Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York on Monday proposed an expansion of the state’s child tax credit that would more than double what some families currently receive.

The plan, the second in a series of recent proposals the governor has made toward addressing the state’s affordability crisis, would give eligible families a tax credit of up to $1,000 per child under the age of 4. Each child from the age of 4 to 16 will qualify families to receive up to a $500 tax break per child.

In recent years, the state has offered up to $330 per child for the poorest New York families. Ms. Hochul will include the proposal in her State of the State address next week and push to include it in her executive budget.

Frustration with the high cost of living surfaced among voters in the 2024 elections, and many Democrats, amid soul searching about Republican victories, said they should have talked more about addressing affordability.

Both Ms. Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams of New York City have already announced tax cuts or refunds they want the Legislature to adopt this year. Mr. Adams’s proposal would eliminate New York City income taxes for more than 400,000 of the lowest-wage earners. Ms. Hochul announced in December that she wants to spend about $3 billion to send checks between $300 and $500 to roughly 8.6 million New Yorkers, using money from sales tax revenue.

In a news conference Monday, Ms. Hochul said she has long focused on affordability, adding that proposals like increasing the child tax credit are partly shaped by raising her own children and seeing the financial strain that experience can have on a household.

“I will continue doing this,” she said. “I’ll do it independent of elections. It’s the right thing to do.”

“People are hurting right now,” she added, “and we cannot be tone deaf as a party, as a nation or as a state to those cries for help. This is how to respond to them.”

The state has spent billions in recent years on child care and to make more families eligible for subsidies. Tax credits like the one Ms. Hochul proposed have proved popular and effective. During the early years of the coronavirus pandemic, an expansion of the federal child tax credit led to dramatic reductions in adolescent poverty. This expansion then expired, and bipartisan efforts to bring it back failed.

Ms. Hochul’s proposal would apply to more than 2.75 million children in the state; families earning up to $200,000 a year would be eligible for the credit. In a news release, Ms. Hochul’s team said the average credit for families would double to nearly $950 under her proposal.

Legislative leaders, who have suggested similar proposals in past budget negotiations, appeared receptive.

“We are very glad the governor is supporting these important tax credits, which we have long championed in the Assembly majority,” said Mike Whyland, a spokesman for Assembly Speaker Carl E. Heastie.

State Senator Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the majority leader, noted in a statement that she, like Ms. Hochul, is both the first mother and grandmother to serve in her role. Funding child care would remain a focus this legislative session, she said.

“I know firsthand how expensive raising children has become in this great state,” she said. “We look forward to discussing this proposal further. But we also know we have to deal with the rising cost of child care. The cost of child care is a burden that can overwhelm families, and we need to take steps to make affordable child care available to all New Yorkers.”

Even some Albany Republicans were open to the proposal. State Senator Jacob Ashby, a Republican from Rensselaer County, said that the state needs to do more “to make structural changes to our state economy” like lowering taxes across the board. Many of his colleagues have criticized Ms. Hochul, arguing that her administration has not done enough to lower costs for New York families.

“As someone who’s sponsored bipartisan legislation to provide new parents with targeted relief and pushed to increase the child tax credit across the board, I’m really optimistic about this proposal,” Mr. Ashby said in a statement.

If enacted, Ms Hochul’s proposal would be among the most generous child tax credits nationwide, according to researchers at the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University. In 2023, New York and 15 other states had some form of this credit, ranging in the amount given to families and the income threshold when it phases out. When the proposal is fully up and running in several years, these Columbia researchers estimate the tax cut could drop child poverty by about 9 percent.

“When the federal child tax credit was expanded during the pandemic, we saw child poverty plummet to historic lows,” said Richard Buery Jr., the chief executive of the Robin Hood Foundation, a nonprofit in New York City that works to reduce poverty.

“With more money in your pocket, as a parent, you are less stressed, you can be more present, you can be much better and more effective at parenting children,” Mr. Buery added. “But when those federal credits expired, we saw our local poverty rate reach a 10-year high. So we know what to do. We just need the political leadership to do it.”

In the last few weeks, Bethenny Frankel has been talking a lot about Dior bags on TikTok. The subject itself isn’t unusual: As a reality TV star and entrepreneur, she frequently posts about fashion topics to her 2.4 million followers, including in a feature Ms. Frankel calls “Handbag University,” where she offers reviews and tutorials.

But the tone of Ms. Frankel’s posts about Dior is strikingly different than a typical conversation about luxury goods. Less Vogue and more Jason Bourne.

In a post on Monday, Ms. Frankel suggested there was a cover-up at play.

“I’ve received several Dior bag videos and messages about sightings which are obviously not being reported in the mainstream media,” she said.

The day before, Ms. Frankel said she had been talking to an unnamed source about the Dior bag situation, and that this person — the father of someone Ms. Frankel knows — had passed along top-secret intelligence.

“If our government tries to tell us that they’re from China, that these bags are from China, that we have an issue,” Ms. Frankel said, cryptically, repeating what she said her source had told her, “that would be very alarming.”

Confusion would be understandable to someone coming across just one of the videos, but watch enough of them and you will realize “Dior bags” aren’t always Dior bags. In this case, Ms. Frankel is using the term to refer to the drones that have been reported flying in the skies over the eastern United States and elsewhere.

Who but a fashion obsessive would use a French luxury label as a code word?

“It was in the moment — it wasn’t planned at all,” Ms. Frankel said in a phone interview. “I was just like, ‘The Dior bags are real, they’re in the closet, and management doesn’t want us to know about it.’”

Various governmental agencies have said the sightings, for the most part, are not drones, and a visual analysis by The New York Times indicated most of the sightings over New Jersey were of airplanes rather than drones.

That has not been enough to persuade Ms. Frankel.

She said she initially had only a peripheral interest in the story. Then someone she knows whose father has access to inside information of some sort — and whom she refers to only as “Waterhammer” — reached out to her with a theory explaining the drone sightings. Ms. Frankel posted about it on TikTok in the days before Christmas. But whereas her posts usually get millions of views, she said, the handful of posts in which she talked about drones “were getting 500 views.”

TikTok creators have long complained that the reach of videos has been restricted because they touched on topics the platform didn’t like — “shadow banning,” as the alleged practice has come to be known. It is hard to prove that TikTok is suppressing content, but Ms. Frankel started talking about Dior bags instead of drones in an attempt to get around algorithms and strict content moderation. Such a diversion technique is called “algospeak.”

Ms. Frankel’s fashionable way of talking in code has caught on. Indeed, the reality TV star, her followers and others who want to discuss the drone phenomenon and theorize on social media have created an alternative lexicon built around shopping terminology. “Store management,” to this group, is the U.S. government; Oscar de la Renta products are the shiny objects some have claimed to have observed in the sky; and Prada items are plasmoids, or structures made of plasma and magnetic fields.

Curiously, the largely male audience that listens to podcasters like Joe Rogan and Shawn Ryan, a former Navy SEAL, has also adopted the term and used the hashtag #diorbags in their own videos.

“There were truckers with skull caps and guys on oil rigs talking about Dior bags,” laughed Ms. Frankel.

One group not talking about it apparently is Christian Dior SE, the French company behind the Dior brand. Its representatives did not return a request for comment.

Ms. Frankel hasn’t heard from Dior either, though she wouldn’t be surprised if that were to happen, given that the company may not want its name associated with an online community sharing wild theories about the drones.

“I can’t believe Dior corporate hasn’t called me at this point,” said Ms. Frankel. She clarified: “We’re not mad at Dior. This is just what I used.”

The conversation around “Dior bags” is happening just as another handbag discussion is dominating social media: the look-alike Birkin bag being sold at Walmart.

For anyone not in on algospeak, having a conversation about actual handbags can suddenly lead to confusion. The other day, Ms. Frankel posted about “why the Walmart Birkin is fascinating.” She was quick to clarify, “And this is legitimately about bags — it’s not code.”

The number of felony assaults and rapes in New York City rose last year even as the overall crime rate fell, Jessica Tisch, the police commissioner, said on Monday.

Shootings fell 7 percent last year compared with 2023, to 903, and there were 377 homicides reported in 2024, the lowest number of killings since 2020, according to police figures. The number of burglaries, robberies, car thefts and larcenies also dropped in 2024, Commissioner Tisch and Mayor Eric Adams said during a news conference.

But two crime categories — sexual assaults and felony assaults, a major crime category defined as an attack in which a dangerous weapon is used or a serious injury results — continued to buck the trend. There were 29,417 felony assaults last year, the highest number in at least 24 years and a 5 percent increase from 2023.

For the mayor, the decline in several major crime categories was an opportunity to tout his policies at a time when he is trying to persuade New Yorkers to re-elect him, even as he faces criminal prosecution and a perception that the leadership of the Police Department descended into dysfunction under his watch.

“I was clear from Day 1, not only on the campaign trail, but when I became mayor, the prerequisite to our prosperity is public safety, and I was committed to driving down crime,” Mayor Adams said. “We’re the safest big city in America. The numbers are clear.”

The department said it had received 1,748 complaints of sexual assault, nearly half of which were connected to domestic violence incidents, Commissioner Tisch said.

The number of rapes was the highest since 2020, though it was slightly lower than in 2019, when the department received 1,771 complaints of sexual assault, according to department figures. About a quarter of the rapes reported last year occurred in the Bronx.

The announcement of a drop in crime comes as headlines have been dominated by terrifying incidents, such as the killing of Debrina Kawam, a 57-year-old woman who was burned to death on the F train three days before Christmas, and the shooting of 10 people outside a club in Queens on New Year’s Day. Mr. Adams acknowledged on Monday that reporting a drop in most crime categories may not comfort many New Yorkers who are fearful of being randomly attacked on the subway or on the street.

“These high-profile random acts of violence have overshadowed our success,” he said. “We have to deal with the perception.”

Commissioner Tisch, whom Mayor Adams appointed on Nov. 20, said she had issued an order for 200 officers to patrol the city’s trains. More officers will be deployed to subway platforms in the 50 highest-crime stations in the city, she said.

“We know that 78 percent of transit crime occurs on trains and on platforms, and that is quite obviously where our officers need to be,” Commissioner Tisch said. “This is just the beginning.”

Mayor Adams said that kind of presence “will allow New Yorkers to feel the omnipresence” of the police “and feel safe.”

The number of sexual assaults was down during the first part of 2024 but began to rise later in the year. Commissioner Tisch attributed that increase in part to a rise in the number of sexual assaults connected to domestic violence incidents and a change in state law in September that expanded the definition of what constitutes rape.

Under the law, the definition was expanded from strictly vaginal penetration by a penis to include acts of oral, anal and vaginal penetration.

Felony assaults have been persistently high since 2020, however.

Commissioner Tisch pointed to recidivism, citing police figures that showed a large increase in the number of people arrested three times for the same crime.

Mayor Adams cited mental health as a factor in many of these crimes. He has directed the police and emergency medical workers to hospitalize people they deemed too mentally ill to care for themselves, even if they did not pose a danger to others.

On Monday, he broached that issue again as he pointed to recent random acts of violence committed by people who appeared to have “severe mental health issues.”

“The many cases of people being pushed on the subway tracks, of women being punched in the face,” he said, “it’s the same profile.”

Gov. Kathy Hochul has called on state legislators to pass a law that would allow hospitals to force more people into mental health treatment. Mayor Adams supports that plan, though the New York Civil Liberties Union said it “threatens New Yorkers’ rights and liberties.”

Christopher Herrmann, an associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said that while mental health is an important factor, other societal ills can drive felony assault numbers up.

“Is it housing insecurity? Are there food shortages? Is it the economy? We need to consider all of it,” he said.

Mr. Herrmann said crimes like assaults and robberies are the type “that really fuel public fear.”

“It’s just more of a reason we’ve got to get those numbers under control,” he said.

Chelsia Rose Marcius contributed reporting.