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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now it's time for our Friday Ask The Mayor call-in, my questions, and yours for Mayor Bill de Blasio at 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280, or you can tweet a question. Just use the #AskTheMayor. Good morning Mr. Mayor, welcome back to WNYC.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, Brian. How are you doing today?

Brian Lehrer: I'm doing great. Thank you. We spoke in our last hour, some of the people listening now were listening then, about the news you broke this morning about vaccines, anybody 16 years or older can now walk in without an appointment to any city-run vaccination site. One of the things that came up was that it's going to be confusing for some people because the Governor announced this week that anybody 60 years and older can walk in without an appointment to a state-run vaccination site. People are like, "I don't know what a city-run site is compared to a state-run site." Help us out here.

Mayor de Blasio: Yes, look, it's a very fair concern. I think we've all long since recognized that different levels of government aren't always doing the same exact thing, but here's what is the way through it. Anyone who wants to find a site, a city-run site, you can go to vaccinefinder.nyc.gov. If you prefer to go on the phone, 877-VAX-4NYC, the Health and Hospital site, that's our public hospital system and Department of Health sites are the ones where you can just walk up at any age.

There's dozens and dozens of them around the city. We're encouraging more and more of the other healthcare providers to start to do this approach too because we tried it, we really got great results. We've seen great results in other parts of the country that have tried walk-up approach, the convenience makes all the difference. You know what, New Yorkers are going back to being the busiest people in America, there's a hell of a lot more activity now, and let's face it. New Yorkers will do things if it's easy, and if it's harder, they tend not to. [chuckles] We want to make it really, really easy. The city sites are going to lead the way in that.

Brian: Do you still think that the city can meet its goal of five million vaccinated people by June because one of the things that I've seen is that even as there's more accessibility, according to health department data, the number of people getting their first shots is declining?

Mayor de Blasio: Well, let me go over the exact numbers because I do think we can get to five million. Look, we got a curveball thrown the last few weeks with what the federal government did with Johnson & Johnson, that was not part of our plan. Didn't help at all, but we still have two full months to go.

We finally have a situation where we have enough supply and it's easy to get an appointment. A lot of people were discouraged in those times where it was very hard to find an open appointment, I think this is going to be so much better. It's not about hesitancy, it's really about convenience, so just come forward, so here are the numbers. Right now we've got 2.2 million fully vaccinated adults, 3.3 million if you look at folks who've gotten at least one dose. The folks who have gotten at least one dose overwhelmingly will get a second. Right there, that puts you out about two-thirds of our goal.

That's 3.3 million follow through, the ones who still need the second dose follow through, you're right there about two-thirds of the way to the five million goal. We've got 600 sites, it's free. We're doing all sorts of amazing community outreach activities. Today, I'm going up to the Museum of Natural History, that is now a walk-up site, get vaccinated under The Whale. It's pretty amazing experience, and we're going to do a lot of things like that, that are going to be really compelling and positive fun. The Broadway site that we set up, it's now reached thousands of people from the theater and film and TV communities. We're going to be doing a lot more of that, and I think it's going to make a difference.

Brian: Before we get too far away from our previous segment with Judith Enck, the former EPA Administrator for this area on plastics. She said at the end of the segment, and she said it on this show before, that the only plastics that really get recycled, when you put them in your recycling are numbers one, two, and five from the city. My understanding is that the city requires more number of plastics than that to be recycled. Otherwise, you can get fined or your building can get fined, but she says other than one, two, and five, they don't really go into the recycling stream. In fact, what they do is pollute the recycling stream and make it harder to actually recycle the ones, the twos, and the fives. Is this an issue you're aware of?

Mayor de Blasio: I haven't heard that critique. I take it seriously, and I'll look into it, but I haven't heard that. I think what has happened, Brian, is that the nature of the recycling industry has been changing. Some of what worked before may not work now, and that's something we have to constantly reassess. I do believe though, at the same time, a lot of jurisdictions have encouraged the most universal approach to recycling to get people to do it and make it easy.

Recycling rates are still not what we want them to be. In part, because the more you have to think about it, the more you need to take up space or plan around it, the less likely everyday people busy, people with lots of things to worry about are going to be thinking about recycling. In New York City, you put your metal, your plastics, your glass all together of many different kinds. In some places, you put every kind of recycling, paper included, everything in one bin. I think those are all efforts to get people into the habit of recycling, and we still have a long way to go on that. It's a fair question that you're asking, and I'm going to go and look into it.

Brian: Let's take a phone call. Clint in Hamilton Heights, you're on WNYC. Hello, Clint with the mayor.

Clint: Hi, thanks for taking my question, Brian. Mr. Mayor, over the past week, you've been speaking out about the police killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis, regarding the verdict and Adam Toledo in Chicago. We saw you talking last week as well about Daunte Wright. About Adam Toledo, you tweeted, "When will this country stop killing Black and brown people?" You said, "Every police officer in America must be trained to de-escalate and avoid the use of deadly force," but meanwhile in our city, Kawaski Trawick was killed in his own home in the Bronx in 2019 by NYPD officers, Brendan Thompson and Herbert Davis.

Kawaski was cooking in his own home when the officers opened the door, the closed door of his apartment, broke the door chain, entered without being led in, escalated the situation every step of the way, tased Kawaski while he was standing still and talking, and then they fired four shots that killed him, all in 112 seconds, but this past Tuesday, the NYPD told the press that they found no wrongdoing in the killing of Kawaski Trawick, and they refuse to discipline the officers responsible for his murder. Mr. Mayor, you talk so much about police violence across the country, but when will officers Brendan Thompson and Herbert Davis be fired for murdering Kawaski Trawick?

Brian: Clint, I'm going to leave it there and get an answer to your question. Mr. Mayor, do you stand by the department's finding in this case?

Mayor de Blasio: I'll put it this way, Brian, I wanted to certainly know more about this. This case is not one that honestly I had heard a lot about previously, and I want to know more now. I don't have a reason to share Clint's analysis from what I've heard so far, but I want to be thorough. I'll certainly look into this and come back with more.

Look, there's lots of oversight. There's Civilian Complaint Review Board. There's internal oversight. There's a lot of oversight. I think when people suggest sometimes that it's open and shut, my experience is many use cases are complex and are looked at very, very carefully, but I will happily-- I think it's important to keep looking. So I'll look at this one and come back with more.

Brian: I was going to ask you about this case, anyway. ProPublica did some reporting on it. Apparently, according to them, there was one more experienced officer, happened to be Black trying to convince his colleague not to use force before Mr. Trawick was shot and killed anyway. ProPublica quoted a former NYPD detective who said they could have waited for help. This was a mental health crisis case, person was in his own home, they could have waited for help, according to this former detective, and just closed the door since department policy is to isolate and contain people in crisis. So there's something for you to look into.

Mayor de Blasio: No, I'll look into it. I want to comment on that. This is a really important point. First of all, we are increasingly working with a new approach, that if someone has a mental health crisis where there is not any evidence of violence, we are going to an approach where civilians mental health workers, paramedics, EMTs handle the case, not police officers. We'll have more to say on that in the days ahead, but that's been a promising approach so far. In the cases where there is some evidence that there may be violence or there's violence happening and police officers go to the site, we've been training thousands of officers in how to handle situations where there's a mental health element.

We definitely are training officers and de-escalation, you're absolute right, if it's a situation where there's not a threat to anyone else, the goal is to isolate the person and if backup as needed, to wait for backup. The department was very clear about the fact of the horrible killing of Deborah Danner a few years ago, protocol was not followed by the officer involved, and that officer is no longer on the force. There is a protocol that says, "If someone can be isolated," of course, you want backup, and you want to handle carefully.

I don't know all the facts of the case. Here we're talking about do absolutely want to get those facts, but I want to affirm the point, we've been teaching de-escalation, we've been teaching limited use of firepower. Look, this police force has had-- It's really important to look at these facts. A few years ago, in New York City we had under 30 gun discharges in adversarial setting in a whole year by the NYPD, on a city of 8.5 million people. There's been real progress in reducing the use of weaponry, and that continues. Any tragic individual case, we must follow up on and make improvements, but I want people to also understand that structurally, there's been very big change in the NYPD.

Brian: Structurally, to follow up on that, you said at your news conference yesterday that the city of New York does not have some of these tragedies we've seen in other places, but I've been getting a lot of reaction to that, and you know we could take calls here all day if we wanted to, from people outraged at the deaths of the hands of the NYPD of various people, the Trawick case.

We've taken calls for you about Delrawn Small. There's this week the $750,000 settlement with a woman who was kept handcuffed while she was giving birth and shackled in the moments after, and none of the six officers involved have been disciplined despite the settlement according to the NYPD discipline database, our reporter looked it up. Do you stand by your remark about that sort of, "This doesn't happen here"?

Mayor de Blasio: No, I want to be clear, Brian. I do stand by my remark, but I want to explain it because I think this is one of the places where we actually get to have a dialogue. In the case where the officers shackled the woman giving birth, that's just insane. There's no reason in the world that should have happened. The patrol guide was not clear on that. That's a mistake. It was fixed July last year, so now it makes very, very clear that that is a practice that is banned. That cannot happen in the future.

If the officers were not properly instructed and the patrol guide wasn't right, that is the fundamental problem here, but you talked about very, very different realities there. That case, obviously, the structure was wrong. Delrawn Small, that was an off-duty officer, that's gone through a lot of due process, it's going to go through more now with the CCRB. The case that we just talked about a few minutes ago is one that-- I'm not convinced the narrative you just heard is the whole story.

I want to get the whole story and then I'll be happy to speak to it more. I'm talking about the fact that there's 35,000 officers who almost never pull the trigger of a gun. That is different than a lot of other places we've seen in the country, the recklessness and the lack of care with weapons that we've seen around the country. I'm talking about the fact that every single officer has been trained in de-escalation, and officers here go through extremely intense complex situations and overwhelmingly do practice de-escalation effectively. You will always find some things that are not good enough.

I'm certain and we have to address every one of them and with a discipline matrix, it means more and more, and more than ever, if someone has done something wrong, and they did not follow the rules, they can be terminated, but I feel like a lot of times the questions like try to paint 35,000 people with one brush despite extraordinary movement that's happened in de-escalation and reduced use of force.

At a certain point, if we don't also acknowledge progress, I think people almost create a myth of Sisyphus problem here. They never want to acknowledge any progress and they always want to find the one thing that went wrong. I actually want to say no. NYPD has done a lot to improve itself, CCRB has done a lot to keep the NYPD accountable, and there's been a number of reforms even in the last year and that's something we should actually embrace.

Brian: Just to finish this thread on the settlement with the woman who was giving birth for $750,000. That settlement is paid and none of the six police officers involved were disciplined, can you explain that?

Mayor de Blasio: Well, I can tell you that the policy was wrong. Brian, I think you can relate to this, if the policy of your station was one thing, and you were following the policy and then it proves that it was not the right policy, you could say, "Well, you should have known better." Or you could say, "Well, maybe the people who set the policy should have known better." This was ridiculous. It never should have been that way.

The policy should have been explicitly clear. I think it's dehumanizing to treat a woman giving birth the way that she was, but that's not in my view about individuals as much as a systemic problem, that systemic problem has been resolved. If we find anything more about individuals making additional choices that were wrong, of course, they will be disciplined, but this one to me, the history was folks who were in the hospitals who were inmates or prisoners were typically kept in restraint. That was the norm for a long, long time. It should not have been, but it was.

Brian: Osa in Queens, WNYC with the mayor. Hello, Osa.

Osa: Hello, thank you for taking my call. Mr. Mayor, I am a parent of three Success Academy scholars. On this same show in 2019, you promised me specifically, that you would find us a permanent space in South East Queens for middle school. You gave us a space, a temporary space for one year, but in 2019 due to the pandemic, we were not able to attend school in this space. Fast forward to 2021, city agencies we are required to go back to work now in the buildings, in our respective buildings. You have not said anything concerning the permanent space for our middle school that you promised. My question to you Mr. Mayor is where am I supposed to send my children when I do return to work as a city employee?

Mayor de Blasio: Osa, you're right. I remember it about years ago, we found a space for that time. I don't have the update on the space situation for this coming September. I think I know that this is right, that Success Academy has chosen to go remote for the entire school year this year, so obviously, it's moot, but for September is the issue.

If you'll give your information to WNYC, I'll have our folks follow up with you directly and give you an update. We obviously work with every charter organization, either to find space in a public school building where appropriate, or they get state funding and city funding to find alternative space if there's not one in a public school building. Overwhelmingly, charter organizations have been able to find what they need. We'll give you an update on what's happening in the case of your school, and certainly work with you and fellow parents to get this resolved.

Brian: I think she raised the second issue there as a city worker. I know that your office has now sent out a message about the city's plans to reopen its offices in conjunction with many city office workers being required to come back starting May 3rd, will the city continue to allow city workers to work from home if their children are not back in school or daycare full time?

Mayor de Blasio: Brian, we have a really clear standard for our city workers. I want to make that clear to you, but I want to give you some breaking news that we have updated numbers on vaccinations among city workers. At this point, we've got 146,000 city workers fully vaccinated. 180,000 who have received at least one dose. The fact is the vast majority of our workers, it's about 80% are actually back at their jobs right this minute.

The folks we're bringing back are in the offices, and we believe it's going to really ensure that they can do a better service to the people of the city, we just know that remote has not been as effective in so many cases as having people in person, but it will be with all the social distancing and safety measures and often on a rotating basis some days in the office, some days out. Now, we need people to come back. Individual supervisors will always work with folks if there's a particularly extraordinary situation, but this is one approach for all city workers, the 80% have been at their posts. In fact, during the worst of the pandemic, our healthcare heroes, first responders, so many honestly, so many educators--

Brian: The people who work in the field who are not in office jobs, but this specific question here is from--

Mayor de Blasio: Yes, but this is a consistency point. People of all incomes, people of all types of profession. We need everyone back to serve the people and we're treating all types of workers with the same equality and the same respect. I think that has to be remembered here.

Brian: The question that we've been getting from a number of listeners and I think Osa from Queens was asking a version of this question is, if the schools are not open for five-day a week classes in person for their kids, then how could they be required to go back five days a week to their jobs?

Mayor de Blasio: Again, let's be clear just to make sure everyone's hearing for September, Chancellor Porter and I have been 100% clear-

Brian: Well, for May.

Mayor de Blasio: -it will be all kids will come back. Now, I just want to make sure because there's been confusion on this point. All kids back five days a week in September. Now what we've been having is more and more schools have been moving to five days a week, in fact, because of the opt-in and because of the three-feet rule that the CDC approved for elementary schools, in this case, a lot more schools starting Monday, will be going to five days a week right now. We've got a much better situation for five days a week. As I said, a lot of our city workers coming back will be only coming back certain days because of the social distancing and we'll work with anyone to do our best to balance their needs.

There's lots of opportunities being provided, whether it's five day a week school, whether it's childcare opportunities, a lot has been provided obviously for free. I'm convinced that for now through the end of June we can accommodate people. Then starting in the beginning of July, we have first time ever a summer program through our schools open to all for free. All grade levels. In the summer months there will be-- And those are five-day-a-week options in many cases, that will be available to all parents. That's going to be a different part of the equation as well.

Brian: Mullu in Harlem. You're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello, Mullu.

Mullu: Hi. Thank you, Brian. Thank you. I love your show. Thank you, Mr. Mayor also. My question, I want to make it short. I live in Harlem in HPD Building. Now, they're going to renovate the building. It was supposed to be this year, but next year because of COVID. They gave us a layout for how it's going to look. It's going to be the same size, very small apartments we have.

There are 13 empty apartments in the building. The 13 empty apartments are going to be bigger for the people who's going to buy, but we've been managing our buildings since the '90s and we ask NCP to give us the same equal size apartments for us and for the new people, but they refused. We are struggling with them. We don't want to-- The same same size. Very, very small size. Mr. Mayor, if you can help us, please.

Mayor de Blasio: Thanks for the call Lulu. Please give your information to WNYC. I'll have someone talk to you today. Let's see what we can do to help here. I think the most important thing, obviously it sounds like a little bit of a complex situation, but the important thing here is preserving affordable housing, preserving affordable buildings. Sometimes we do have to strike a balance of how that is going to be financed, how that's going to be sustainable. We always try to figure a way to--

The most important thing from my point of view is you and so many other people have affordable housing needed for the long-term and that's always the goal we're trying to achieve. Let's figure out in your case if we can do something to address your concern.

Brian: I think she wants the insiders who were there to get dibs on some of the nicer, newer renovated apartments in the building instead of them going to people outside. Karen on Staten Island, you're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello?

Karen: Oh, hello, Brian. Longtime listener, first-time caller. Mr. Mayor thank you so much. My name is Karen. I work for Farewelling, a New York City-based company that helps families plan a memorial service after they've lost a loved one. We're working with a family now in Staten Island who lost their son in January. They were unable to have a funeral then because of COVID. He was an avid fisherman and his favorite spot was in Gateway National Park. They really want to have a small memorial there on his birthday weekend in May.

We've contacted the Park authorities and they've denied our request due to COVID, but outdoor events are permitted all over the city and state now. Since people can even gather inside for dining at restaurants, we can't understand why in a vast outdoor public space we can't help this grieving family have a small personal tribute of just 20 to 30 people to honor their son. We're hoping that your team, Mr. Mayor can help us help the family by granting our permit.

Mayor de Blasio: Well, thank you, Karen, and please give your information to WYNC. I definitely want to help you. I think your case here makes a lot of sense that this family has been through so much and there's nothing worse than losing a child. If they have a vision of how they want to remember their child and obviously celebrate his life, we should try and help them do it. I think you're making a really good point. We will work with you and the folks from the National Park service and see if we can get this done because I do feel for the family. Thank you for all you're doing to help them.

Brian: We have about a minute left. One more reopening question. Manhattan Borough, President Gale Brewer, says it's time to reopen senior centers in the city, that the older population is sufficiently vaccinated by now, and "We know how to do safe spacing indoors," She says, enough that they can start up again. Do you agree?

Mayor de Blasio: We're getting there. There's something I've talked to the Health Commissioner about and talk to her. Commissioner for the Aging, Lorraine Cortes-Vasquez, and they're working closely. I think we're getting closer. It's still overwhelmingly the most vulnerable population. We are not out of the woods on COVID, we're not out of the woods on the variants. I think from the Health Department point of view, they'd like a little more time and a little more progress, but I don't think it's too far off. More to say on it soon.

Brian: All right. To repeat the breaking news from this morning from you, all city-run vaccination sites will now be open for people without an appointment, 16 years of age and up. How can people find out again, which are the city-run sites?

Mayor de Blasio: For the city-run sites, here we go. You can go to vaccinefinder.nyc.gov.

Brian: Thanks as always, Mr. Mayor have a good weekend. Talk to you next week.

Mayor de Blasio: Thanks so much, Brian.

Brian: Have a good weekend everybody. Brian Lehrer, on WNYC.

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