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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We are re-airing most of the Democratic mayoral primary debate that I co-moderated last night with Errol Louis from NY1, and Katie Honan from the news organization The City. Near the end of the show this morning, we'll open up the phones for you to name something that you learned in the debate or if it changed your mind on anything. The seven candidates, in alphabetical order once again and for those just joining us, were Adrienne Adams, Andrew Cuomo, Brad Lander, Zohran Mamdani, Zellnor Myrie, Scott Stringer, and Whitney Tilson. We pick it up in the next section moderated by Errol on the Cuomo sexual harassment scandal, and then on public safety and crime.

Katie Honan: This question is from Mr. Cuomo because it did come up earlier. Many voters are grappling with how to disqualify you or not after the sexual harassment findings that led to your resignation as governor. How do you argue people should consider that factor, and we'll let the other candidates give their take?

Andrew Cuomo: I would ask them to look at the facts and not the political rhetoric that you hear on this day.

Brian Lehrer: I'm just correcting myself. Obviously, this section of the debate is moderated by Katie Honan, not Errol. Go Katie, and we'll pick it up where Andrew Cuomo left off.

Andrew Cuomo: I said when the report was issued, it was all political. That's what I said. I said nothing was going to come of it. Four years later, we've had five district attorneys—Democrat, Republicans, upstate, downstate. They've all looked at them. Nothing has come of them whatsoever. There has been one civil case that's been resolved. I was dropped from the case. Absolutely nothing has come, except political fodder for my opponents and political fodder at the time.

Katie Honan: Do any other candidates want to chime in?

Brad Lander: Andrew, you admitted at the time that you called a 25-year-old staffer into your office and asked her questions about whether she had older partners and whether she was available, and intimated that you were looking for a partner. Everybody here knows that you sexually harassed women, that you created a toxic work environment. We're here with all these CUNY students, many of them young women. I went to the City College commencement. The valedictorian is going to come work at the Department of Homeless Services. I don't want to have to tell her, don't go work at City Hall because the mayor is a sexual harasser.

Andrew Cuomo: Those are just bold-faced lies, and you know it.

Brad Lander: You admitted it at the time.

Andrew Cuomo: It’s frightening that you can look at a camera and lie that easily.

Brad Lander: Right now I'm looking at you. You admitted it at time.

Andrew Cuomo: I never said that. I never said that. By the way, that has been totally disproven by every court that has looked at it, every court that holds legal proceedings.

Brad Lander: Everyone knows this.

Andrew Cuomo: Yes, they do, sir. A report was issued. The DA's looked at it. They all disagree with you. I was dropped from the case. Those are the facts.

Brad Lander: The Biden Justice Department and the Attorney General of the State of New York, and again, it was reported that you admitted at the time.

Andrew Cuomo: No. I did not--

Brad Lander: It was a mistake to call-[crosstalk]

Andrew Cuomo: No. I never did. [crosstalk]

Brad Lander: -a 25-year-old into your office. Folks can check the record. Folks know if he worked for you, you would fire him. [crosstalk]

Errol Louis: Hang on, hang on, hang on. [crosstalk]

Andrew Cuomo: The Attorney General's--

Errol Louis: Just wrap up. Yes.

Andrew Cuomo: The Attorney General's report was determined by a court to be hearsay and not a finding at all. I understand Mr. Lander is just appalled.

Brad Lander: [crosstalk] The women accused you of sexual harassment. That's what you're calling hearsay.

Andrew Cuomo: The district attorneys looked at all those complaints and not a single case has been brought.

Errol Louis: All right. We're going in circles. Let's move on.

Andrew Cuomo: Maybe you know better than the facts.

Brad Lander: Obviously, this is disqualifying. The man resigned. It should be obvious. The problem is we do not get to address the issues that New Yorkers care about because we're talking about his past.

Errol Louis: That's just what we're going to do. Just hang on, hang on. We are done with this topic. We're going to move on to the next one, candidates. Let's talk about quality of life, concerns about disorder and public safety. The number of complaints about disorderly conduct in New York City have nearly tripled compared to the pre-pandemic year of 2018. Arrests for disorderly conduct have risen significantly, but New Yorkers still say they are less satisfied about their quality of life than in the past. We're going to start with you, Mr. Lander. Do you want the NYPD to address quality of life violations or is there some other way to do it? How would you address concerns about quality of life without violating constitutional rights or opening the door to accusations of illegal profiling?

Brad Lander: As mayor, my number one priority will be to end street homelessness for people with serious mental illness. When I talk to people about what's influencing their quality of life, what would they like changed? They would like to be able to get on the subway and feel safer. Last week, I talked about a friend whose middle school student was pushed to the ground by a mentally ill, homeless person. We don't have to be a city where a couple thousand of our mentally ill neighbors sleep on subway platforms and the sidewalks and stoops of our buildings.

Yes, of course, NYPD have a role to play in keeping neighborhoods safe, getting guns off the street, but no amount of policing is going to connect a homeless mentally ill person to the housing and services that they actually need. The plan that will is called Housing First. It's working in Houston and Denver and Salt Lake City. We used it here to end street homelessness for veterans, and I will use it to end street homelessness for people with serious mental illness, and that'll be a city with a dramatically better quality of life for everyone.

Errol Louis: Okay. Mr. Stringer.

Scott Stringer: Let me try to answer your direct question, which is the issue of quality of life. To me, as someone who has spent his entire life here, who's raising kids here, people do not want to live with trash. They don't want to live with broken sidewalks. They don't want a 311 system that can't resolve the basic day-to-day issues that New Yorkers face. We've gotten away from that kind of work. Swagger to me is different than swagger at City Hall today. Swagger means I feel satisfied when we help somebody get the services we need.

How I'm going to do it? Specifically, we got to have a deputy mayor for quality of life, and institute what I call quality stat, meaning there's a lot of agencies apart from the police that actually are responsible for the day-to-day running of the city and resolving complaints and issues. We need to measure that. We need to look at the data at 311. We need to do the follow-ups.

I'm going to be the mayor in the Ed Koch mode that comes to town hall meetings and communities, just like Ed did with his controller, roll my sleeves up, go in front of hundreds of people and say, let me have it. What do you want? What's going on? I will resolve a complaint to 24 hours. That's the kind of mayor that we need in this city to keep people here and to make sure that we become the beacon of the greatest city in the world.

Errol Louis: Okay. Mr. Mamdani.

Zohran Mamdani: When I speak to New Yorkers across the five boroughs, what I hear time and time again are these very kinds of complaints. Complaints around the cleanliness of our streets, complaints around whether the parks that they love can actually be maintained, and so many of them come back to a mayoral administration that has underfunded city agencies time and time again, literally requesting to take garbage cans off of sidewalks. That's what we have had for the last four years.

I'm proud to have been endorsed by DC 37, the single largest labor union representing municipal workers in this city. The people who run this city trust me to lead this city. What I will do is fully fund each one of those agencies to ensure that we are not just providing public service, we're providing public excellence, so that each and every New Yorker is finally receiving the quality of life that they deserve living in this city.

Errol Louis: Okay, and so, Mr. Myrie, really in a lot of ways, what I'm getting at is that the city government and a lot of voters, frankly, will reflexively reach for the NYPD as the best tool to handle what they perceive as disorder, which some people say is kind of a stepping stone towards crime or in some ways a precursor to it. What's your take on that, and how would you handle it?

Zellnor Myrie: Let me first say, Scott, you got a little bit of swagger. You got some sneakers on today, so I don't want you to discount yourself.

Scott Stringer: That I got it from you.

Zellnor Myrie: All right, all right. Very good. Let me say this. Look, I walk the streets. I take the subways, just like you do. Part of the reason that people are frustrated with politics is because you walk the streets, you take the subways, and then you listen to folks on this stage, and it's completely divorced from your reality. Here's what I want to do. I think we need police and clinician teams in our subways, in our streets 24/7 to get people on a path to real recovery.

New Yorkers are compassionate people, but we want to ensure that people are actually getting that help. I want stabilization centers in every borough so that we can deliver that help. Public safety requires us to do two things. We understand that police officers are necessary, but we also have to invest in the things we know prevent crime and disorder in the first place. That's why I want 50,000 more summer youth jobs, so that it is universal. We have no young person on a waiting list. Stop telling our kids what not to do without giving them something to do. I want universal after-school as well, so that we can have a safe place to be and have our families have a place where their children can stay.

Errol Louis: Okay. Mr. Tilson?

Whitney Tilson: Yes. To answer your question directly about enforcing more quality of life issues, for example, I ride my bike almost every day in the city. The e-bikes are fast and dangerous, and were riding up on the sidewalks, blowing through red lights, and cops started enforcing it, and I can tell you, being out there every day, they're now obeying the law. That is the kind of thing that contributes to the feeling of lack of safety.

I will say that what I would not do is demonize the police by calling them wicked and corrupt, by threatening to defund and dismantle them, as Zohran has done. We are at a 34-year low in the number of police officers. There's only one candidate on this stage, him, who has not said that he would try and build that number back up. I think his Department of Community Safety, which he talks about is just backdoor code word for continue to defund the police. They are demoralized. They are understaffed. We have created a revolving door where an officer at the Midtown North Precinct, very close to here actually told me, she is still filling out the paperwork for most of her arrests, and the criminal is back out onto the street before she's finished.

Errol Louis: Did you want to respond?

Zohran Mamdani: I want to say it very clearly, because both Mr. Tilson and Andrew Cuomo's Republican billionaire donors have been lying about me on our television screens. Right now, I will not defund the police. I will work with the police because I believe the police have a critical role to play in creating public safety. Fundamentally, when I put together our proposal for the Department of Community Safety, it was built upon the many conversations I had with rank and file officers who had told me that they signed up to join the department to take on serious crimes, and yet, what they were being asked to do is play the roles of mental health professionals and social workers.

That is part of the reason why 65% of crimes in the first quarter of this year are still not solved. We need to ensure police can focus on those crimes, and we have mental health professionals and social workers to address and tackle and resolve the mental health crisis and homelessness.

Scott Stringer: I just want to just clarify, Whitney, did you not talk about my police retention plan or you didn't--[crosstalk]

Errol Louis: Come on, Scott. Ms. Adams, I want to bring you in the conversation because you were at the City Hall when the funding question came up that has been interpreted by some as defund the police. What was happening then in that particular session with that particular proposal? If you're elected, what would you do about this question of where and when, and if the police get involved in quality of life policing?

Adrienne Adams: Thank you for asking the clarifying question, Errol, very much. The FY 2021 budget season was a very, very tough season for the New York City Council, and quite frankly, for the mayoral administration as well. We were still masked up in the pandemic, and New York City was very, very underfunded as a city. We were looking towards going in the hole, if you will. Several city agencies had to take a haircut. The NYPD was one of those agencies, as were many, many city agencies. Heck, the New York City Council, we had to take a haircut.

There was funding reallocation that happened across the board for New York City because of the pandemic. Services were cut. Many folks out there realized that some of park services were cut and other services were cut as well, unfortunately. That was the climate that we were in, quite frankly, during the pandemic season. As mayor, though, I know that New York City is fiscally found.

Our issue right now is going to be Trump-proofing New York City, which I am doing right now, as one who is negotiating the fourth New York City budget, something that no one else on this stage can say, and we've already put aside in reserves, through my leadership on the Council, $1.9 billion to begin to protect the people of the city of New York from Donald Trump's harsh cuts. We want the administration to not match us or go above us. We're going to need to make sure that our resources are protected, that our nonprofits are protected, that our children, our seniors, our health care is protected. As leader of the City Council, I've already made a start in doing just that.

Errol Louis: All right. Thank you. Mr. Cuomo.

Andrew Cuomo: Yes. If we wonder why the people watching this are frustrated is because of the disconnect of what they're hearing. They are afraid on the streets. They feel unsafe. You can quote statistics all day long. They get afraid walking into the subway. They get afraid walking down the street when they see a mentally ill homeless person. We did defund the police. We did. We cut $1 billion from the police. People on this stage said, defund the police. That was the chant, and $1 billion was taken from the police department. Mr. Mamdani says he would dismantle the police. That's his expression. Mr. Lander said, "I'll admit progressives like me were slow to recognize the problems of crime and quality of life and mopeds."

Brad Lander: See, it's not so difficult to take responsibility, is it?

Andrew Cuomo: That's what he said, that they were slow to realize the crime that people were living with. We have to get back to safety. I would add 5,000 police officers. Yes, we need mental health professionals who also help work with the mental ill, and they're two totally separate things. This city has to be safe. Opportunity for youth is part of it. If people don't feel safe, Errol, they're not going to stay. End of story.

Errol Louis: Okay, real quick.

Brad Lander: Yes, I think New Yorkers want accountability. They want accountability when people commit crimes. They want accountability when officers use excessive force. They want accountability when top brass violate their office, and they want accountability from elected officials. Yes, I said we were slow to reckon with rising disorder. Here's how I'm going to actually deliver it. You've never taken responsibility for one single thing you've done wrong in your entire life. Not one single thing. You should try it sometime.

Errol Louis: Okay. Ms. Adams, real quick.

Adrienne Adams: Yes. I just want to clear up the whole defund mystery here that keeps on being used as far as the New York City Council and the FY 2021 budget is concerned. Let's just be clear. The budget is negotiated with the mayoral administration. The NYPD is a part of the mayoral administration, and the reallocation of funds was done with the knowledge of the NYPD, not in any far-off land, far, far away. I don't know how long you've been out of it, Mr. Cuomo, but it's been a while. I just want to make sure we are clear here tonight. Old slogans and scare tactics aren't going to make anybody in New York City safer.

Errol Louis: Okay, candidates, thank you.

Brian Lehrer: All right. We are re-airing most of the Democratic mayoral primary debate from last night. We'll take calls and texts, and talk to Brigid and Liz, our political reporters, at the end, around 11:30. We'll continue in a minute.

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