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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now we return to our coverage of Mayor Adams weekly news conference, our first in the new year. If you've been here before, you've heard us recap these events with WNYC and Gothamist lead Mayor Adams reporter Elizabeth Kim. The mayor holds these news conferences every Tuesday, generally the only time all week that reporters can ask questions on topics of their choosing. Liz usually gets to ask one of those questions, as she did yesterday and comes on with us the next day, which is usually Wednesday like it is today with some clips and analysis and to take some of your calls and texts. Happy New Year, Liz. Welcome back to the show.

Elizabeth Kim: Happy New Year, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: I definitely want to get into what I flagged at the beginning of the show today. The mayor kind of winking at the city council member from Queens who posted a way for people to vandalize congestion pricing cameras to disable them when they're driving in. Let's start where the mayor started with crime statistics, lower crime statistics in general over the last year. The city did ring in the new year as he acknowledged with a number of high-profile subway crimes. Here's about a minute of the mayor on that.

Mayor Adams: I just told you how well we're doing in our subway system. People don't like to hear how well we're doing when we talk about it, but we need to be honest about the success. With that honesty, we're not saying we don't have to deal with the perception. A burning of someone on the subway system, shoving on the subway track, a slashing, being punched. When you read that stuff or you're in the subway system, you see someone yelling and screaming, walking down the tracks, you don't want to hear about the numbers only. My job is to make sure I do the substantive things to bring down crime, which we have done.

I have to do the symbolic things that make people feel safe. That's why I said we're going to give the commission-- the Commissioner announced her 200 more police officers because I said we need to give her more police officers to carry out the job.

Brian Lehrer: Mayor Adams yesterday and Liz, he's essentially saying crime is down. We've heard this so many times before from the mayor and lots of people. Crime is down, but they need to fight the perception of crime equally ferociously. I guess what's new is that his way of going about this is by adding more cops to the system, even if he might think that they're not needed to actually reduce the amount of crime and supporting policies that may soon come out of Governor Hochul's office to remove more people with perceived mental health problems from the street. Is that a fair assessment of what he's saying and what he's doing?

Elizabeth Kim: That's right, Brian. I think we should, though, say what the mayor isn't saying, which is that felony assaults are up citywide. There were over 29,000 felony assaults last year, and that is the highest number in nearly 25 years. That's pretty significant. Murders are also up. There were five last year, and there were ten the previous year. That's what the mayor--

Brian Lehrer: In the subways.

Elizabeth Kim: In the subway system. That's right. That's what the mayor isn't really emphasizing there. He's underplaying that. When it comes to perception, the mayor and the governor have already surged officers in the subway, both police officers and also National Guard. I've thought a lot about this idea that the mayor talks about perception. He's not the only one to talk about it. He talks about it, the governor talks about it, Janno Lieber talks about it.

[00:04:02] Brian Lehrer: This comes from the progressive left, too.

Elizabeth Kim: Interesting. The question is a fair one, is how does a city create a feeling of security in public spaces? What I want to tell listeners is this is not a new concept. This is not a new policy discussion. There are experts who have studied this issue, and they've come up with some solutions. There are things that are as simple as lighting, add more lighting. We've heard that from policy experts for years. Lighting, making the spaces not only more clean, but more inviting. This is not rocket science, but it is investment. Also, as the mayor says, yes, police. He often refers to it as omnipresence.

I think that where we should take the conversation now is what can we do in terms of to go beyond presence. Presence of either law enforcement or some kind of city worker, whether it's a social worker, whether it's a nurse, whether it's an MTA worker, and maybe start thinking about what are the activities that these officers can perform that can make the city safe. These were questions that I had tried to pose to the mayor last year, because one thing, and this was raised by some of your listeners, Brian, is when you take the subway, it's quite rare to see a police officer actually walking through the trains.

That was a question posed to the mayor. Why doesn't that happen more? Another question I posed to the mayor--

Brian Lehrer: He did say, by the way, yesterday that he's going to move more officers off the mezzanine away from the-

Elizabeth Kim: That's correct.

Brian Lehrer: -booths and onto the platforms and the trains. Right?

Elizabeth Kim: He also said that last year as well. We need to see a discernible difference and a discernible divergence of officers away from basically the turnstiles. The other thing I asked the mayor about last year is, and I know other riders see this, oftentimes when there is someone who looks as if they might be in need of some kind of help, you'll see officers on the platform and they're standing there and the person just continues to languish there. You rarely see any interaction between the officer and that individual. When I put that question to the mayor at the time, his answer was I thought fair, which is these officers are not always comfortable doing that because they aren't trained for that.

Then I thought he was teasing something and he did say, "We're going to announce something in the weeks to come that's going to address this." I thought he was going to announce something in which officers were going to be given some guidance on how they handle these situations. Then we were going to see some more robust exchanges or interactions between police and just civilians who might look like they need help. I'm not saying people who are screaming, just people who look like they're in need of some kind of assistance or a question, are you okay?

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take your comments or questions about this or other things that came up at Mayor Adams' news conference yesterday with Liz Kim. 212-433-WNYC 212-433-9692 call or text. I want to go back to that stat that you gave of felony assaults in the subway being at a 25-year high. That is quite in contrast to murders in the city, not just the subway, but overall being down in the last year. That's usually the Marquis stat that people talk about.

When we say felony assaults in the subway, what are we talking about? Is these fights between people who know each other? Is these muggings that also wind up in injuring the victim? If felony assaults are way up, what are felony assaults?

Elizabeth Kim: That's a good question, Brian. It's interesting because I was asking a policing expert exactly this question. I asked two policing experts this Question yesterday. I was asking them, and I don't know that people really know yet. It's like, why are felony assaults up? One of the people I spoke to told me that the categorization is very important here because the police do have leeway in how they categorize it. Yes, it could be a fight, but when you think about it, it's something a little bit more serious that's doing more physical harm. He told me that we need to scrutinize the data and look at exactly how this is being categorized.

He's told me that that could be squishy and that could be one of the reasons why we're seeing it go higher. One suggestion he put to me is, why don't we go to-- the hospital should have data of how many people are hospitalized for these kinds of assaults and look if the numbers have risen there.

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes in a text message, it's more than crime in the subway. Homeless are smoking cigarettes in the subway. People blasting Bluetooth speakers. I've seen urination on an actual subway car. It's horrible and I ride every day. The mayor, in an additional news conference, specifically on crime that he had on Monday, did talk about, and we played this clip yesterday along with the police commissioner, Jessica Tisch. They want to see more enforcement of misdemeanors. That's going back, I guess, to an earlier era of what's known as broken windows policing.

If you bus people for the smaller things like breaking windows, then it's going to reduce not only that kind of disorder but the track toward more violent crime. How much was he on that yesterday as well?

Elizabeth Kim: He didn't mention that, but the mayor's been very clear since his first year in office. He believes in cracking down on misdemeanors. He believes in this broken-windows philosophy of policing. One thing he was asked yesterday, which I thought was an interesting reversal by him, he was asked whether he still wants to know from the public if they're seeing police officers on their phones. Now, back in his first year, he had made the statement that if you're seeing a police officer on their phone in the subways, I want you to take a picture of it and I want you to send it to me.

Yesterday he was asked by a reporter, do you still want to see those photos? His answer was no. He said that he had discussions with the union and he himself had even had conversations with police officers who showed them their phones and showed them that what they're doing on their phones is actually work. He has done a 180 on that. I think it's interesting because one, yes, people do work on their phones. I work on my phone. We're answering emails, we're writing notes to ourselves, but I think there's something problematic about that.

When it comes back to perception, if you're worried about perception, the perception for bystanders who are watching police officers is if they're on their phones, they then become worried that they're not observing or patrolling the area. I think that there's something troubling that the mayor is now willing to reverse on that. It's all true what he says. I'm sure police officers do have apps and moments where they do need to enter information, but to now retreat on that is the opposite of what he says, that we need the police officers there to make people feel safe. Police officers on their phones don't make people feel safer.

Brian Lehrer: And I think we have a call to that point. Jeff in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Jeff.

Jeff: Hi. I am so grateful for the police presence, and I don't want it to mean that, but so often I see groups of four or five cops, even on the platform, chatting, engaged in conversation, and not necessarily looking around.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. There's that perception. Liz, moving on, congestion pricing, which of course took effect on Sunday. Want to set up this clip for us?

Elizabeth Kim: Oh, sure. The mayor was asked about people-- apparently, the reporter said that there are people in the private sector who have been able to get some kind of credit or reimbursement from their employers for having to drive to work and into the congestion pricing zone. He was asked by the reporter whether he, as mayor, would do the same for municipal employees.

Mayor Adams: The question becomes, where do you stop? That is a real challenge that we are facing, that every civil servant deserves some form of benefits that's attached to their union contracts and so it's like, where do you stop? Which civil servant do you tell they should not have the credits that you're talking about?

Brian Lehrer: Liz, it sounds like civil servants aren't going to get congestion waived for them. I want to play a clip that we used on Monday from over the weekend. This is Andrew Ansbro, who's the head of the firefighters union, and he put this in very stark terms. Listen.

Andrew Ansbro: All we were asking for was an exemption for our members bringing their vehicles into the zone. Those vehicles are regularly used to transport firefighters to and from their detail to another firehouse when there's a shortage in one spot and they need them somewhere else. We were denied at every turn. We have been putting ourselves out there for the city of New York and for the FDNY. now a lot of our members have asked us, how do we get our money back for this unfair tax burden that's been placed on not only them but every resident of New York City.

Brian Lehrer: Liz, I guess I'm surprised in a way that Mayor Adams, given the rest of his politics, didn't back up the firefighters union in that respect, especially when they're calling attention to the risk of slower response times because people won't want to take their personal cars to go from place to place as they're sometimes asked to do on the job.

Elizabeth Kim: I thought his answer was a little bit of a cop-out, although I do recognize what he's saying. I think it has to go to the fact that the mayor is always very sensitive to this issue of equity in the municipal workforce. If you remember when we were having conversations about remote work, one of the reasons he was reluctant to allow remote work because he said not every civil servant can work from home. There are people like firefighters, there are people like parks workers who need to do their work in a specific location.

At the same time, making a call like this, like he says, "Who should make this call?" I think that's exactly the kind of call that the mayor and his team could be expected to make. I think it is a fair question. If there are, for example, emergency responders who are suddenly called in and they are asked to report to duty as fast as they can, are there situations, at least, in which this can be considered? I'm not advocating for one or the other. I'm sure there are pros and cons in this debate, but I think it is fair to ask the mayor to think about this and what policy he would like to put out.

To me, it was like he was just saying "No, because then I'd have to decide who gets it and who doesn't," but guess what, you're the mayor. That's the kind of decision you should have to make.

Brian Lehrer: I want to ask a follow-up question that ties together the two things we've been talking about so far. Disorder, not Just crime, but that general atmosphere of disorder that a few listeners have pointed out on the subways in general. That would include low-level vandalism, graffiti, these things always come up, and a kind of advocacy for vandalism, I think we can call it that. That we saw from a New York City Council member when congestion pricing went into effect the other day that the mayor kind of winked at yesterday and dismissed as just a joke.

Here it is. Republican Councilmember Vickie Paladino of Northeast Queens posted on X, "Important warning, a high-powered laser pointer like the ones you find on eBay for under $30 can destroy a camera sensor. If you buy one of these lasers, be sure to NOT point them at any cameras because they could be permanently damaged." Mayor Adams was asked about that yesterday. Didn't Councilmember Paladino seem to be giving her constituents or anybody else who reads her social media feed the tool to disable congestion pricing cameras because she vehemently opposes congestion pricing? He said, "Oh, we take things too seriously. That was just a joke."

Elizabeth Kim: That's right, Brian. I don't know if that's true or not, whether there is such a laser can destroy, but I think it was a joke in poor taste if it was a joke. The mayor didn't seem to take it very seriously that a council member was basically inviting the public to find a way to destroy government property. This is property where the city and state have invested money in installing. He's lukewarm about congestion pricing, there's no doubt about it, but it is being implemented and it is supposed to generate revenue and it is supposed to reduce traffic. That was maybe an odd response by the mayor.

Brian Lehrer: Darrell in the Bronx, going to tie congestion pricing to the presence of apparently mentally ill people on the subways. I think. Darrell, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Darrel: Hello. Hear me?

Brian Lehrer: Hello. I hear you.

Darrel: Hello. Hear me? Good morning. Happy New Year.

Brian Lehrer: I hear you. Can you hear me? Happy New Year.

Darrel: I want to tie a couple of things. I've been living in New York since 1958, born and raised. The point that I'm going to raise is what you just raised about cameras. I think if they had put cameras in a lot of these stations and then they station someone per se in the vacant toll booth that no longer has a person there, that can help out similar like in healthcare. You have different clinics, we have urgent care, and stuff like that. Why couldn't we use the money from congestion pricing to use as a pilot project to do that to help out the subways? Then you have somebody that's actually on the platform. You have eyes on the platform to see what's going on.

If somebody's acting suspicious or if it's connected to the subways and somebody's acting suspicious. When they reach at that station, you could take them off that station and we could be able to deal with that and then train the necessary police force to able to deal with it. Use the money for congestion pricing to do this.

Brian Lehrer: Darrell, thank you for the suggestion, Liz. There are a lot of surveillance cameras in the system. I don't know if they're in the cars.

Elizabeth Kim: Yes, there's plenty of surveillance cameras but I think what Darrell is saying is more human beings. I think the suggestion he posed has been put to the MTA before, but their finances are not in good shape. It's about being able to deploy those people to be there at the turnstile. it's also about engagement. It's about interaction. It's not just about sitting in a toll booth, I would say. I think that that is where the discussion needs to head with this idea of how do we create a feeling of safety. What is it that government workers can actually do with the public to make them feel safer?

Brian Lehrer: Last thing for today, federal prosecutors shared that they've uncovered more criminal conduct on the part of the mayor, which could lead to new charges. His response to that. Listen.

Mayor Adams: Even Ray Charles can see what's going on. [chuckles] I have an attorney, Alex Spiro is handling that. I've said over and over again, I've done nothing wrong. Let the attorneys do that. I have to run this city.

Brian Lehrer: So even Ray Charles can see what's going on. For people for whom that's a generational reference that they don't get, Ray Charles was blind. What exactly was he insinuating there?

Elizabeth Kim: What he's insinuating is what he has insinuated and implied and suggested in the past, which these are trumped-up charges and that he's being targeted by prosecutors. I do want to say that a reporter told me that they thought that that joke was in very poor taste. It also didn't really elucidate the press corps on what exactly does he mean by that. He was later pressed by a reporter, "That's a very funny joke, but what exactly do you mean?" Overall, this is bad news for the mayor.

He's already expected to go to trial for the existing charges that have been filed by the Southern District, which include charges that he took flight upgrades and other travel perks in exchange for fast-tracking the opening of a Turkish consulate in New York City. There were already those charges, but this sort of answers what a lot of legal experts, in the beginning, had said, which is that they all suspected that there was something more to this case. That the Southern District wouldn't have brought this case if it was just about those flight upgrades and travel perks. This is very bad news for the mayor.

Brian Lehrer: Allegedly or reportedly, what it might turn out to be is approving the opening of a building in New York City, the Turkish Consulate, without the safety approvals, right?

Elizabeth Kim: That's correct.

Brian Lehrer: Last clip for today that I think relates to this topic. The mayor actually snapped at you after you asked your question yesterday. You were trying to come in with a follow-up, I guess as he was answering your question and he said this.

Mayor Adams: I'm not going to respond if you cut me off because whenever you ask me questions, I remain silent and I listen to you, so we got to do the same thing. If you want to respond after, you could do that. I don't want to cut you off when you're speaking, so please don't do that to me.

Brian Lehrer: I was watching the news conference live. I didn't think you were trying to cut him off. You were jumping in, as reporters often do with a follow-up question during a pause. We do that in conversation all the time. Why'd the mayor snap at you as you see it today?

Elizabeth Kim: Brian, at the end of the year, you asked me-- the last time I was here, you asked me the question of what is it like to cover the mayor? In hindsight, I didn't think I gave, gave a very good answer. I thought about what happened yesterday as a good-- that highlights in a way what it's like, which is there's a lot of jousting with the mayor. It's strategic because you have to think about how many questions can I get in and what's the question that I ask. What is the burning issue of the day? Because he only has this one weekly off-topic question, the stakes seem a lot higher.

When you have a moment like that where you want to get the mayor to answer a question and then you see him filibustering, and you know that when he finishes that he has a press secretary standing by the side of the door who's already ready with her hand to move on to the next reporter. That's what happens. The mayor can be combative and he can admonish us and he could scold us, but that's also his way of battling us on these questions.

Brian Lehrer: More to come next Wednesday. I assume he's still going to take your questions after that.

Elizabeth Kim: I hope so, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Didn't seem really a serious ostracization of you. It was more like, "Hey, let me finish here." I assume we'll have another Liz Kim question to Mayor Adams at next Tuesday's news conference. We will certainly have another Liz Kim appearance on the show next Wednesday after the Tuesday news conference. Liz, Happy New Year. Talk to you then.

Elizabeth Kim: Thanks, Brian.

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