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Brigid Bergin: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Welcome back, everybody. I'm Brigid Bergin from the WNYC and Gothamist newsroom filling in for Brian today. We are nearly eight months into the new administration of Mayor Eric Adams and City Hall is a much different place than it was a year ago. Mayor Adams maintains a packed schedule with a wide range of events.

Just today, he is scheduled to host a breakfast with advertising industry leaders, meet with interfaith leaders on Staten Island, meet with the National Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives director and deliver remarks at an event with Vice President Kamala Harris, and finally, he'll attend a celebration of Peruvian Independence Day. Wow. I hope he ate his Wheaties. That's a lot.

Of course, this schedule is always subject to change given the ebbs and flows of the city, especially if there's a serious criminal incident that takes place. Adams is known for showing up at the scene. As someone who ran for office on a pledge to reduce crime while also bringing the city back to life after the worst of the pandemic, the mayor is not afraid to say or do whatever he thinks needs to be done to accomplish those goals, even if that means saying or doing something that seems to conflict with something he's said or done before.

In the spirit of former mayor Ed Koch, how's he doing, particularly on the issue of public safety? Joining me now to talk about that are Jeff Mays, a politics reporter on The New York Times Metro Desk and Harry Siegel, editor at the news site The City, creator and co-host of the FAQ NYC podcast and a columnist for The New York Daily News. Jeff and Harry, welcome back to WNYC.

Jeff Mays: Thanks for having us.

Harry Siegel: Thanks for having us.

Brigid Bergin: Listeners, we want to hear from you. How do you think Mayor Adams is doing after nearly eight months in office? Call us at 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. What's changed in the city or in your neighborhood? What do you think about his new leadership style, what appeals to you, what surprised you, and is the city on the right track? That number again, 212-433-9692 or tweet @BrianLehrer. Jeff, you covered the de Blasio administration and now Mayor Adams, what would you say are some of the most striking differences between the two that you've observed so far?

Jeff Mays: Well, I think you hinted at it in your opening there, that the mayor is just incredibly active. He has several events today, but a few weeks ago, I think I counted, he had 12 or 13 events on his calendar. He has been out, he has been active. He has also tried to format this national image. He's been with the mayors of Chicago. He's traveled. He's been to D.C. He's testified before Congress regarding guns and the availability of guns. Frenetic, I think is a good way to describe him. He's been incredibly active during this time and that's certainly a huge contrast from Mayor de Blasio.

Brigid Bergin: Absolutely. Harry, there's frenetic, but there's also that bid for national attention. We certainly saw that from Mayor de Blasio, but it seems that Mayor Adams is going about it a little bit differently. How do you see that?

Harry Siegel: We just had 20 years with de Blasio and Bloomberg, of mayors from Massachusetts who absolutely hated performing the job and Eric Adams plainly loves that. He loves the national and local attention. That's a real difference. I think very much to his credit, he's showing up. He's saying, without setting real benchmarks or anything, but hold me responsible for baseline things that he's promised like fairly restoring public safety. The last polling we had, which is from June now, but it really shows this split, where only 29% of New Yorkers say he's doing an excellent or good job, a bunch more say fair, but 53% like his style.

I think it's very appealing to have a mayor who's a native New Yorker, who knows the city, who's of this city and who shows up, but the national stuff is a little worrisome. We've seen this before. Every living mayor has run for president prior to Eric Adams at this point. As New Yorkers are getting impatient for results to match the rhetoric and the swagger, the question is, and he's showing that he's busy and around this city, if he can keep his eye on that ball because at a certain point, talk alone is not going to satisfy.

Brigid Bergin: Harry, you put a really fine point on that in some of your recent columns talking about the challenges facing the mayor, particularly around his defining issue, which of course is fighting crime. The headlines, Crime is Now Catching up to Eric Adams' Swagger and more recently, Eric Adams Needs to Mind the Gap in Fear City. You started to get at this, but do you think his messaging is hurting him at this point?

Harry Siegel: Yes. Eric Adams, in trying to hold himself accountable, keeps pointing anecdotally at terrible and terrifying things that have happened and saying New York doesn't feel safe. He's doing this in part to hold himself responsible, but definitely in part to point fingers elsewhere. Just this week and after the whole thing with gubernatorial Republican candidate Lee Zeldin getting attacked and then trying to make this into an issue around bail reform, which has been Lee Zeldin's big issue as he's running against Kathy Hochul. Eric Adams out of the blue said, "We need a special session in Albany to address the problems with bail deform," as he says he's going to call it.

Very predictably, the governor and legislative leaders the same day said there's absolutely no chance that's happening. We could talk about the merits of bail reform, but separate from those, this is Adams, who said in an interview in June, that he thought he was going to have crime turned around by February. While shootings and murders are down pace-wise slightly from last year, everything else is up. He clearly hasn't made that turnaround and so it's a little distressing to see him pointing at things that are entirely outside of his control and demanding rhetorical change there rather than addressing what it is that he can be doing with the powers, which are pretty vast, at his disposal.

Brigid Bergin: Harry, you brought it up, so I want to take a minute to pause on what happened this week where Adams took this position that, as you noted, put him in the same camp as Republican congressman and gubernatorial nominee Lee Zeldin, calling for a special legislative session to address the state's bail laws. Let me play a little clip from a press conference earlier this week.

Mayor Eric Adams: I hope that just as we had a special call to return to Albany to deal with the ruling on right to carry, I believe that Albany should consider coming and revisiting some of the violence we're seeing of repeated offenders. We need to be clear on that. We're not talking about someone that steals an apple, we're talking about someone that has repeatedly used violence in our city.

Brigid Bergin: Now, as you noted, Harry, Zeldin has made fighting crime, reforming the bail law central to his campaign and yet, editorial pages, including the Albany Times Union, have said that this debate has become completely distorted. Specifically they write, "Critics of New York's bail reforms keep ignoring two fundamental facts about our criminal justice system. One, people are considered innocent until proven guilty and two, the purpose of bail is to ensure that a person shows up for court, not to summarily deprive them of freedom before trial." At this point, it doesn't sound like that special session is happening. Speaker Heastie essentially dismissed the idea in a tweet, but what's at play here, Harry, just to finalize this thought?

Harry Siegel: Bail reform became a shorthand for lots of other things. It's a really dishonest one and the Times Union is just fundamentally right about this. What bail reform meant is that people without money couldn't be held before trial where people with money would not be. That complicates things for prosecutors who have people they are very confident are guilty, who they don't expect to necessarily have to go to trial with when people are released, but talking about this only in terms of bail reform, insisting that's what has to change when the legislature clearly isn't going to do that and New York has rejected a dangerous [unintelligible 00:09:18] since the 1970s, is a way of shifting the rhetoric of the issue from what can actually be happening.

It's also a way of avoiding the court slowdown during the pandemic that just ground all of these things to a halt and clearly that's played some role in the rising crime numbers here and nationally. I do wish that we could stop focusing this conversation as the police unions have tried to do, Zeldin has tried to do and Mayor Adams intermittently tries to do and talk more broadly about having a system where you are having a predictable system where people who are doing things that are illegal have some expectation of what the consequences might be, the sort of people Adams is talking about who are not stealing an apple.

We don't have that system, but bail reform is largely separate from that, largely an issue with fairness, and using that as the shorthand, as also the New York Post consistently does, is a really distorted and dishonest way of getting at any of those issues.

Brigid Bergin: Jeff, you recently wrote about how activists of color are pushing back sharply against some of the mayor's anti-crime rhetoric and tactics. What are some of the approaches people are most concerned about and who are some of the people raising these concerns?

Jeff Mays: Sure, I think just to follow up quickly on the bail situation, there's just been no evidence that bail reform is leading to an uptick in crime whatsoever. Secondly, the legislature recently just passed some changes to the bail reform law that allowed judges to have more discretion in certain cases. There's already been some changes in the law to begin with and they didn't go as far as the mayor wanted.

I think the story I recently wrote about Black activists, a lot of them are concerned about the way in which the mayor talks about crime, about the way he focuses on good New Yorkers, bad New Yorkers, innocent New Yorkers, and I think they felt that because the mayor used his background as a police officer for 22 years and rising to a captain and also during his time as a police officer he often spoke out against discriminatory policing, was involved in an effort to reduce the use of discriminatory use of stop and frisk as well, that a lot of people who voted for the mayor really felt that he understood both sides of the issue, that he understood what it meant to want to stop crime, but also do it in a way that would not violate people's rights.

A lot of these activists feel like the mayor has a very powerful pulpit, but they don't agree with some of the solutions he's come up with, for example flooding the subways with police officers, or being much more aggressive in quality of life issues like subway turnstile jumping, or selling items on the subway, for example. There's a concern there from them, that these sort of practices and also the mayor's language could lead back to practices from prior administrations that led to large groups of mostly Black and Latino men being treated unfairly by the police.

They feel like because they share a lot of the same stories as the mayor and they come from the same background as the mayor, have the same experiences, there's just been an effort by a lot of these Black activists to step up, to speak out, sort of counter it to say that, "Hey, instead of just toughening the bail laws, what we should do is provide services to people that have interactions with the subway, with the criminal justice system.

The mayor recently mentioned this one case in the subway where a 16-year-old was fighting with a police officer as an example of why the bail reform laws need to be changed. Well, you talk to activists and other people in the criminal justice reform area, and their questions are, well, what happened to this young man after he had an initial reaction with the criminal justice system? Was he given services? Was he guided in the right direction? I think there's definitely an effort to counter the way in which the mayor talks about crime and addresses crime.

Brigid Bergin: I thought it was striking, your reporting also noted that there were certain white leaders in the city who seem potentially to be holding back from criticizing or challenging Mayor Adams who, of course, is the second only Black mayor in New York City. Do you get the sense that as time wears on that that's something that might change and what is underlying that?

Jeff Mays: Yes, I think certainly there has been an increasingly openness to some of those white progressives to be more open in challenging the mayor. I think his response from the public in terms of some of the polling, people are anxious about his promises to reduce crime. I think you're going to definitely see more people stepping up. I think early on there's definitely a willingness to give the mayor a chance, an opportunity.

He's still not a year in yet but I think as we see major crime increases, there's still a drop in homicides, for example, and shootings are actually down compared to last year. They're up compared to a couple of years ago, but I think as the mayor continues to struggle with that messaging on crime that I think that's going to wear off a bit and you're going to see more widespread criticism of him without fear from some of these activists of being accused of any sort of racial prejudice.

Brigid Bergin: If you're just joining us, I'm Brigid Bergin from the WNYC and Gothamist newsroom filling in for Brian today. My guests are Jeff Mays, The New York Times Metro desk politics reporter and Harry Siegel, editor at the news site, The City, creator and co-host of the FAQ NYC podcast, and a columnist for the New York Daily News. I want to go to one of our callers. Regina in Brooklyn. Regina has a policy idea for the Adams administration. Regina, welcome to WNYC.

Regina: Hi, I was telling your screener that I would really like to see the mayor use his relationship with Biden and with members of Congress and his national reputation to call on the federal government to reinvest in affordable housing because homelessness is not a New York City problem and the lack of affordable housing is not a New York City problem, these are national problems, and the truth is that the federal government used to invest heavily in affordable housing and that has stopped over the last several decades, but states and cities really cannot solve these problems by themselves. We need federal investment and I think that he should use his profile to push for that.

Brigid Bergin: Regina, thank you so much for your suggestion and Regina raises, certainly it was the perennial issue during the de Blasio administration, the issue of affordable housing and it's a reminder that public safety is not the only issue facing Mayor Adams or New Yorkers and it's not the only issue where some of his messaging has raised some alarm bells. First, Harry, any reaction to Regina's suggestion.

Harry Siegel: It's a great suggestion, whatever help we had just came with this pandemic aid. There is not more help coming in a lot of these NYCHA buildings. We're talking about a city within the city and 600,000 people who live there. Other cities tore those buildings down. We kept them up. The Feds stopped putting money in and this has been a huge and difficult burden on the city and the people who live there as buildings that had 60, 50 year lives have been there for 70, 80, 90 years.

It's a tremendous problem and yes, it would be wonderful if the Feds were to put money into that but I don't see any indicator that's happening. I will mention that Biden, of course, has just encouraged cities to put the remaining funds they have that came with the pandemic and won't recur into police, which is an indicator, I think, of how Democrats nationally are seeing these things.

A lot of this is very hard to straddle. Fear should not be the only issue, but it's difficult and yet 85% of New Yorkers as of June, and I don't know if these numbers have shifted, saying there should be more cops on the train and that includes 91% of Black New Yorkers from this Siena poll and Adams was very concerned about his own narrative about balancing fairness with safety, is trying to figure all this out and we now have this Supreme Court ruling.

We're going to have more licensed guns here soon, that's going to change how policing works dramatically, at a time when something like 68% of New Yorkers, I think, say they're really concerned about a terrible incident with a shooter targeting people because of their ethnicity or religion or gender or whatever else in their own neighborhood. Getting away from fear, we could be able to look at some of these larger issues, figure out where help might actually be coming, and significantly, what the second Black mayor and not accidentally, we keep getting Black mayors at moments of real trouble for this city. Good luck to you, what he can do when there is not going to be significant federal help coming and the outlook is likely even worse after we get through November.

Brigid Bergin: Jeff, do you want to weigh in on the affordable housing question and that sort of national context that Harry is laying out there?

Jeff Mays: Yes, I think what I find interesting about that is that the mayor has been really focused on crime, but there's a larger context and that many people believe that crime is not just the sole issue. There are underlying root causes behind people who commit certain crimes and certainly, a lack of clean, safe, affordable housing is often one of those issues. I think going back to my story, that's what some of those Black activists want the mayor to focus on. They want a bigger focus on the underlying issues that most people who study this believe can help drive crime, but that can actually reduce crime, providing people with opportunities, jobs, improving the educational system, safe, affordable housing.

Those are things that will reduce some of the issues that we're seeing in this city. I think the mayor is struggling a bit with that message. He certainly talks about the need for affordable housing. He was pushing the idea of affordable housing trusts for NYCHA, which was approved, but certainly, if you want to address crime, you have to address the horrible conditions in public housing where you have a minimum of 400,000 to 500,000 people living.

Brigid Bergin: I want to bring in another caller, Brian from Queens. Brian, welcome to WNYC.

Brian: [unintelligible 00:21:23] this is my first time. Thank you for all you do. The point that I wanted to make is that bail reform really is the result of the court systems not being fully funded, fully staffed, the lawyers, both defense and prosecution, there aren't enough of them to do the job. The Sixth Amendment of the Constitution guarantees a public and speedy trial, but that's not happening. You have people like [unintelligible 00:21:53] who were professing their innocence for three years and never got a trial. There are a lot of people who plea out just so that they can get the whole thing over with and they're innocent. What we need is we need what the Sixth Amendment calls for.

Brigid Bergin: Brian, thank you so much. I know you said you were a long-time listener, a first-time caller, so welcome. Thank you. Please call us again. Keep coming back to that conversation about bail reform, which I think we are going to continue to be talking about from now through certainly November and potentially beyond. I want to come back for a moment to this question about housing in the city, and specifically, the other dimension to this is the right to shelter and what we are seeing at our city's shelter systems.

Jeff, you reported this, about how Adams has made some pointed comments at one point saying that this was the result of states sending asylum seekers here to New York. What did you find in your reporting there?

Jeff Mays: Last week the mayor talked about how the shelter system was struggling in part because there had been an influx of 2,800 and then he raised that number to 3,000 asylum seekers who have been sent here from Texas and Arizona, been sent to D.C., certainly. The governor of Texas has admitted. The mayor said a lot of those people were finding their way to New York and they were overwhelming the shelter system. There were reports that some families had to sleep in the homeless intake center, which is something that the city has always tried to avoid over the last several years.

The mayor said, "Look, the system is overwhelmed. We're seeing this influx." He called for president Biden to send resources so that they could help house some of these individuals. The issue with that was a lot of advocates felt like while there is some anecdotal evidence, definitely of an uptick in asylum seekers in the city, I talked to folks at Catholic Charities who help those people who are seeking asylum. They are seeing more people being bussed throughout the country.

There's also the larger issues at play with the city's homeless system, which is an inability to build enough housing that would allow people to leave the system quickly, that would free up space in the system. There's also some staffing issues as well. There was some concern about the mayor's remarks looking at the increase in asylum seekers as part of the problem with the shelter system when there are long-standing issues that have made it difficult for people who are in trouble to find housing in the city.

Brigid Bergin: Harry, I want to come to you on this question in just a moment, but I've got to do a little business, which is our legal ID, 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 Toms River. This is New York in New Jersey Public Radio. Harry, picking up on the thread that Jeff was talking about. The city just reported that despite this crowding in these shelters, for all the many reasons that it is likely to be caused by, the city's also canceling its plans to build more shelters. How is that impacting city neighborhoods and how does that connect with some of the messaging from Adams about spreading the burden in some of the fairness for addressing what are citywide problems?

Harry Siegel: Greg Smith has a really wide story about how homeless shelters are overflowing. Most of them are in poor areas despite these promises to fairly distribute them around the city and wealthier neighborhoods have been very successful in keeping shelters up. The shelter numbers have been going up, the number of people seeking shelter, both families and single men since the start of the year, steadily. This plainly precedes whatever is happening with asylum seekers.

Adams speaking of buck passing is plainly trying to conflate the two. He had this emergency press conference and then they put it out, all caps, MAYOR ERIC ADAMS PROVIDES UPDATE ON ASYLUM SEEKERS. He said, "This is what's unprecedented and this is the emergency." They don't even have a solid number and it doesn't seem like that is the only thing, or even necessarily the main thing that's going on. By the way, families, it's not just that the city tries to avoid putting them there. The city is legally obliged to give them safe, sanitary, and decent conditions.

If you show up to an intake center with your family before 10:00 PM, they have to find you a place to stay that day. This is the first time since 2014, at least according to [unintelligible 00:27:24] and Greg Smith's reporting, that that hasn't happened. There's clearly something happening with asylum seekers. The city does not seem to have a full handle on it, somewhat understandably. We're a sanctuary city as Adams was [unintelligible 00:27:37] know the number because we're not asking people about their status.

Again, like with bail reform, pointing to the asylum seekers here seems to be a way of avoiding the bigger issues at play. As that last caller mentioned, with these public safety and criminal justice concerns, a lot of this is even prior to the pandemic, prior to bail reform, and then undoing parts of bail reform twice, which the legislature has already done as Adams and others are pushing for more.

We simply don't have a system that fully respects the Sixth Amendment. It only works if most people plea out. It only worked for a long time if judges who weren't allowed to consider dangerousness used cash bail to implicitly do so. "Well, this guy seems like a real bad guy. This is his second gun case, so I'm going to set a very high cash bail." That had been the cheat code. It would be very helpful with this mayor who's from New York, who understands a lot of this, who really wants to succeed if he would stop finding these opportunistic framings that actually distort the issues and the problems that he's trying to solve and that New Yorkers are concerned about.

Brigid Bergin: Well, we have about a minute left in this segment. I could not have a conversation with two politics journalists without asking you a question about the upcoming election. Jeff, Mayor Adams, do you see a role for him in this August 23rd Primary or the November general election? He's making a handful of endorsements. He just endorsed Liz Crowley in the 59th State Senate District. Of course, he's backed Governor Hochul. Is this good or bad for some of these candidates?

Jeff Mays: Yes, I think certainly the mayor does have a strong base in the city of middle class, working-class Black, Latino, maybe more moderate voters as well that if you're someone like Governor Hochul, who is not as well known, who is running for her first full term, you certainly would want to tap into that base. The mayor did endorse her in the primary and I know it was an endorsement that she definitely sought and probably will seek to utilize as she runs against Lee Zeldin in the November elections.

Brigid Bergin: Harry, same question very quickly to you.

Harry Siegel: I think it helps Hochul in particularly certainly to have the mayor, just listeners, show up, vote, vote early if you can, check your polling site, show up on election date because right now, I am worried that the number of candidates is going to actually outnumber the number of voters in the second primary of the year.

Brigid Bergin: That is a dark thought, but we're going to have to leave it there for today. My guests have been Jeff Mays, The New York Times Metro desk politics reporter, and Harry Siegel, editor at the news site, The City, creator and co-host of the FAQ NYC podcast, and a columnist for The New York Daily News. Since we're talking about elections, one more quick plug since on Tuesday I will be co-moderating a debate with NY1's Errol Louis for the 12th Congressional District Primary.

Hear what Congress members Jerry Nadler, Carolyn Maloney, and Attorney Suraj Patel, where they stand on the issues. You can hear that Tuesday night starting at 7:00 on WNYC or stream it on wnyc.org. Harry, Jeff, thanks so much for being here.

Harry Siegel: Thanks.

Jeff Mays: Thanks for having us.

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