry from more left-leaning Democrats.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pounced on the mayor’s rhetoric, calling it “a new low.”

“This honestly feels like a new low: not being able to clearly condemn a public murder because the victim was of a social status some would deem ‘too low’ to care about,” the progressive Democrat, who represents parts of the Bronx and Queens, wrote on Twitter.

The Black busker, Jordan Neely, was known for his Michael Jackson impersonations. On Monday, the Marine, who is white and has not been identified, put Neely in a headlock onboard a subway train after the performer started acting erratically and threatening commuters, according to cops and video of the encounter.

Ocasio-Cortez, who has largely stayed away from directly criticizing Adams since he took office last year, said the mayor’s response was also “especially rich,” given that his administration is “trying to cut the very services that could have helped” Neely — a reference to the mayor’s proposed city budget.

Adams later emphasized the need to remove people “with severe emotional illnesses” from the subway system, saying the city should be proactive and shouldn’t wait for a tragedy to react.

“There are many layers to this,” Adams said Thursday at an unrelated press conference in Queens. “There are going to be those who are going to criticize no matter what’s done. I have a responsibility for this entire city. And I have faith in the criminal justice system and I’m going to let the process take its place.”

Asked if he expected the tenor of his response to change as more information comes out, Adams suggested that whatever he says publicly in the coming days will depend on the emerging facts.

Hochul hasn’t escaped the wrath of critics on the left, either.

Speaking about Neely’s death during a press conference Wednesday, the governor told reporters she found it “deeply disturbing,” but also that “there’s consequences for behavior” when there “are homeless in our subways, many of them in the throes of mental health episodes.”

Hochul’s response drew withering pushback from Brooklyn Councilman Chi Osse, a Democrat who called her comment “ghoulish” in a Twitter post.

Osse also pointed fingers at the mayor, saying he “just All Lives Mattered the murder of a mentally ill Black man who was killed by a blood thirsty vigilante.”

In his CNN appearance Wednesday night, Adams would not directly condemn “vigilantism” in the subway system when asked what he thought more broadly of passengers taking matters into their own hands.

“I was a former transit police officer and I responded to many jobs where you had a passenger assisting someone,” Adams said. “We cannot just blatantly say what a passenger should or should not do in a situation like that and we should allow the investigation to take its course.”

Maurice Mitchell, director of the left-leaning Working Families Party, lambasted Hochul and Adams for not speaking out against what he described as “a modern-day public lynching.”

“In refusing to condemn this killing, the mayor and governor are fueling the dehumanization of Black life, the dehumanization of unhoused New Yorkers, and the dehumanization of those with mental health needs. They’re also condoning the vigilante-style killings of members of our community,” Mitchell said. “We expect leadership at this moment, but so far what we’ve seen from the mayor and governor is cowardice.”