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Amina Srna: This is The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm producer Amina Srna filling in for Brian today. Yesterday, Mayor Adams held his weekly news conference. Many of the questions focused on Monday's horrific random stabbings, the city's drought warning and the mayor's relationship with President-elect Trump. And as usual, Liz Kim, the WNYC and Gothamist reporter who covers the mayor joins us for a recap like she does most Wednesdays after these press Q&As. Hi Liz.

Liz Kim: Happy Wednesday.

Amina Srna: Let's start with this terrible story from Monday. Have we learned more about the stabbing deaths of these three people? There were random attacks, but the police arrested the man who evidently confessed, right?

Liz Kim: That's right. Late Monday, police arrested Ramon Rivera. He's a 51-year-old man. He was charged with three counts of first-degree murder and he was apparently homeless, according to police. Just to recap what police say happened, just before 8:30 on Monday morning, police say that he approached a construction worker on West 19th Street and stabbed him in the stomach and ran off. The victim was declared dead.

Then afterwards, around 11:00 AM, he fatally stabbed a man who was fishing by the side of the East River. Then he went on to attack a 36-year-old woman near the United Nations. All three people have been pronounced dead. He had been released from jail last month. According to police, he was charged for burglary and assault. The mayor has said that he had "serious mental health issues" and there are records that seem to support that assertion.

Amina Srna: Yeah, the mayor cited a reduction in crime in the city before taking questions from reporters yesterday, but of course, he was asked about this attack, the kind that makes everyone feel unsafe no matter what the stats say. His focus was on mental illness and the policy of involuntary confinement, which he was criticized for as a violation of rights. Let's take a listen to 30 seconds of that.

Mayor Eric Adams: You're seeing it. All of you are seeing it. You're seeing it on the subway, you're seeing people walk the streets, you probably see it in your neighborhood where people are talking to themselves, yelling at themselves, walking around with no shoes on in 20 degrees weather. What I said was, listen, we have to be honest about the ability that someone has gone through a severe mental health issue, is not aware that they're not on their medication, that they not receiving the support and family that they deserve. When we rolled that out, you know how we were treated. Everybody said I was inhumane, that we just want to institutionalize people. Well, this is the result of that.

Amina Srna: He suggested that critics need to answer for random attacks like this? What's the history here?

Liz Kim: That's right, Amina. This is a long recurring debate and conversation that has been happening in the city. It's not just this year. It's not just under Adams. It goes back decades. It's this question of, what should the city do when there is someone who appears to be mentally ill who commits an act of violence? Now, this was top of mind when Adams entered office in 2022, because that first month, many listeners will remember, was the death of Michelle Go. She was a woman who was standing inside Times Square Subway Station. She was pushed onto the tracks and she died. Her assailant turned out to be a person who had a history of mental health issues.

Fast forward to November of that year, November 2022, the mayor introduces a plan to address people who appear to be mentally ill and living on the street. That was also part of the story having to do with Go, was that her attacker was living on the streets. His plan was to give police and other officials more leeway to take these individuals to hospitals. Under state law, you can do so if they are diagnosed to be a harm to themselves and also others.

Adams wanted to change the parameters of that. He wanted a new policy that would allow police to take a person to a hospital as long as the person couldn't "meet their basic human needs". The directive immediately faced a lot of criticism from not just homeless advocates, but also civil liberties advocates. They argued that this went too far and that it's not always easy to determine whether someone is able to meet their basic human needs. One example that the mayor gave was someone who isn't wearing shoes. A lot of people felt like that should not be some kind of qualification for whether or not a person should be hospitalized.

The mayor also introduced a lot of other things into the conversation. He wanted to introduce many reforms that made it easier also for hospitals to evaluate people who were brought there and also keep them there. This is a longstanding conversation that the city has had. It's not the first time. Adams is not the first mayor to talk about this, but when these moments arise, he often points to the backlash that he received when he rolled out his plan. It's not really clear what the mayor did after he rolled out that plan because he was heavily criticized for it and also because legal experts said that he couldn't really legally do that.

The city has done more involuntary hospitalizations, or I should say transporting people to hospitals against their will, but they've been very fuzzy about the stats and also the outcome, because ultimately, that is what is important. It's not just that the city is taking people who they think are mentally ill off the streets to hospitals, but it's what happens to them after they get to the hospitals? How long are they held there? What kind of treatment do they receive? His administration has been criticized because we don't know.

Amina Srna: What we do know is I believe that he wants a specific bill passed in Albany next term. Do you know about it and what it would do?

Liz Kim: That's right. He has talked about this bill and it would introduce some of these reforms, which would basically give clarity to the state law that stipulates when someone can be taken to a hospital against their will. He also wants, as I said, to reduce the bar that clinicians and doctors have to meet in order to keep someone hospitalized.

Amina Srna: We are already getting some listeners calling in before we get to a couple of different topics, including the mayor's relationship with President-elect Trump and the drought in New York City, but let me put out a call to more listeners. We have a few lines open. Do you have any questions for our lead Eric Adams reporter, Elizabeth Kim, on the mayor's response to the changes in Washington, to this terrible triple stabbing or to the drought? She's with us today, as she is most Wednesdays, to recap the mayor's weekly off-topic press conference. You can text or call us now at 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692.

All right, let's move on to President-elect Trump. Reporters asked the mayor a few times again this week, but he didn't seem to be engaging even on the question of mass deportations, saying it's misinformation and fear that are hurting people and talking about the problems with the current immigration system. Let's take a listen to that.

Mayor Eric Adams: This is a country of immigrants, a country of immigrants, but let's not ignore the fact we have a broken immigration system, broken. The American public, they have communicated they want it fixed. That's what we need to be talking about. All of these little small items that we're talking about is not getting to the heart of the problem. New York City should not have had to address 220,000 migrants and asylum seekers with no money from the federal government.

Amina Srna: Liz, how do you want to respond to that clip we just heard?

Liz Kim: He talks about small items that you guys keep wanting to talk about. Presumably he's talking about questions that he's repeatedly gotten on how the city would respond to a mass deportation order from President-elect Trump and that is not a small item. On social media recently, Trump confirmed that he would use the military to carry out these deportations. The mayor's stance on this has been that he is not in favor of mass deportations.

I think he's being pressed, though, because the press really wants to know, well, what exactly would happen? You can lay out several scenarios, which actually did unfold in 2017. What would the city do if there would be federal immigration agents that showed up at a shelter, for example? What if they showed up at the courts? These are all things that did happen in 2017 and the mayor has really not wanted to sort of take these questions.

To be fair to the mayor, he doesn't also want necessarily to lay his cards out on the table of what he's going to do preemptively. I think it's totally fair for him to be asked these questions and maybe it's okay for him not to want to divulge too much detail. At the same time, I think the criticism has been, it's lacking the kind of reassurance that perhaps some undocumented New Yorkers would want to have in this moment.

Amina Srna: Before we get to the drought, which is another big issue here in the city and that the mayor addressed yesterday, let's take a call. We have Julia in North Bergen, New Jersey. Hi, Julia, you're on WNYC.

Julia: Hi, good morning. Thank you so much for taking my call. And as a first-time host of the show, you're doing a great job.

Amina Srna: Thank you, Julia.

Julia: Sure. Just to touch on the subject of removing mentally ill people from the streets of New York, now, let me just preface, I personally am totally against everything that Mayor Adams stands for. I think he should be relieved of his position from office. However, in reference to this, I agree with him. They need to be taken off the streets because I have a young daughter who has a very long travel on the subway system by herself and she's potentially in danger every single day from something like this. It makes me sick that she just missed this happening on Monday. It could have been her. And yeah, I have to support his position on removing mentally ill people. That's my final thought on it.

Amina Srna: I hear you. I hear you. Thanks, Julia. Thanks for your call. Liz, it has been a topic of many of our conversations, or Brian's conversations with you about how Mayor Eric Adams has been staffing the subways, in particular with NYPD personnel. I don't know, how do you want to respond to the listener?

Liz Kim: I think that that is a perfectly fair concern. I think that the mayor is speaking to the kind of fear that runs through a lot of New Yorkers when a crime like this happens, right? Everybody starts thinking-- like it was the same thing with Michelle Go, that, "That could have been me." Sort of what Julia was saying, "That could have been my daughter."

I think what some mental health experts, the caveat that they would always bring up is that it's one thing to bring someone to a hospital for an evaluation, but then there's the other question of are there enough beds? Are there enough doctors and clinicians? Are there enough mental health programs? I think this has been a little bit of the criticism around Adams, is are you giving us a holistic approach to this problem, or are you trying to answer it as he often does? He's been criticized with police, that somehow policing is the answer. That somehow simply by removing them from sight, that that solves the public panic that exists.

The other point I would like to make, which is something that homeless advocates and also mental health advocates often say is that for the most part, the vast majority of people with mental health issues are not prone to violence. I understand when these incidents arise, it's incredibly scary because they're big headlines and then people start talking about it, but they're also relatively rare. And violent crime, as the mayor did point out at his press conference yesterday, has been trending downward in the city.

It doesn't mean that people aren't going to be afraid, and it doesn't mean that this is not a policy worth discussing. Because even if a person who does appear to be mentally unwell is living on the streets, living on the subways, and is not violent, that doesn't mean that the solution is to allow them to continue to be there. I think this is worth the conversation. I expect that the mayor will want to maybe continue to talk about this legislation that he's proposed. The problem is it hasn't gotten any traction since he started talking about it in late 2022 and I don't quite understand what's behind that. It could be maybe there are some legal hurdles to getting something like this passed, but we'll see.

The problem is also the mayor doesn't a lot of political capital right now in this moment, so I don't know. But other elected officials could decide to take up this conversation and see where it goes. Certainly, with every incident that happens, we're repeatedly having this conversation. What is the best public policy to address people who are living on the streets who appear to be mentally unwell? Again, not just people who have done something violent, but even for their own wellbeing and for the wellbeing of other New Yorkers who are around them.

Amina Srna: I want to move on to something that came up yesterday that ties both the mayor's, can you call it a relationship with President-elect Donald Trump, and also the drought, the very real drought that the, that the New York City area, New York and New Jersey are facing. One reporter did try to link the new drought warning and the brush fires to the president elect, citing his climate change denials, but the mayor wasn't having it, citing Trump's climate change denials, excuse me, but the mayor wasn't having it, saying the president elect's beliefs on the matter don't concern him, but "we're going to put out the brush fires".

He even had a little fun with this vein of questions when he was asked what Trump said to him at the Ultimate Fighting Championship event at the Garden this weekend. If listeners aren't familiar, both Mayor Eric Adams and President-elect Donald Trump were at that UFC fight. He claimed that he couldn't hear him very well. Let's take a listen to that clip.

Mayor Eric Adams: You know, we exchanged pleasantries and I didn't hear-- there was a lot of noise, so I didn't hear exactly what he was saying. But it was something to the tune of that you're one of the greatest mayors this city has ever had. The city, the city has turned around under your leadership.

Amina Srna: Mayor Adams has been asked repeatedly about his relationship with Donald Trump. Do you see it as a little bit of a game, especially given that response?

Liz Kim: I think so. I think it's a game that the mayor knows he has to play in this moment and that he kind of has to artfully navigate. The reason people are so interested in his relationship with the president elect is, for one, this is something that is very important to the city's future in terms of federal funding, in terms of federal policies, but also because there's been an interesting shared political grievance between Trump and the mayor because of the mayor's legal problems.

Trump has expressed sympathy for the mayor. As we know, the mayor has been charged with federal corruption and Trump, who himself has been indicted in four separate cases can relate. The mayor has suggested that he was a target because he had criticized the Biden administration on its migrant policies. That's something that resonates very well with Trump and Trump has come out and basically said, "I predicted this was going to happen."

There's been the question that's hanging out there, if once President Trump gets into the White House, he would then have the power to pardon Eric Adams. That's certainly something that people in political circles are closely watching. That's why the mayor is constantly being asked about his relationship with Trump. But it was very curious too to see the two of them at this UFC event. He knows he's going to be asked what exactly-- what kind of conversation they had, what did they talk about? There, he's able to make a joke out of it.

Amina Srna: Yeah. We've certainly discussed on this program before whether the mayor is currying favor with the president elect for any future pardons, which may or may not happen, but he did address it again yesterday, so let's play a clip of that.

Mayor Eric Adams: How about we're doing it because we love New York? This is the president, and it's time for us to stop yelling at each other and working with each other.

Amina Srna: Liz, you were touching on this already a little bit, but the president, whoever is in office, can help or hurt the city a lot, right?

Liz Kim: Right, and the mayor is framing it in exactly those terms, that it's a gesture of bipartisanship that he is stopping to shake the president's hand at a major sporting event in New York City, that he reached out and called the president elect shortly after he won the election, that all of these things that he's doing, he is doing on behalf of New Yorkers, and he pointed to other people following suit. He said Governor Hochul also reached. After he called President-elect Trump, Governor Hochul did that, Senator Gillibrand. He even noted that the hosts of Morning Joe, who were infamously critics of President-elect Trump made a visit and kissed his ring at Mar-a-Lago.

I think that was kind of astute of the mayor to frame it in that way, because the heart of this question, and he's been asked this, is whether he as mayor is compromised in some way. Because how do you represent the interests of New Yorkers when you're also looking out for your own legal interests? In this way, I think he's giving the argument, which is valid, that by fostering or cultivating this relationship with President-elect Trump, he is in fact representing the interests of New Yorkers.

Amina Srna: One final question, since I have been talking about it the whole segment, the drought warning, which tonight and tomorrow, rain isn't really supposed to make much of a dent in. The mayor read from a list of things individuals can do to conserve water. But he did get asked for clarification on one item on the list, which read "flush your toilet less often". The reporter cited the old water saving adage, "If it's yellow, let it mellow, and if it's brown, flush it down." The press staff thought it was a good place to stop the Q&A, but the mayor did have a response, so let's listen to that.

Mayor Eric Adams: First of all, I like those, if it's yellow, let it mellows, but also, you'd be surprised why we flush our toilet that does not have to do with personally relieving ourselves. Some people put food in the toilet. Some people drop after they floss. They would drop the string in the toilet. We're just saying be conscious of what you're doing. That's what we're saying, that everyone to be conscious. Take a second and think what I'm doing. That's what it's all about.

Amina Srna: And that was the end of the press conference, "Take a second to think what I am doing." Not bad advice for a drought or pretty much anything, I guess. Liz, we'll leave it there for today. Liz Kim is Gothamist and WNYC's lead Eric Adams reporter. Thank you so much for your time.

Liz Kim: Thanks for having me, Amina.

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