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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on NYC and these continue to be very fraught times in New York City with the pandemic taking people's lives and livelihoods, with a spike in shootings taking people's lives too, with people who can, moving out of the city, and a lack of consensus over issues ranging from how to tax or otherwise, engage business leaders for New York come back, to how to police the streets to where homeless people should be housed as they break up in shelters to protect people from the virus.

We'll talk about the state of the city now and also continue on Kamala Harris as Joe Biden's running mate with Errol Louis, Daily News columnist and host of Inside City Hall on Spectrum News NY1 weeknights at 7:00 and 11:00. Hi, Errol, thanks for starting your day early for us. Welcome back to WNYC.

Errol: Absolutely. Always good to be with you, Brian.

Brian: We invited you to talk about city things, but you also do national political analysis, so what do you think of Harris, Biden's running mate, is it who you expected?

Errol: I think it's a smart and a savvy choice. I didn't expect one thing or the other because what politicians do is ultimately a bit of a mystery. In this case, I think it made a lot of sense, that this is somebody who is tested on the campaign trail, isn't going to shrink or wilt or fall apart under the pressure that she is sure to get, somebody who's actually good on the small screen. That's something to keep in mind in this pandemic election, that a lot of this is not going to be done in big arenas or outdoor rallies, but actually on the small screen, on your TV set, on your mobile device, and so forth, and she's exceptionally good there.

The first duty of a vice presidential running mate is to help win the darn election, and that is something she is clearly able to supplement. In the end, Biden's gonna have to win or lose on his own, but it's a really strong running mate that provides outreach, Brian, to a key constituency within the party. He's doing a lot of things all at once by taking her on and she's given evidence that she can deliver. Of course, that always remains to be seen.

Brian: The evidence that she can deliver, what are you basing that on since she never pulled above a couple of percent in the presidential primaries?

Errol: Look, she had a pretty ugly six-month run, six months or so when she ran for president, but look at her record before that. She's never lost an election prior to that. She really did quite well as San Francisco district attorney and a state attorney general and she won a Senate race. It's not easy to pull that off in the rough and tumble of San Francisco politics, in California politics generally. If you look back at some of those races and the people that she dispatched, that first race for San Francisco district attorney, she beat her boss, who actually was a very progressive prosecutor. This is not an easy thing to pull off.

There's a long line of people who would love to be attorney general or US senator from California, and Kamala Harris beat them all.

Brian: Good reminder. I want to ask you the same question that I asked Jamie Floyd at the end of my segment with her about how you anticipate a Kamala Harris-Mike Pence debate possibly going? Now, you and I have moderated some debates together, Errol, as you know, with local politicians. I can only imagine the contrast, not just in their speaking styles but in the way they go on the attack, in the way they'll frame issues. Have you started to have any visions of the Kamala Harris-Pence debate yet?

Errol: I think it's going to be a beat down, honestly. I think she's going to take him apart and he won't know what hit him. The Mike Pence style, if you look at it carefully, is that he tries to be aloof, he acts as if he's a little bit confused in this kind of all shocks Midwestern style. She's got like this high wattage smile and with a smile, she takes out the dagger and cut your throat, rhetorically speaking. We saw her do it to Brett Kavanaugh, we saw her do it to Bill Barr, we saw her do to Joe Biden. I don't know if there's a defense to that kind of a thing where somebody says something that is true, and tough, and factual, and says it with a big bright smile, how do you react to that?

The president himself, Donald Trump, will react with name-calling. He already got an early start on that yesterday. That's not the Mike Pence style, so I'm not sure what he can do other than shake his head a little bit and say, "Oh, shucks, I think you're too far to the left." "Okay, you think she's too far to the left, you are the head of the Coronavirus Task Force." Mike Pence is going to have a lot to answer for. He's going to have to answer questions that President Trump simply denies exists. He goes around denying reality by saying the reason we have so many cases of coronavirus on his watch is that we're testing so much. That's perfectly illogical.

He can pull it off because that's the Trump style. He says whatever he wants to say whether it's logical or not. Not so easy for Mike Pence and sitting across or standing across from a skilled prosecutor, it's going to be very hard for him to wiggle out of the many failings of this administration when it comes to containing the coronavirus.

Brian: Did you see Trump yesterday use some of this news conference time to urge Mayor de Blasio to hire back NYPD cops he fired? I don't think people knew who he was even talking about. The only high profile firing was of Daniel Pantaleo, the cop who put Eric Garner in a chokehold. Is that what Trump meant yesterday? Have you figured that one out?

Errol: Of course, not. Once in a while, and yesterday happened to be one of those times, I'll tune into Fox News. I don't know if your listeners fully appreciate what a complete closed system and alternate reality is going on among Trump followers. They've got just a whole different reality. If in that reality, the leader says, "Cops have been fired in New York," then people will believe that cops have been fired in New York. You can't find one, it didn't happen, there's no trace of it, it wouldn't even make his point, honestly, but the reality is very, very different from what people believe.

Trump informs his followers what they are to believe, and facts are secondary if they manage to sneak into the conversation at all. What the president is clearly trying to do is create some sort of image of an urban hellscape stretching from coast to coast, that only in the cities is run by Democrats, by the way. No other places. Baltimore gets a pass or one of these.

Brian: Of course, there aren't a lot of cities run by Republicans because the Republican Party almost runs against an Urban Agenda as a matter of principle.

Errol: That's right and look, there are a lot of different reasons why cities are isolated out there. The problem, of course, and this comes up every few years, is that cities are not mentioned in the constitution, cities don't have standing, cities don't necessarily get the federal funding that states get, where these little urban laboratories that are politically orphaned in some ways when you have an anti-urban president like Donald Trump and here he is. It doesn't matter that he's from New York, it doesn't matter that he knows what he's saying is not true, he wants to create this image that cities are bad places, don't do what the city people want, don't vote for the candidate that the city people want.

It's a pretty naked appeal to suburban distrust of the cities. That's his attempt to try and rebuild his flagging fortunes amongst suburban voters who every poll that I've looked at suggests they are turning their backs on him in state after state including the swing states that he needs to win.

Brian: Of course, there are a few republican mayors of cities, but it's a very rare thing, and if Trump wants to run on how badly Democratic mayors have managed their cities, if you look at the last 30 years, cities have been booming and crime has been declining in cities that are run by Democrats or Republicans. If you take a view that's longer than six months, the Democratic or other mayors of America have a pretty good record. Listeners, we're going to pivot to some city issues in particular now with Errol Louis, host of Inside City Hall on Spectrum News NY1 and a Daily News columnist.

We can take your phone calls for him on any of the things because, of course, these are tough times in New York City, not to sugarcoat any of that. Any of that or more of your reactions to Kamala Harris as Joe Biden's running mate, 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280. Errol, at a moment when crime is up but so our demands for police reform and a lighter touching communities, do you see opportunities for finding a consensus that solves either problem?

Errol: Consensus is probably too hopeful of a word at this point, but it can be done. Clearly, we can find some so-called 80% solutions, meaning things that would satisfy 80% of the city that they're both good reforms, and also will contribute to or uphold public safety. The key is to discover what they are, and then find public figures who are willing to go out and sell them. The problem that we face right now, in my opinion, is that people have retreated to their respective corners. Somebody like Commissioner Shea, who knows better, will go around saying things like, "It's bail reform" or "The courts aren't working and that's why shootings are going up."

He knows very well that that's not true. Once the data comes out showing that it's not true, he has no choice but to maybe rhetorically change a little bit, but he still calls the policies and sanity and so forth and that's no way to get to consensus. By the same token, those who say we have to defund or abolish the entire police department are not being realistic and are not talking about what even a thin majority of the city really wants. Cooler heads have to prevail, sensible policies have to be developed, and then the negotiation has to happen where we decide, "I don't necessarily want all of what my rivals are calling for, but I can live with some of it if I get some of what I want."

In other words, politics has to enter back into this. Regular politics, not slash-and-burn, kill-the-other-side sort of politics, which apparently, a lot of people seem to think is the way to do politics in this town. I think that's what leads to a sense of unease. It's one thing to see that we've got all of these big problems; we've got the pandemic, and we've got rising street violence, and we've got a huge crushing economic burden that we have to climb our way out of. All of that you could live with if you fought the people in charge, the leadership class, who are taking sensible steps toward resolving it. That's not happening and that's the thing. I think that leads to a certain amount of uneasiness in the city.

Brian: I wonder how you see this dynamic which has been getting more press recently. There are black members of city council who are not completely on board with the defund the police movement and even describe it, in some cases, as a kind of white, progressive colonization of the issue. Well-meaning though they may be, Vanessa Gibson from the Bronx, Robert Cornegy from Brooklyn, and others seem to have more nuanced positions on what kinds of police presence they want in their district. I'm curious how you see this dynamic within city council and its ramifications.

Errol: That's just real. I've been there on weekend meetings, sitting through hours on a Saturday afternoon with Cornegy and other local leaders, Laurie Cumbo who's my council member, talking through how to react to absolute tragedy. Kids who have been shot dead on the corner kind of thing. There's no way to get through that that doesn't involve some kind of intelligent discussion about how you, and where, and why you deploy the police. That's just the facts of it.

Now, people who have not been exposed to that, people who don't live in precincts, people don't sit through these kinds of conversations and talk with folks who are genuinely scared because there really are gang members on their corner, who threaten and intimidate them on a daily basis, people who don't understand that, yes, it's very easy to say, "I'm an abolitionist. We don't need the police. Let's defund. Let's cut them back. Let's talk about George Floyd." That's not reality.

The council members that you mentioned would be tossed out on their ear, or at a minimum, denied reelection, or a promotion to another job if they didn't take into account the very real daily issues that their constituents are telling them they care about. Not Twitter, not occupy city hall, but their actual constituents.

Brian: George Floyd is very real. That killing and what it signifies for, especially black and brown people generally, and what they go through, and what they see their kids go through in police contacts day after day in terms of fear of both civilian crime and fear of the police, no?

Errol: It's just a different conversation. I bet if you went to that neighborhood in Minneapolis, I bet if you asked people I bet you'd get 8 to 9 out of 10 who would say calling the police because somebody presented a phony $20 bill is ridiculous and a misuse of police resources. On the other hand, if you're talking about shootings, robbings, rape, domestic violence, you need the cops there. The idea that they should simply go away or be defunded is a nonstarter. I think what people have always understood, Brian, people who were actually in the front lines of this problem, is that police misconduct and brutality and a lack of policing are the same coin.

They’re different faces of the same coin. You can't solve one without dealing with the other. If you really want police reform, you're going to have to have a sensible approach to dealing with actual street violence because what's happening now, if these numbers that we've seen in the last few weeks continue in this direction, you're going to build a large political constituency for a backlash. Anybody who was here when Rudy Giuliani defeated Dave Dinkins knows exactly what I'm talking about.

You can build a constituency for a backlash against reform, and the way to do it is to be inattentive or unhelpful at a minimum to the actual task of public safety which is supposed to be the ultimate goal. The goal is not abolition, the goal is not defund, the goal is safety for all New Yorkers.

Brian: I'm curious how you see the politics around city council speaker, Corey Johnson in this respect because he's basically apologized for not winning more cuts to the police department in the new city budget. It's now coming out that he's been punishing old school leader style, some members of city council who did not support him on some things in those negotiations, and yet his fortune seem to be going down not up in what was such a strong position before the pandemic and before the police reform movement of the last few months in his likely run for mayor next year.

Errol: The retribution against council members, I think of that as like their business. They had some understanding behind closed doors or some sort of an arrangement about what would happen if you didn't take this vote or that vote, and him punishing them or directly their constituents, I suppose, is between them. That's gone on for a long, long time. You and I both remember what Peter Vallone Sr. would do if you voted against him, and what Christine Quinn, would do and what Gifford Miller, it is in the nature of the job that the speaker rewards and punishes those who force tough votes or don't come along with the agenda that's been set up.

True retribution, by the way, would be stripping people of committee assignments, which is not what's happening right now.

Brian: I was just going say, I don't think anybody remembers Gifford Miller, but that's another show.

Errol: [laughs] I do think though that Corey Johnson's in a difficult position as are all of the candidates. Look, every candidate for mayor is trying to do what they say in hockey, you don't go to where the puck is, you go to where the puck is going to be. People are trying to forecast where in 10 months the city is going to be on questions of criminal justice reform and associated issues. It's very hard to try and build a record that is going to sell eight months from now, nine months from now when you don't really know where people are going to be nine months from now.

You rely on your own values, your own vision, and you make an educated guess about what the right thing to do is for our city. Corey Johnson is trying to do that just like everybody else. You have to feel for him in just a very human way, it's very hard to figure this out. He has decided that the usual tools of politics, meaning, try to give everybody at least a little bit of what they want, that 80% solution that I was describing would work when it came to defunding. Some of the louder voices in the reform movement that's giving them 80% is not nearly enough. Giving them 95% is not nearly enough.

These are people who were protesting in a very rambunctious way going to people's homes and so forth demanding that they cut, not 1 billion, not 2 billion, but $3 billion from the $10 billion police budget, and if you didn't go along, then you were just the worst thing ever. They'd spray paint your house and all kinds of other crap. Those people are not going to determine who the next mayor is. I hate to disappoint them this morning on WNYC, but that's not the way it's going to go. More sensible people, I think, are going to try and figure out where things are heading and where we should go. Corey Johnson is trying to be part of that conversation.

It may make it harder for him to become mayor, but it's the right and decent thing to do. Try to hear everybody out, do what makes sense, not be guided by the passions of the moment, and try to figure out what is going to, in the end, especially when you're talking about public safety, what's going to keep people safe in their homes, and in their schools, and on the streets.

Brian: This is WNYC FM HDN AM, New York. WNJT FM 88.1, Trenton. WNJP 88.5, Sussex. WNJY 89.3, Netcong, and WNJO 90.3, Toms River. We are in New York and New Jersey public radio. We'll take a few phone calls for Errol Lewis from NY1 and the Daily News. Jay, on the Upper West Side, you're on WNYC. Hi, Jay.

Jay: Good morning. Thank you.

Brian: Oh, Jay, you're breaking up real bad. Give it one shot.

Jay: Hello?

Brian: Yes, you're breaking up. Let's give it a shot, go ahead. Give it a try, Jay. Can you hear me?

Jay: Yes.

Brian: Go ahead. All right, I think we're having too much trouble hearing him even though he can hear us. Let me go to Steve in Nassau County. Steve, you're on WNYC with Errol Louis. Hi, there.

Steve: Thank you for taking my call. Thank you for what you do. First, I just want to say that I'm so delighted that the text that her sole strategy was deep about because the number one thing that I feel is that so many problems that we have and we'll continue to have are only going to get worse.

Brian: You're talking about Kamala Harris being chosen as Biden's running mate, right?

Steve: Yes, that's number one, but I'm saying because now with her on the ticket and galvanizing the bait in such a way because the only way I feel that we may achieve our change is if we really have closer to a landslide and people willing to stand out for hours to exercise their rights to vote. I just want to express that and say thank you for taking my call, and thank you for what you do.

Brian: Steve, thank you very much for the kind words. Errol, of course, it has yet to be seen how much Kamala Harris helps to galvanize the Democratic base. I don't want to make a casual assumption that because she's a black woman that suddenly there's going to be this big surge of black women turning out to vote who didn't vote in 2016. It's certainly highly possible, but I don't want to assume it. There are other Democratic constituencies who underperformed in the turnout category in key swing states like suburban white women who maybe Kamala Harris has also been chosen to appear as safe to.

Errol: That's exactly right. Politically speaking, she has an assignment that she needs to carry out. I suspect that she can carry it out successfully, but she's got to get up every morning and she's got to do that. She underperformed with black voters all throughout the primary season which is why she's not the nominee. She's going to have to figure out what went wrong there and then turn that around, and reach out to people, and reach out to organizations and put together or at least not interfere with the building of a really good field operation that's going to bring out the vote.

You also suggest something that I think is worth keeping in mind which is that, she's got cross-cultural appeal in ways that we can't necessarily anticipate are going to work out on behalf of the Democratic ticket. She might be more popular with, say, suburban educated white women than Joe Biden. We don't know that, but it's entirely possible. You just don't know where people are coming from because she represents the modern multicultural America. You never know, she could be poison to millennials or they could love her. She could be great with suburban voters, swing voters, even some Republicans that want to maybe walk away from their party for an election.

We just don't know where it's all going to spin out and that's, of course, going to be part of the fun of the next 84 days.

Brian: Alex in Greenwich Village, you're on WNYC with Errol Louis. Hi, Alex.

Alex: Oh, hi. I live in the village. The NYPD has been clearing Washington Square Park just after midnight for the last several nights. Primarily, it seems to get the remaining groups of protestors to leave, but it also, of course, includes all the homeless people that I think normally sleep in the park. The park is, of course, technically closed in the middle of the night, but I don't remember cops ever intentionally clearing everybody with a large group. On Saturday, in particular, there were 35 officers from all over the city. There was some from a precinct all the way up from The Bronx that had come down to do the clearing effort.

I'm wondering if you know how this practice fits into the city's effort to help and provide aid to the city's homeless population during the pandemic and if there's indeed a new effort.

Brian: Errol.

Errol: It's a very good point. The reality is that these things are normally negotiated at the local level, and by local, I mean almost at the precinct level or certainly would say within a command where they'll say safer for Manhattan South or something like that, Midtown South. They'll say, "Look, here's what we're going to do. We're not going to strictly enforce the letter of the law, we're going to let people stay up until this time, and then we'll clear them out or we'll move them along." They've been doing that at Penn Station for 20 years. The complication it sounds like in this case is that if you've also got protesters there, it becomes harder to decide what the priority is going to be.

It sounds like from what you're saying that the priority is to get the protesters out of there, and then as is often the case in our city, people who are homeless get caught in between. The services that should be available to them, the intensive outreach from social services and other departments of homeless services, other places to try and get them a bed, get them some services, get them any other kind of help that they might need, it sounds like it's not part of the operation. Local leadership there probably needs to step up.

Maybe the protesters themselves might want to step up and say, "Look, we'll work out something with you. If you want us gone by two o'clock in the morning, three o'clock in the morning, that's fine, but you got to take care of the people who are here with us."

Brian: We will leave it there for today with Errol Louis, host of Inside City Hall on Spectrum News NY1, 7:00 PM and 11:00 PM every weeknight and a Daily News columnist. Errol, thanks.

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