NEW YORK — The public safety policies Gov. Hochul laid out in her State of the State speech Tuesday were likely music to New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ ears, as he has called on Albany to take up several of those proposals during this year’s legislative session.

That included Hochul’s vows to roll back some of the discovery reforms the state enacted in 2020 and make it easier to involuntarily hospitalize homeless individuals deemed incapable of taking care of themselves.

But Hochul didn’t address one longstanding Adams priority in her speech: bail reform. While acknowledging the problem of recidivism in the criminal justice system, Hochul spoke of the need to work within current bail laws.

An ongoing topic of concern for the mayor, Adams told Politico just on Jan. 2 that people can keep “repeatedly” committing crimes “due to” the state’s 2019 reforms, which eliminated cash bail for most misdemeanor and non-violent felony charges.

He then told the outlet his Albany priorities this year is to push the state to adopt new policies on “bail, discovery, mental health.”

During Tuesday’s speech, which Adams attended, Hochul only mentioned bail once, and it was in the context of utilizing the laws currently on the books, not changing them.

“I want judges statewide to use all the powers under our recent bail law changes to stop the rinse and repeat cycle of offenders being released over and over without consequences only to commit crimes again,” she said.

After adopting the initial reforms in 2019, the state backtracked slightly in 2020 and 2023 by giving judges more discretion in setting cash bail.

In a statement praising Hochul’s speech, Adams didn’t mention her lack of bail talk. He said they both “agree that we must make changes to the criminal justice system to prevent repeat offenders from doing further harm to our communities.”

In comments Monday at City Hall, Adams struck a similar note. “Recidivism is the issue for me, not bail,” he said.

Queens state Sen. Michael Gianaris, who serves as his chamber’s deputy majority leader, suggested Hochul avoided focusing on bail for good reason, saying any attempts to further undo the 2019 reforms are dead in the water in the Democrat-controlled Legislature.

“Perhaps the mayor would be better to fight crime with the law enforcement tools available to him rather than shift the blame elsewhere,” Gianaris told the New York Daily News. “We’ve already touched (the bail law). We made the changes that responded to people’s concerns, and if there’s a problem administering that, that’s on the judges making these decisions, not on the law.”

On other public safety fronts in her speech, Hochul fully embraced Adams’ viewpoints.

Hochul shared Adams’ push for making it easier to force people living on the streets or in the subway system into hospitals, saying she wants to change the standards that currently dictate when involuntary committal can happen.

Under current rules, people can only be involuntarily committed if they pose an “immediate threat to themselves or others.”

Hochul said the laws “must be even stronger.”

“And that’s why I’m willing to stand up and say we need to expand involuntary commitment into a hospital to include someone who does not possess the mental capacity to care for themselves such as refusing help with the basics: clothing, food, shelter, medical care,” she said, echoing a proposed amendment supported by Adams.

“Now critics will say this criminalizes poverty or homelessness. I say that is flat out wrong.”

Hochul also echoed Adams’ concerns the discovery reforms the state enacted in 2020 — designed to ensure fairness for defendants — are having unintended consequences.

The reforms imposed new requirements on prosecutors to turn over evidence to defendants more quickly during pretrial periods, and supporters have said the old system contributed to wrongful convictions, mass incarceration and case delays.

But Hochul argued the reforms are resulting in cases being dismissed on deadline technicalities. A policy book provided by her office says she will seek to change the current law so that “a discovery error is addressed in a manner proportional to the discovery error itself rather than as a technical mechanism to have an entire case dismissed.”

In the arena of public safety, Hochul also said she’s going to fund the deployment of a police officer on every subway train in NYC overnight for at least six months.

The Legal Aid Society, the public defender group that supported the state’s 2019 and 2020 reforms, slammed Hochul for backing Adams’ discovery and involuntary commitment priorities.

“Waiting for those with serious mental illness to reach a breaking point, forcibly hospitalizing and medicating them, and then releasing them back into the community only to repeat the cycle fails to address public safety or meet the needs of people with mental illness,” the group said in a statement.

“Instead, as the governor also suggests, we should increase access to outpatient services and invest in models like Assertive Community Treatment teams, which meet people where they are and provide direct support.”

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