Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now to Mayor Adams's public safety agenda and some new polling that shows a downward shift in the way New Yorkers are feeling about Adams' response to crime in the city. My guest Harry Siegel has a column in the Daily News now with a headline, Crime is now catching up to Eric Adams' swagger. Though the number of some violent crimes came down a bit in April.

Notably shootings down 30%, that itself could be the headline, but the numbers are still elevated when compared with before the pandemic and elevated even compared to recent months in a lot of other categories. We'll get into it now with Harry Siegel, co-host of the podcast on New York City politics and affairs called FAQ NYC. He co-hosts that with our friend Christina Greer. He's a Daily News columnist and a Daily Beast senior editor. Hey, Harry, welcome back to WNYC. Always great to have you on.

Harry Siegel: Hi, Brian. Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Adams has been in office four months now. What's actually happened with the crime numbers?

Harry Siegel: You mentioned that shootings were significantly down in April compared to last April. Murders were down too by the way. That's a really good sign. However, the overall major crime rate has continued to go up and shootings, murders, and the overall crime rate are up really significantly since 2019. When Eric Adams was running for office he said, "I'm the former police officer who's reformed it from within and can restore public safety."

As mayor, he started to talk a lot about the many rivers feeding this crisis as a way of pointing elsewhere and I would say particularly to Albany. These bail reform laws that passed in 2019, took effect in 2020 and have been slightly rolled back a couple of times since, but it's still basically there. If your baseline is 2019, things look really bad. In February, New Yorkers really approved at what Eric Adams was mostly saying at that point about crime. He was plus 14 points in this Quinnipiac poll.

Now, it's May, three months later, he's at minus 17 points. That's a 31-point swing in three months. I think there's just this sense that things do not seem to be improving. Significantly, the reason murders and shootings are so important is obviously their impact on human lives. They're also just unfalsifiable numbers. As those continued to be incredibly elevated compared to where they were in 2019, it's seeming less clear that Adams has any path to fixing this.

Talking with Bill Bratton recently and with members of the NYPD now of some authority, they're skeptical that there's all that much space to turn things around, not because of bail reform. It became the symbol or the red herring, I would say, of this fight, but because of a broader justice system that really isn't equipped to remove from circulation, often by incarcerating, the relatively small number of New Yorkers who are consistently involved in shootings, either because they're shooting someone or because they're getting shot. What I keep hearing is that those people recirculate.

There's not much to be done. One other thing I say about this Quinnipiac poll that's important is 50% pretty much. I think it was actually half, 48%, of the respondents in the survey, said crime is the top issue facing the city. That was as much as everything else combined. There were only two other issues, a couple of figures.

New Yorkers are getting impatient with Eric Adams, who said many of the right things, but seems to have trouble executing. Then you look up and there's kids getting shot by stray bullets, there's police arresting vendors on train station and there's not a sense that the tools he's bringing to the table seem adequate to changing this dynamic and at a time when he's desperately trying to get New Yorkers back to the office and imploring them to do so, scolding them, get out of your pajamas, hasn't worked. The one thing he can really control is how safe it feels to take the trains, to go out, to circulate in the city.

To this point, I think disappointment is starting to set in although it's very early. I've thought from the jump he has through the summer when the numbers will inevitably go up, but we'll see how they are compared to last year and previous years and before the pandemic and the Floyd protests and bail reform. That, if he's not showing some real signs of progress at that point that the honeymoon is truly over. I'm hopeful the last month's numbers mean what he's doing, a lot of which is rebranding-- instead of an anti-gun unit, there are neighborhood safety teams that aren't anti-gun unit.

Instead of quality of life enforcement, broken windows policing, there's police looking for smaller crimes that can't be indicators of larger ones. Whatever name you call this, he's got a very limited amount of time left, either show some results or I think this Quinnipiac polls will not be an outlier, but a sign of where things are going that's very ominous for him.

Brian Lehrer: Is this 30% decline in shootings in April so unnoticeable in the neighborhoods that have a lot of shootings or is it just unable to compete with a drip, drip, drip of news coverage, which is focusing, I think, more than in the past, on individual crimes. There are always individual horrific crimes that take place, but now they lead the news on television. The New York Post sends out a notification tweet into its subscriber list every time something happens that looks like an outrageous crime.

I don't know if it's a positive trend that should be sinking in more to the public at large if shootings are really down 30% in April. 30% is a big number competing with that drip, drip, drip of, "Oh, my God, look what happened to this child or oh, my God look what happened to this old person."

Harry Siegel: No. I'll tell you why not. Not yet because we're talking about a decline from 164 shooting victims last April to 131 shooting victims this April. That's 33 fewer victims. The decline in incidents is a little larger. It's 20% in victims, 30% in incidents. Those numbers, anyone who tracks them fairly regularly understands that they do bounce up and down month to month and you do not want to over-index that in the short term.

Additionally, there's no question that the tabloids have focused on these stories and the evening news and that that is playing into this narrative. At the same time, you just have an overwhelming number of examples of people who are circulating, who I think reasonably most people would not want circulating. I would point to this Taco Bell worker, Edison Cruz, who gets into a fight with a guy there and his girlfriend goes out, follows him around the corner to a bakeshop, shoots him, shoots two other people in the process. He's a known ghost gun seller.

He's been arrested for walking around with basically a grenade launcher on his back or an incendiary launcher and a bulletproof vest a year ago. He has this long record and he's out and circulating freely as somebody the NYPD knows is there. Yes, there's always an example, but I always think of The New York Post as the stop clock test. The New York Post is always going to say things are nearly out of control and it's terrible. They did this really dishonestly for six years where de Blasio did a fine job of keeping the balance and found ways to reform policing, where the number of murder and shooting victims continued to go down.

That really did shift in the last few years of his administration and it continued so far into this administration. I think focusing too much on the meta-narrative of what journalists are pushing is a distraction from what most New Yorkers are actually seeing and that it's showing up in these polling numbers, which is things are considerably more dangerous than they were just a couple of years ago. No, this is not the bad old days of the late '80s and early '90s, but we've lost 10 years of improvements.

The numbers have been around 300, once under 300 for a decade, and now in 2020 and 2021 and we're on track in 2022 to have 500. That's a lot of human lives or murder victims that we're talking about and not just the question of how the papers are playing them.

Brian Lehrer: The stop clock test meaning The New York Post always says things are out of control, but even a stop clock is right twice a day. Maybe at this moment, they're right. Talk more about the 700 people, I think that was the number in your column. I guess this Taco Bell employee now accused, who have violent crime records, but you say they can't be kept in jail by the criminal justice system, that's not the 2019 bail reform law. That's something else.

Harry Siegel: These parts are very hard to separate. The impact of the 2019 bail reform, I think, has been exaggerated by both reformers and police promoters, if you will. That became a shorthand for a larger system. The question simply put of how many people and which people should be incarcerated. I was talking to somebody inside the NYPD was saying the cliche is you can't arrest your way out of a problem.

Of course, you can, it's a question of arresting the right people. Rudy Giuliani famously thought he was going to have to really increase incarceration rates to drive crime down in New York, to his surprise, and not really to his credit probably to Jack Maple and other people. He ended up driving those numbers down dramatically. While the incarceration rate actually started going down on his watch. It's significantly down now.

What you have is I think a generation of journalists that's locked into this story. There are all sorts of think tanks and groups now that are promoting consistently justice reform in good and admirable ways and finding individual cases of injustice. Those are getting rare. As many fewer people are incarcerated. Those numbers have gone up a bit over the last few years with the rise in crime, but they're nothing like they were even a decade ago.

At some point you do have people you want to have out of circulation who are very predictably going to be involved in violent and dangerous situations, either shooting someone or getting shot. There's the venn diagram of those two groups, as you'd imagine there's a ton of overlap. Who's been really difficult to get off the streets. We have a justice system, Brian, as you know where very few cases go to trial, where it's very difficult to identify who the bad or wrong actor is in any given instance. Even if that terrifying person ends up on the cover of the Post or Daily News. It's just difficult to pin responsibility.

The mayor said I'm the guy who can fix this. I think new Yorkers are getting impatient, understanding that to see if you can. I'd added Rikers by the way, which is a legitimate moral disaster and has been for years and decades, but you have this brand new report out, about the three inmates who died this year. The board of correction report a fourth died right after the report was issued expressing extreme concern.

Basically, they detail what happened. There were no officers around when each of these people died because guards just don't show up to work. The unions allowed for this, all of these different reasons. However, in this report, you have the medical staff saying they follow a protocol, the officer's union saying they did exactly what they're supposed to. You get a sense of how hard it is to pin responsibility in any given case when you're arguing by anecdote as the tabloids do for what's gone wrong, but on the whole, when you have this large an increase, and it's very difficult to say.

It's just the pandemic now, and we're going to just restore the previous norms naturally in the course of things when people get through this trauma and this tension. I understand Adams as the person who's claimed responsibility and has raised his hand, people getting frustrated quickly. That he's been unable to do that as difficult as it is in this system to actually achieve results or to point to the one point of responsibility or the one place where it broke down. Last thing I'll say is bail reform became a shorthand for that in a really clumsy and dishonest one.

This is an utterly decent idea that nobody should be locked up simply for lack of funds. Then became the way in which the police unions and other groups that had felt frustrated. Like they'd been politically wrong-footed, especially after the George Floyd protest used that as a shorthand to say, "See, they, they won't even let us go after criminals anymore." I think that that's too compact and dishonest. It's really unfortunate that took over the debate.

I do think Adams, however, he wants to engage with these issues. He said he wanted more of the bail reform undone rather than he got from Albany, which rolled it back slightly in this last session. Like the buck stops with him.

Brian Lehrer: This is WNYC FM HD and AM New York, WNJT FM 88.1, Trenton WNJP 88.5 Sussex, WNJY 89.3 Netcong, and WNJO 90.3, Tom river. We are New York and New Jersey public radio and live streaming @wnyc.org with daily news columnist, Harry Siegel, and his column Crime Is Now Catching Up to Eric Adam's Swagger at eleven o'clock. Are you listeners part of this?

What's reflected in the Quinnipiac poll of a sharp sudden drop so early in his administration of people who said they approved of Eric Adam's approach to crime so far now not so much. 212-433-WNYC 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer or any other way you want to enter this conversation. Troy in Brooklyn. You are on WNYC. Hi, Troy. Thanks for calling in today.

Troy: Good morning, Brian. Thanks for taking my call. I wanted to express the fact that, constantly in New York City and in this country, we advocate and we want certain things and we go hard for, one immediate solution. We wanted a vaccine to fix the problem with, the virus. It's not the solution we wanted to defund the police, the virus solution.

Brian Lehrer: The vaccine did a lot to save hundreds of thousands of lives-

Troy: No, it did

Brian Lehrer: -compared to people who didn't get it.

Troy: It wasn't [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: I don't wanna get bogged down in that, but it wasn't.

Troy: No, I understand that.

Brian Lehrer: It wasn't the magic bullet that something hoped on cases, but go ahead. Go ahead, Troy.

Troy: The bigger issue was health, and we never addressed that. People are still going to be not taken care of with the defunded police was a immediate response to a George Floyd incident. I'm a law enforcement officer and I've seen the transition even with bail reform. I thought that it made sense that people that were 16 and 17, shouldn't be charged or treated the same way as maybe as an adult. Maybe have some diverse diversion programs or something that can facilitate them change in life.

There hasn't been an overall structural change, whether it's in prisons, whether it's in the court systems to address people who are victimizing other people in the city. There are people innocent, hardworking folks that are constantly being victimized. There's stories that are being victimized. It's unfair because there is no solution because the person does something they get right back out. They're encouraged to do the wrong thing.

Eric Adams can't fix all these problems. I knew that. I wasn't the biggest Eric Adams fan, but I knew that he had a problem that he just couldn't fix because the culture and the city has changed, the traffic situation has changed. I said it before, there were going to be a lot of people that were going to start getting killed because of the reckless driving because you defunded the police. You created a culture where police were afraid to do their jobs, and now people are just riding reckless. People are dying. I did a lot of Vision Zero enforcement. It has nothing to do with cameras.

Police officers need to stop people. Now, the culture is people are not going to stop. We are not going to chase them. We are not even attempted to stop because now you end up getting more liability that the city and the people aren't for the police. You put yourself more at risk by trying to do your job. It's a cycle that I don't know when it's going to change, but it's going to take a long time.

We are creating new generations of criminals in the midst of all of this. It's going to be another when we see it bad now. The ones who are seeing it, the younger ones they're five, six and seven-year-olds who are seeing the older ones do this stuff are just going to be ingrained into the gang life, into everything that's going on now it's going to get worse

Brian Lehrer: Troy-

Troy: We haven't solved solutions.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for calling us with your experience and perspective as an NYPD officer and keep calling us. That is a very particular NYPD perspective. Harry, I wonder what you were thinking as you were hearing that creed occur, at least as Troy sees it. Did we lose Harry?

Harry Siegel: Defund was another political shorthand.

Brian Lehrer: Wait, I think you were cut off for a second, but I think you were saying something very important. We did not defund the police in New York. First of all, right?

Harry Siegel: The NYPD is extremely well funded defund, like bail reform, I think was a really unhealthy shorthand. Something very important. Troy just brought up is this increase in traffic deaths. Look from most people's perspectives. What you're trying to have is some orderly waste in which terrible and violent things don't happening, and that can be crime. That can be a car. It doesn't make all that much of a difference if the terrible thing happens and the traffic numbers have really been going in a disturbingly bad direction. Also, since the pandemic. There seems to be a shift in which a handful of people again, and again, we're talking largely about a pockets of aggressive young men, just don't seem to be interested in rule-following.

The violent consequences of this are life-changing and sometimes life-ending. The question is, what the city can do, including the NYPD, but certainly not limited to, to try and change those dynamics and get a hold of that in the short term as this is happening right now, as well as the generational solutions. There are not easy answers to that. It would actually be very helpful to have full control of our traffic cameras. The mayor and his new traffic Commissioner, Ydanis Rodriguez had been pushing on this.

It's not clear if Albany which controls the city will give that to us, because that helps identify the handful of really bad drivers who rack those tickets up with the same ones who are blowing red lights, who are during intersections, where people are crossing are injuring and killing people over time. The question is always how to focus on the handful of really dangerous people who may have a broader impact on the city without dragging everyone else in that process.

I do not think that's simple. I don't think it's just a question of talking about a defund or bail reform or those other slogans. It is finally a question of a result. At the moment, at least, it's been an ominous few years for that. As I said, the murder rate now, these are not the battle days, but we have not been here since 2010, same with the overall major crime rate, the traffic numbers are as bad as they've been in nearly as long our traffic death numbers. Clearly, some force needs to be brought to bear to shift these dynamics because they're not just going to resolve themselves.

Brian Lehrer: About the poll numbers, since it was a surprisingly fast drop in his approval rating on dealing with crime in this Quinnipiac poll, did you look to see how it breaks down demographically? de Blasio never cracked 50% among white new yorkers, I think ever, but was almost always above 50% among Black New Yorkers. Are we seeing anything like that?

Harry Siegel: What's interesting, first of all, Adam's overall approval rating is 43%, 37% positive according to Quinnipiac, and crime is clearly dragging those numbers down. I just want to stress, this poll was not simply all bad news for the mayor, it was also claimed, I don't think very credibly, but it's an outlier. When you go into the cross tabs of this poll, what's really striking is the crime concerns are really widely dispersed. It's the top concern of over 40% of the people in every borough.

Predictably, it's much higher in Staten Island, it's 69%. Since the others where it's between 43% and 55%. It's every age group, every racial demographic, and Republicans and Democrats, sharing many of these concerns. This doesn't seem to be as we noted, we saw with de Blasio something where white voters just never warmed up to him and other voters did. There seems to be a broader at this point, West racially distributed concern. Obviously, this is something Mayor Adams is the city's second Black Mayor, is correctly in his messaging and how he's approaching things very cognizant of.

Brian Lehrer: You know what? We're going to do something that we very rarely do. That is, let a caller on twice in the same show. Derek in Manhattan performed such a service last hour, explaining to our chief economics commentator from The Wall Street Journal, why the price of eggs is going up? That I'm going to let Derek back on this one. Derek, you're on WNYC again. Hi.

Derek: Thanks for taking my call. Sorry, I hung up early last time, I forgot to tell you guys about the avian flu pandemic, which entered Canada and the United States by the way and caused a culling of the herd of chickens. On this issue, police, issues in defunding, one of my strong points. Mayor Adams has a problem of dissemination versus recognition. I believe, in my opinion. Crime is related to the economy.

This was proven in the '60s and the '70s, somewhere between the Heller plan and On Monahan's investigation in the Senate, US Senate. Nobody seems to recognize that. Everybody keeps saying, "Well, we need to police this, to tamp down, or stop crime." Police only react to crime, they don't actually control crime being committed. Again, that was proven in the '60s and '70s, to a lot of statistical studies. The other point is, nobody has mentioned that I've heard in the last two years, bail bondsmen. That's the guys who are really pushing this thing about the anti bail reform because a lot of cops when they retire, they get into the bail bonds business and after extremely lucrative, and it's predicated on--

Brian Lehrer: Yes, so they want the bail industry to persist. Derek, I'm going to leave it there. Thank you again. Harry, we hear this from defund movement people also, that the police don't reduce crime, they only react to crime and arrest the bad guys after a crime is committed, but how much do you think that's right? Because certainly, when you talk to leaders of the NYPD, when you talk to politicians, they say, "Community policing," and if they're doing it well, they're developing relationships that wind up reducing crime? If you look at the numbers in ComStar and know where the crime hotspots are, you can reduce crimes before they start, what's real?

Harry Siegel: It's very hard to measure, and so everyone cheats these numbers, the same way they cheat the idea that there's a correlation between the economy and crime. In recent years, nationally, since 2019, violent crime and gun crime, in particular, has gone up, not just in New York. That hasn't tracked with the economy, and it hasn't tracked with the other crime numbers either. I think you need to be very careful about that.

The idea that we need generational investments, to change people's circumstances is unquestionably and completely correct, the issue is those do not pay off over three months, or three years, for the most part. It's always a balance between that and what you can do in the short term.

While it's very difficult to measure exactly what the NYPD is doing, that is having an impact on crime, New York's experience over nearly 30 years now, which was not the national experience, the crime rate dropped here was sharper. It started sooner. If there were clear policies you could connect it to, strongly suggest that there are things police can do without being everywhere, unable to stop every crime that have real impact.

Something I noticed last month with the subway shooter and his insane rambling, very unpleasant videos is, he was going on about how you can't have a carpet every turnstile, and consequently, there's no way to stop somebody who wants to commit tremendous damage. What struck me about that is it's the same argument that many of the carceral police abolitionist people, and some of the reformers, including those in elected office, had been making for years and in fact, mid after that shooting.

I would hope that some of them would take pause, think about the company they're with, in that instance, and what that might say. The NYPD is always going to over-promote and propagandize about what it's doing, does this make crime go down? Or if crimes going up, say, "This is why we need more resources." It's very hard to measure, but starting with the idea that the police can do nothing, policing is useless, and there shouldn't be some state monopoly on force. People should just negotiate this with themselves is, I think, just on the face of it, nuts. It's not a healthy point to start legislating from.

Brian Lehrer: Last thing, and we're way over time, thanks for all this time, in our last minute, just on this poll and where this decline might be coming from in part, there are incidents on the other side, like last month, city and state reported that most of the arrests made by the new neighborhood safety teams that are supposed to be looking for guns had been for non-violent offenses like drug possession and driving with a suspended license.

A recent bit of NYPD news that made some people really upset is the rest of Maria Falcone. This week, maybe you saw that story for selling mangoes and kiwis on a subway platform in Brooklyn. Does the poll give any clues as to whether his approval on crime is down simply because crime is continuing? Or also because stories like that, and fear of another Eric Garner, another Amadou Diallo, more deaths at Rikers Island which are happening, and those kinds of failures also contributing?

Harry Siegel: Brian that is a great question the polling does not give insight into that great question. The last thing I'll say is that if police are going to be stopping people who are not openly carrying guns to which the Supreme Court may soon allow them to do in New York they're necessarily going to be doing some form of pretextual stops. Where they're finding smaller documented offenses that they see because they suspect reasonably or otherwise that that person may be carrying a gun.

Doing that in an effective and decent way that does not turn into profiling and does not end up dragging people who don't need to be into the criminal justice system is the defining question. I think for whether or not the NYPD up against difficult circumstances is going to be able to turn this corner on Adams's watch.

Brian Lehrer: Harry Siegel, Daily News column is called Crime Is Now Catching Up to Eric Adams's Swagger. Harry, thanks so much.

Harry Siegel: Brian, thank you so much. I really appreciate.

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