Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Well, this weekend saw more of headline-making violent crimes in New York City and ones that can also bust people's stereotypes of who criminals and victims tend to be. If you fear people experiencing mental illness and homelessness randomly pushing you onto the subway track, say, this weekend New York had somebody randomly killing homeless people while they were asleep on the street. I'm sure you've heard about that. Three so far, according to police, in addition to another two victims they think he killed in Washington DC.

If you think of violent crime as being perpetrated mostly by young men of color in economically marginalized neighborhoods, Mayor Adams says 80% of the shootings are in just 30 of the city's precincts, well, this weekend there were two knife attacks at the museum of modern art by a 60-year-old white guy. Both the attackers remain at large as of now. Perhaps, mental illness and extreme times is a common thread. We'll see. As difficult as it is to pigeonhole acts of violence, so is it difficult so far to pigeonhole the city's new mayor who is a uniquely unique political personality. Here's Adams yesterday on the murders of the people sleeping on the street.

Mayor Adams: The case is a clear and horrific intentional act of taking a life of someone that appears because he was homeless. Two individuals were shot while sleeping on the streets. Not committing a crime, but sleeping on the streets.

Brian Lehrer: An ally there of people experiencing homelessness, who wouldn't be in this situation, but here is Adams recently on unhoused people who resort to finding shelter on the subways.

Mayor Adams: There are rules. There are rules to ride in the system. Andy Byford, the former head of the system when he came here and did a tour, he says, "You all let people sleep on your trains? You let people live on your train? What is that about?" We got so used to being dysfunctional that it became the normality. Well, I'm not a dysfunctional mayor.

Brian Lehrer: Talking about people taking refuge on the trains as being a sign of a dysfunctional city. Two faces of Eric Adams, two sides of Eric Adams, a deep dive article about Adams in Politico begins by saying, "He has more contradictions than most politicians, and that when you believe as Adams does, that your mind can create its own personal reality at a subatomic quantum level than endless versions of the self can and do exist." Those are the words of political reporter Ruby Cramer, who will come on with us in a couple of minutes and join WNYC and Gothamist reporter Elizabeth Kim, who joins us now. Liz is covering the mayor and her articles include one called Why Eric Adams Faces a Far More Difficult Test than Previous Mayors in the War on Crime. Hi, Liz, thanks for joining us this morning.

Elizabeth Kim: Good morning, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Before we get into any political analysis of the mayor with Ruby Cramer from Politico joining us, there's, obviously, an emergency situation right now for anybody living on the streets of New York city, because that apparent serial killer is still on the loose. Apparently, people are most at risk right now when they are asleep. How can anyone even get some rest? What's the latest you know on the search for the killer?

Elizabeth Kim: What we know so far is that the suspect is still at large and it's an ongoing joint investigation between federal authorities and also police in New York City and Washington. Coincidentally, the mayor actually is in Washington today for a conference organized by the National League of Cities. I imagine he'll be getting briefings there and, hopefully, there'll be some news on the investigation and the authorities can find this suspect.

Brian Lehrer: We played the clip of the mayor yesterday condemning the crimes. He's also urging unhoused people to start sleeping in shelters right away if they're out on the street at least for now while the gunman is on the loose. How tall an order is that though, either for people who have found the shelters dangerous themselves or for the city to actually accommodate?

Elizabeth Kim: It's a very tall order. We know for the last two weeks the city has been sending teams of outreach workers. They are a combination of police and social service workers, to have conversations with people that they find sleeping on the subways. What we know is that they may be speaking to as many as, perhaps, making contact with as many as 100 people, but only a very small fraction wind up taking them up on the offer of shelter. It's a combination of reasons that we hear. They don't feel safe, as you said, in the shelter system or they don't like the rules that a lot of the shelters have.

Brian Lehrer: Right. In fact, I heard a stat yesterday that Adams' push to get people out of the subway system as their shelter is ongoing now or it's at least begun, but only 22 people have been moved into other facilities so far off the trains. Is that proving a harder task than they thought it would be or is it just too early to look at any numbers?

Elizabeth Kim: It's both. First of all, this is not a new initiative. At the end of 2019, Mayor de Blasio announced a plan to end street homelessness. What he did then was it was a $19 million effort to get more unhoused individuals off the streets, very similar to what Adams is doing now, having outreach teams have conversations with homeless individuals. I think the criticism that we're still hearing to this day from homeless advocates is that such an effort really needs to be matched by a commitment by the city to create more affordable housing and specifically it's housing for those in the lowest income brackets that can capture people who are unstably housed, or very vulnerable to becoming homeless.

At the same time, I think outreach workers will say that this is not a process that they talk to someone and they bring someone in. It doesn't work like that. They need to have several multiple conversations with them. It's about building trust to get people to accept city services.

Brian Lehrer: One other thing before Ruby Cramer from Politico joins you with her very interesting article. Today is the first day that those controversial new partially plain clothes anti-gun units are supposed to be deployed in those selected 30 precincts with the most shootings. You've reported on Adams wanting to invest in communities of color to address the many rivers, as he calls them, that feed into violent crime. Are we seeing that in a meaningful way in the first budget proposal that he released recently?

Elizabeth Kim: We are, although I think policy experts still question whether it's a sufficiently large investment on his path and also if it's sufficient bold enough too. I'll give you an example. On Friday, he announced the expansion of the city summer school program. He's going for 110,000 slots for kids in K through eight. Now that's 10,000 more slots than the prior year and it's also in combination with his effort to grow the city's youth employment program.

These are two existing programs. He's not really reinventing the wheel here, but he is expanding on something that experts do like and do believe can have an impact because the end goal is to give vulnerable youth the support, the jobs, the education they need so that they're not susceptible to pursuing a life of crime.

Brian Lehrer: In just a minute, Ruby Cramer from Politico will join us on a very long deep dive into the idiosyncrasies of Eric Adams. In fact, she calls him probably the most idiosyncratic mayor New York City has ever had. It includes that line that I cited in the introduction about Adams believing that your mind can create its own personal reality at a subatomic quantum level, therefore endless versions of the self can and do exist.

I'll ask Ruby if she wrote that line or if that's something that Eric Adams has actually said, and we'll take your calls for Ruby Cramer and Liz Kim as well at 212-433-WNYC on the spate of murders of homeless people sleeping on the street or anything else about the mayor. 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer as we continue after this.

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Brian Lehrer in WNYC with WNYC and Gothamist reporter Elizabeth Kim, who's covering Mayor Adams and now Ruby Cramer from Politico who has that deep-dive article on the mayor that I mentioned before the break. Ruby, welcome to WNYC. Thank you for coming on.

Ruby Cramer: Hi, Brian. Hi, Liz. It's really nice to be here.

Brian Lehrer: That reference that I read from the lead paragraph of your article on Adams, believing your mind can create its own reality at a subatomic quantum level, is that language that he actually uses or did you just put something that way?

Ruby Cramer: I put it that way, but it's very closely drawn from what Adams has talked about in the past. I'm glad you pulled out because I am a little obsessed with it. Adams has read several books by a neuroscientist and lecturer named Dr. Joe Dispenza. In particular, one of his favorites is the 2017 book Becoming Supernatural. He actually ended up recommending it to his current Chief of Staff Frank Carone when the two were becoming close early on in their friendship.

He said on various podcasts and stuff, citing this work that-- Essentially, the short along of it is that you can create your own thoughts and therefore create your own reality. He has talked quite a bit about doing this work through meditation. He said, "I put in my existence what I want through my thoughts, and I can manifest things." I thought it was a perfect encapsulation of how in his world all these many things can be true at once because he has fashioned this reality to allow space for everything. To answer your question, it's drawn very closely from the work that he has read and passed around among his friends.

Brian Lehrer: We know he's changed politically in various ways over time. He was a Democrat, and then a Republican, and then a Democrat again. For all the mercurialness and unpredictability you suggest there, you do also write that he radiates a palpable sense of evenness. Never too low, never too high. How does that fit together with somebody who keeps reinventing himself?

Ruby Cramer: It doesn't. I think one of the things that I felt about Adams going into working on this piece was here's a guy who has all these bombastic, brash occasionally, one-liners for the camera. I would see during the mayoral race all these tweets pop up from the New York City press corps, the latest wild thing that Adams says. He has a great way with words, and some of his quotes I'm sure are very well known among your viewers.

Following him around for a little bit of time last month, I was expecting him to be this high energy, backslapping, I don't know, maybe like a Terry McAuliffe, or Bill Clinton type politician, where they're just feeding on the energy of people and are living for that attention. I found instead that he, obviously, takes clear joy in the job and is having fun with it, but he is very level.

It's just operating on this lower frequency and never saw him get frustrated. I never saw him get worked up, I guess, in a positive or negative way. It was just very even. He just went throughout his day. He also described it to me, though this didn't make it into the article as, "When I know what I need to do on any given day, I just go into autopilot." That was my observation of him. He just moves through his day, and it's a lot more even than I was expecting.

Brian Lehrer: You refer to him approaching his job methodically like a police officer, you say, at the same time that you refer to observers not being sure where he'll come down on any specific policy issue. Liz Kim, as someone who covers the mayor day-to-day, and realizing he's only been in office two and a half months, how do you see him on a scale of, let's say, evenness to unpredictability?

Elizabeth Kim: I would say that in terms of his overall message, he's not wildly unpredictable, but I think what makes the press corps want to cover him very closely is that he's very much an off-the-cuff politician. He's very willing to improvise. If he's walking, he's willing to have a conversation with that person, and you just don't know where it goes. He creates this suspense.

I will though point out that last month, it feels like a really long time ago, but one thing that he did say that I think caught all of us more off guard than what he usually says is he complained that his coverage was shaped by the fact that the political press corps is largely white. The insinuation was that he wasn't covered fairly. That really did come out of nowhere because that was a press conference that was about the summer jobs employment rollout so it was a very big policy event.

He, basically, undermined his own press conference to issue this complaint. I think a lot of people in the press wanted to have a further conversation about that, but then, lately, he doesn't allow a lot of questions. That cut it short, but it made headlines the next day, and it spurred this debate about does Mayor Adams feel that the coverage is racist? The press corps is largely white, and what about that? Things like that, I think, can happen with this mayor, which does make him- and he's very much aware of it. He's constantly telling the press, "You guys are going to love covering me," because I think he is aware that what he says will make headlines.

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 Toms River. We are in New York and New Jersey public radio streaming live at wnyc.org with our Elizabeth Kim who's covering Mayor Adams, and Ruby Cramer who wrote a deep dive article about the mayor for Politico. Let's take a phone call. Jennifer in Fort Ann, is it, you're on WNYC? Hi, Jennifer.

Jennifer: Hi, how are you? Can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: I can hear you.

Jennifer: Great. I used to work for BRC in the southern tip of Manhattan, as you may know, in a homeless organization and our findings and other non-profit homeless organizations was that 74 touches, a word I don't like but, interactions with homeless men and women were required on average, to get them off the street. These are by seasoned homeless folks who really understand these people, and who get to know them on a first-name basis over the years, 74 interactions. It's not a couple. It's not many. It's 74. That was a few years ago. I don't know what it is now, but I want listeners to understand these folks are ignored to help. They have found that the "help" they've gotten has not been helpful at all. Their inclination is to go it alone.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Liz, if that number 74 interactions is anything close to accurate, it really is an indication of the difficult situation that the city finds itself in trying to get people off the street for those folks on protection when there's a serial killer targeting sleeping homeless people on the loose or for any other reasons, and the difficult situation those people experiencing homelessness are in if they're so resistant to official intervention.

Elizabeth Kim: Yes, that's correct. That is part of why Adams faces such a difficult task here. He's trying to get the city back post-COVID. He's trying to get people back to work. He needs to assure people that public transportation, which is the lifeblood of the city, is safe. He wants to also provide help. He doesn't want people living in the subways, as he said. It's not a place for people to live, and he wants to get people who need services like mental health assistance. He wants to get that to him too, but as the caller said, this type of outreach and this type of work takes time, and especially to build the trust in a system that many people feel have failed them over the years. It's going to be a long haul. I think that that is what the mayor increasingly needs to reckon with.

Brian Lehrer: Ruby, your article mentions that he likes and is liked by both his former predecessors most recent predecessors, de Blasio and Bloomberg who happened to repel one another, as you say. Do you have a sense that Adams connects with each of them in different ways so that his politics are broad enough to encompass the priorities of both?

Ruby Cramer: I think that's a really good question. I think with Bloomberg, he has talked about just the smart efficient management of the city and with de Blasio there may be more of a personal connection. I spoke to de Blasio for the piece, and he said that the two had developed a Brooklyn focus "outer borough" worldview type of bond. De Blasio who has a way of bringing his wife Chirlane McCray into every conversation said that Adams reminded him of his wife in a way and in a sense that both people have been part of struggles for change for a long time.

That seems to me to be a more personal connection. I do think the relationship with de Blasio is more interesting in that it really does stretch our ideas about what it means to be moderate versus progressive. I know de Blasio has his critics on the left and plenty of them, but he still came into office with a early vision of what it ended up meaning to be a progressive Democrat nationally over the years that followed.

I think his relationship with Adams can maybe show how some of those ideological differences can potentially be bridged. What de Blasio is saying is that, "Let's not fall back into this false choice conversation about whether or not we want order versus civil liberties." Obviously, the vast majority of people do want both and I think he's saying that Adams is in a unique position to be able to bridge that gap.

Brian Lehrer: Liz, I think that relates to the article that I was interested to see on your Twitter feed this morning that for all the stories you've done on the mayor since he took office, you pin near the top of your Twitter feed the one called Why Eric Adams Faces A Far More Difficult Test Than Previous Mayors In The War On Crime and reasons include the economic and other stresses of the pandemic plus the deincarceration movement, which was not a thing really when Rudy Giuliani took office, at least it was not a politically prominent thing. How would you compare this moment to what mayors Giuliani or Dinkins faced when they came in during much more violent times? We should remember, they were much more violent times in the 1990s.

Elizabeth Kim: Right, that's very important to point out. New York City is nowhere near the high point of 1990. There were more than 2,000 murders that year. In New York City, last year, there were around 488 murders. We're not at that type of crisis. At the same time, what we know from what Giuliani accomplished in 1990 when he was able to bring down crime is that it comes at a cost. More people were sent to jail for misdemeanors, there were many stop and frisks in communities of color. Those outcomes are no longer acceptable to most New Yorkers.

That will be the challenge for the mayor. I think the mayor himself has acknowledged that. During the summer, his campaign mantra was very much public safety is a prerequisite to prosperity. Then, more recently, and maybe even later in his campaign, he started to stress that it's not just public safety, but it's public safety and justice. Those two things are the prerequisite to prosperity. We will see how that shakes out. I think that that is still an open question whether he can accomplish that.

Brian Lehrer: Whether he can be the missing link politician on those what sometimes appear like competing priorities although if you look before the pandemic, with all the reforms, de Blasio was making and arresting fewer people for small crimes and the Rikers population was shrinking and stop and frisk Bloomberg style had been ended. Crime was still going down until the pandemic started. Let me take one more call because Earl in Rockland County wants to push back, I think, Ruby, on your premise that Mayor Adams is defined by contradiction. Earl, you're on WNYC. Hi, there.

Earl: Yes, Brian, good morning. Everyone, good morning. The point that I'm making is that you can have rules and still have balance. To say that when the former head of the MTA stated, "You guys have people sleeping on your subway," and to have people sit on your subway causes people to be uncertain, it causes all the things that people don't want to see when they come to New York City, and to say that on one token, he's being firm with the rules of the subway system, and then being sympathetic to homeless people being murdered. As a person, you're entitled to have dual emotions, but we live in a society that there are rules, and there are laws and justice, and how justice is carried out is important.

I'd also like to mention that one of your panel mentioned that Adams said that he's not being covered correctly because maybe most of the press corps is white. Well, has anyone considered that implicit bias goes into how we look at the world? Implicit bias is what Bill de Blasio talked about what happened in the police department, and how people in inner cities are being impacted by implicit bias. Why can't implicit bias be impactful to the press corps and how it relates to Adam, or any person of color that's in office. We should talk about the issue for what it is.

Brian Lehrer: Those are great points, Earl. We're running out of time in the segment. I'm going to go, but please do call us again. Thank you very much for that call. Ruby, you want to have a last response here on how your own background tries to check implicit bias while covering Eric Adams or any Black politician?

Ruby Cramer: Sure. I think your caller Earl actually said it best in his first point. Adams is trying to say, "I can have dual emotions, and I can be both." I think with covering any politician, it's really important to try to understand and create space for those nuances and to try to understand how someone sees the world in addition to how the world sees them. I do think that that is one way to deal with implicit bias and also one way to try to allow for a conversation about who a person as a human being that doesn't immediately revert to ideological labels or labels of any kind, really.

Brian Lehrer: Ruby Cramer from Politico has a deep dive article on Mayor Eric Adams out now. That article printed many, many, many pages looking at the design.

Ruby Cramer: Sorry.

Brian Lehrer: That is a deep dive article into Mayor Eric Adams and it's really interesting, and it goes into his life as well as the early days of his administration. Elizabeth Kim always doing her great coverage of the mayor for WNYC and Politico. Ruby and Liz, thanks for coming on this morning.

Elizabeth Kim: Thanks, Brian.

Ruby Cramer: Thanks, Brian.

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