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Brian Lehrer: I'm a total hot weather person. Give me heat and I'm a happy camper. Maybe because as a kid, I was literally a happy camper. School was out, camp was in, and it was the best time of the year, but not everyone has it that easy, right? Summertime without the resources for things like summer camp, or even air conditioning, or if you have to work out there on construction sites, or whatever work keeps you outside, heat brings health challenges for some people, spikes in crime and political unrest. As the new edition of the policy journal, Vital City, reminds us, when temperatures get hot, so do tempers.

They quote this line from the classic song The Message by Melle Mel. Don't push me because I'm close to the edge by Melle Mel in the classic song The Message. The journal edition is called Summertime! How life changes when things get hot. It's got the good and the bad, reflections on summertimes passed by Dwight Gooden, Lin-Manuel Miranda and others, and we will invite yours in just a minute.

With us now, Elizabeth Glazer, the founder of Vital City. Most recently, she served as the director of the New York City Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice for Mayor Bill de Blasio, where she led the strategy to produce a dramatic reduction in the jail population and to create community-led safety strategies. She previously oversaw the criminal justice agencies in New York State as the Governor's Deputy Secretary for Public Safety. She is a former federal prosecutor and clerk for then US Circuit Court Judge, Ruth Bader Gingsburg. Remember her when she was a US Circuit Court Judge merely? Liz, thanks for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Elizabeth Glazer: Thanks so much for having me, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: We'll also get your take on Mayor Adams' criminal justice policy in this conversation, including after yet another death at Rikers, the fourth this year, but why a special issue of Vital City about summer in New York?

Elizabeth Glazer: Well, I think summertime means a lot to a lot of people. It's the concentration of life in a lot of different ways, both the good and the bad. We wanted to have both a little fun with it and invited a whole bunch of people to give us their memories, their most vivid memory of summer. We also wanted to delve into some of the big issues that actually affect quality of life for New Yorkers, whether it's swimming pools or summer youth employment or climate change. It's summer, so time for the summertime issue.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. You want to pick one of those most vivid memories of summer from your list of guest contributors, maybe Lin-Manuel Miranda's or anyone you want?

Elizabeth Glazer: Yes, sure. I think the memories are terrific. There are a lot of themes that run through them. There's a vividness to them, whether it's standing with Dwight Gooden on the mound and feeling that heat or Lin Miranda, who talks about, and a lot of people did, the most recent blackout and this panic as he's trying to put on a show and trying to figure out where to do that and ultimately gets refuge in a neighborhood bookstore that permits him to do the performance. What really comes through is this sense of neighborhood that people have.

I think one of my favorite memories is actually by a guy who's now a federal judge in Brooklyn, Hector Gonzalez. His parents were Cuban refugees. He talks about how it was the summer of the Son of Sam. Things were not good in the city and there was a general sense of fear and then came the blackout. The most significant thing that he remembers as a kid is how the entire neighborhood spilled out onto the streets. People sat in their cars tuning the radio. There was this incredible sense of connection and people helping one another out. I think it's terrific how that sense of neighborhood and connection and how different all our neighborhoods and neighbors are comes through so vividly.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, who has one? Do you have a most vivid memory of summer in New York City? 212-433-WNYC. This is one to not overthink. What comes right to mind as your most vivid memory of being in New York City in the summer, any summer? 212-433-9692. To the point Liz Glazer was just making, how about your neighborhood as the context for that vivid memory or whatever neighborhood you happen to be in?

Whether it was the blackout of 1977 or whenever it was. 212-433-WNYC. Maybe it was the smoke on June 7th of this year. 212-433-9692. Okay, technically it was still spring on June 7th. 212-433-9692. Who's got vivid memories of summer in New York City that you want to share, or we can talk about the present state of summer in New York City, which we will do too. 212-433-9692. Call or text. Why did you quote Melle Mel on don't push me because I'm close to the edge from The Message?

Elizabeth Glazer: It's a classic. I think it's what immediately comes to mind. One of the things I thought was interesting reading through all these memories is how the triggers are music or smell or taste and how those memories shape us and place us in time. There are a whole bunch of people who talk about how time has shifted and changed the way they think about the city.

Martha Stark, who's a professor at NYU, her mother was a factory worker in New Jersey. She talks about the change between her first blackout and the family worrying about how her mother would get home to her second blackout when she was now the commissioner of an agency in New York City and she herself was in charge of making sure people were safe and got to the right places. It's a terrific, I think, history of people and of the city.

Brian Lehrer: I was thinking about how the Melle Mel is one classic hip hop reference, and I don't know if anybody in your special issue goes to this, but does anyone touch on the fact that hip hop was born in the Bronx on a summer's day 50 years ago? The whole world is celebrating the 50th anniversary of that this summer. Is that a very New York summer history fact?

Elizabeth Glazer: A very New York summer history fact. We actually have an article right now up on the web about hip hop and about the founding of hip hop and how that all came about, but you're right, it's worth a deeper dive.

Brian Lehrer: One of your takes is that the restless ambition we usually associate with New York City gets cooled a little by the heat. What did you have in mind there?

Elizabeth Glazer: I think that people slowdown in the summer, that there's a sense at work that the summer is punctuated by holidays like the one we've just had, July 4th, that people take a minute to take vacations with their families and to reflect on what's going on. It's a little different from that back to school feel in September or October when the city has a totally different feel and energy. Summertime is for sitting out in the park and with your friends. I think that's what both me and my coeditor, Greg Berman, meant by that.

Brian Lehrer: Here's an interesting text from a listener who says he was born on the day of the 1977 blackout, July 14th. The listener just writes, "Hey, Brian, just wanted to shout out all the other blackout babies born on 7/14/77." Whoever you are who texted that to us, or anyone else who might have been a blackout baby born on 7/14/77, what did your parents tell you about that birthing experience? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Laurie in Forest Hills was not born on that day and has a different memory of summer in the City. Hi, Laurie, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Laurie: Good morning, Brian. Hi. I'm a lifelong New Yorker. I grew up in Queens. As soon as I was old enough, I moved downtown. I was working in the East 60s and living in the East 20 and it was the early '80s, it was 90 plus degrees when I got off work. It was a heatwave. It was hell. Walked out of the office and said, "Damn, I should [unintelligible 00:10:10] for a cab, but no, it's too much money."

I get to the bus stop, bus pulls up, and I took the Lexington Avenue, I think it's the 102 or 101, and I look up and it should say 101 to City Hall, but it said 101 to City Hell. I'll never forget it. I cracked up. I was in no mood to [unintelligible 00:10:35] and I thought, "I'm the only one-- This isn't real," but other people saw it. There were other people at the bus stop, 101 to City Hell, yes, and it was.

Brian Lehrer: It was. So either somebody can't spell or somebody was being very, very cute at the MTA. [unintelligible 00:10:55] in Washington Heights, you're on WNYC. Hi [unintelligible 00:10:59]

Speaker 4: Hi. Every time I sweat, I recall my very first summer in New York City training at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center, and in every summer thereafter in various dance studios around town. You just get looser, your legs go higher. It's just that kind of wonderful New York City combination of art, sweat, and connection.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. The boys of some of the baseball players say the same thing, Liz, right?

Elizabeth Glazer: Absolutely.

Brian Lehrer: A lot of those injuries that we associate with baseball happen in April. As the weather gets cooler later in the season, they don't tend to happen in July and August as everything becomes looser like with the dancers.

Elizabeth Glazer: I think to your first caller's point about City Hell, it's tough for a lot of people and one of our writers is a cable maintainer in the train system in the subways, and writes this just gripping account of what it's like, really almost like going down into the mines to be working in those conditions, and how dangerous it is because of dehydration and other things. Summer has a lot of different sides to it for people.

Brian Lehrer: On how difficult it must be to work outside or do other things where you can't be protected from the heat for whatever reason. I noticed a chart on your site that relates to climate change. It's the number of days per year with maximum temperatures greater than 90 degrees in New York City. For the period 1970 to 1999, it was an average of 15 days per year over 90 degrees. From the year 2000 through 2022, it went up to 23 days per year. That's a lot. That's 8 more days of 90-plus degrees in the summer on average since the turn of the century. Where do you see that reflected in human suffering or other human terms?

Elizabeth Glazer: In every aspect of our lives, New Yorkers certainly are not alone in the suffering that we're going to endure as well because of climate change. It's particularly acute for the elderly. We also have another incredibly troubling stats in there, which show how heat and heat deaths also are worse in poor neighborhoods, and because of the incredibly segregated city in which we live, the poor neighborhoods also mean that it is Black people and brown people who suffer most from heat deaths.

Brian Lehrer: In fact, another chart on your site is average surface temperature for June through September 2020 to 2022, surface temperature meaning temperature on the ground, neighborhood to neighborhood, and I could cite what the map looks like in terms of what some of the neighborhoods appear to be. Do you want to talk us through that at all? Are you familiar enough with it to do that?

Elizabeth Glazer: Sure. This issue of the conditions of poor neighborhoods, as I said, usually home to Black and brown New Yorkers and rich neighborhoods just is so stark in every single dimension. Tree cover is one, and tree cover is not just a nice to have. Tree cover and greenery supports better life, it reduces temperatures, it makes the streets and sidewalks, and parks more bearable. Yet what we see in New York when you do an analysis of the tree cover is that it's the neighborhoods, East New York, Brownsville, Mott Haven, the neighborhoods who suffer from almost every other kind of social distress are also the ones in which this issue of greenery are also deficits.

There's been a lot of effort by the city to focus on that. In the last administration, there was a big focus on pushing for additional funding in parks in poor neighborhoods. I think that's something this administration has continued on. Again, it's not just the trees and flowers and greenery are pretty, they're absolutely crucial to sustaining a decent quality of life.

Brian Lehrer: Why isn't that fixed yet? This arboreal inequality, if you want to call it that, and the ills that come with that, I think it was Mayor Bloomberg who had a million trees project. We certainly talked to Mayor de Blasio when he and you were in office about that topic, they continued that. You just said Mayor Adams is also pushing forward on that. I mean, that's a lot of years to have it not been affected maybe all that much.

Elizabeth Glazer: I think it gets to a governance problem more generally, which is how do you actually move from A to B and as the mayor would say, get stuff done. That's what government boils down to, is operations. Yet it is so hobbled by a whole array of things, whether it's difficult to get contracts out the door, or difficult just to mobilize resources. Of course, each thing that you want to spend money on has to compete against other things you want to have money on, spend money on. I think we still elected, New Yorkers, many people still view trees and greenery, again, as I said, a nice to have, not as an essential, so when stacked up against the other needs of the city, I think it's hard for it to push through.

Brian Lehrer: Few more minutes with Liz Glazer, founder of the recently created policy journal that focuses on New York City called Vital City. They have a special edition out now called Summertime! How life changes when things get hot. It's got the good and the bad, the reflections on summertimes passed by all kinds of people, Dwight Gooden, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and others. It's got the light and the heavy. Interesting that we're getting a lot of 1977 blackout memories since you mentioned that, people calling in with those. Let's take another one of those right now. Acacia in Greenpoint, you're on WNYC. Hi, Acacia.

Acacia: In the 2002 blackout when I was in between my 8th and 9th Grade year--

Brian Lehrer: Oh, sorry.

Acacia: I know. When I was in my 8th and 9th Grade year, my cousin, I had a cool cousin that lived in New York. She flew me out here so I could do some back to school shopping. The blackout happened and it changed my life. I saw the city having so much fun. The fire hydrants were open, and we were going into a Bodega and Parker Posey was coming out. She had two [unintelligible 00:19:00] of Ben & Jerry's and she was like, "They're giving away all the ice cream." I just thought it was amazing. I did my freshman year and could not stop talking about New York. I asked my mom, "Can I just go to hair school?" Dropped out and moved here by the time I was 17, and I've been happy ever since.

Brian Lehrer: That is a great story. I have a 2002 blackout memory. I was in the Adirondacks, Liz, and I happened to be doing laundry at a laundromat at just that moment, when the blackout happened downstate. It did not happen where I was even though it was very widespread. I was way up in Long Lake in the Adirondacks doing laundry and as I put-- I told this story on the air once before, but as I put a quarter into the slot in the dryer, everything browned for just a second, and it didn't go dark. The power didn't go out, but the lights went down, the dryer hiccupped and then it went back full. I thought, "Oh, that was weird. Did something about how I put in that quarter and turned the little dial flip out this room?" Then on the way back from the laundry in the car, I heard on the news that almost the entire rest of New York state got blacked out at exactly that moment that I was putting the quarter in the dryer. I thought, "Oh my God, I caused it." [laughs]

Elizabeth Glazer: That is very funny. It's the gods telling us don't get too comfortable.

Brian Lehrer: I guess so. Very different one. Listener writes, "My first summer in New York City was very hot and I didn't have AC and when Michael Jackson died, all I could hear was Michael Jackson echoing through the streets of Brooklyn. It was very memorable." Kathy in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Kathy.

Kathy: Oh, hi Brian. My story is from a different era, so maybe it's interesting for that reason. I was born in 1940, so that makes me 83 this month. We used to spend our summers [unintelligible 00:21:04] when I was about six or seven. We didn't have air conditioning. We lived in a nice middle class area, Riverdale, the Bronx, but I don't know if anybody had air conditioning. We'd always be outside.

In the evenings, I particularly remember there was a huge backyard with a hill where the adults would bring out lawn chairs and sit there in the evening and talk to one another and we kids would be playing on the bottom of the slope nearby, running wildly all around. We had a lot of freedom. Also, we'd play on the roof upstairs also. [unintelligible 00:21:43] we'd play on the roof, run around the whole roof, and we'd look at the sunsets in New Jersey, and again, the adults would be up there just to get out of their warm apartments, I guess. So I think we had a lot of freedom.

Brian Lehrer: Having lived without air conditioning early in your life and then when air conditioning came in, how do you think it changed you or changed the city?

Kathy: Well, people want to stay indoors now. I do it myself. If it's hot and I can be in air conditioning like today, I'll try to stay indoors.

Brian Lehrer: Kathy. Thank you.

Kathy: Of course, we all know the kids and people are looking at their screens, but we didn't have a TV. I didn't get a TV till I was 21, so it changed a lot, but there are many good things that changed for the better.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. Thank you very much for your call, Kathy.

Kathy: [unintelligible 00:22:34] change. Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Really, really appreciate it. Yes. Liz, it makes me think how on June 7th, the day I've cited before, one of the things that people said was, "Well, during the pandemic we were using masks when we stayed inside, now all of a sudden inside was the safe place and we had to use masks when we were going outside." Kathy is talking about how to get relief from the heat, once upon a time you'd go out of your apartment, now you go inside to get relief from the heat because of air conditioning. I think it was Tom Wolfe who once wrote a book that included sections about how air conditioning so dramatically changed the culture in the south, in the United States, you could only imagine, if you've never lived there, but any thoughts about AC or what Kathy was remembering?

Elizabeth Glazer: Yes. Well, it's made life more bearable, permitted us to be more productive. It's reduced deaths. There's so many great things to say about it, but it also has the unintended downsides and consequences, huge uses of energy in a vicious cycle of an ever warming planet.

Brian Lehrer: I've wondered sometimes, and I wonder if you dealt with this question at all explicitly when you were in the de Blasio administration, if heat is a right for tenants in the winter, why isn't air conditioning, given that people do die from excessive heat, especially elderly people who are susceptible for one reason or another? Why isn't air conditioning a right in the summer in an equivalent way?

Elizabeth Glazer: It's such a great question. I'm totally speculating here, but I think it's partly that the extremes of cold have been so much more extreme until recently than the extremes of heat. We have a code blue for when it's incredibly cold and city workers fan out to try and find people who are living on the street to bring them in, but we don't, except for on those particular days when we might open cooling centers, have that same systemic response to heat, but that may be our future.

Brian Lehrer: Now, off topic, as an addendum before you go, I want to ask you one question that pertains to the fact that you were the director of Criminal Justice in the de Blasio administration. Now we have the Adams administration more known for being a law and order administration. Mayor Adams' criminal justice director, Deanna Logan, was on the show last Friday.

Matt Katz was filling in as the host, and they talked about something that you all got through during de Blasio, which was getting a schedule going for closing the Rikers Island Jail complex in 2027, but of course, that presupposes getting the jail population down low enough that the remaining people can be put in borough jails with enough space. Deanna Logan was asked about that and whether the Adams administration is following through as they put more people in Rikers during these two years. Here's what she said.

Deanna Logan: Everyone is working to make sure that we follow the law. Mayor Adams has made very clear that we are going to follow the law, and we are. We're working with all of our partners to A, yes, make sure that people don't have to go into Rikers. If you don't add to the population, then it's not going to grow. As we're looking at the people who are in custody, we worked with counsel and we will continue to work with partners on a population review bill, which is local law 806 that got passed this year, where we will be reviewing individuals that are in custody to start being able to connect more people to resolution on their cases and/or move them out of the system by getting them connected to alternatives to incarceration.

That would some include more programming that would be addressing substance abuse disorders that would put them in residential facilities, as well as thinking about those individuals that would benefit from going into programming that addresses mental health concerns.

Brian Lehrer: Elizabeth, your reaction to that, I know you probably are not crazy about the idea of second guessing your successor in the exact same role, mayor's criminal justice director, but are they doing it right in your opinion?

Elizabeth Glazer: Well, first I'll just say that Deanna Logan is an absolutely superlative public servant, just so smart and effective and is a great leader of that office. I think the problem is that it's not just that office that has to kick in in order to fix the really extraordinary problems that are going on right now. Yes, sure, we should focus on reducing the population.

If the goal is to move off the island and into new facilities, and frankly, just as a justice matter, you want to reduce the population as small as possible consistent with public safety. That is an all hands on deck problem because it's not just the mayor's office, it's judges, DAs, defenders, et cetera. Right now, one of the big problems that's sort of bloating the population is that people are staying for years, and the population grows. I think the bigger issue for me if I were to look at the criminal justice landscape right now is what's happening in the jails.

Jails are out of sight and out of mind, but right now, that for me is where there's really just an uncontrolled fire going on. It's bad by itself. We're hitting record numbers of deaths in the jail, but it's also bad as a kind of democracy issue, that is, how is the city actually being governed? We talked a little bit earlier about governance and why can't we get enough trees in the right place? The jails are an incredibly malign example of governance gone totally astray and leading to fatalities and injuries that are really just out of control. The city right now. Let me know if we have a minute or--

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead. Everybody wants to hear it.

Elizabeth Glazer: It's never as if it's been a paradise in the jails. Let's be clear. For decades there have been problems, but about eight years ago, the Feds came in and said it is really now uncontrollable, the levels of violence that are unconstitutional levels, they called it a culture of violence. We're going to put in what's called a Federal Monitor who will try to work with the department to fix things. We're now eight years later and that Federal Monitor last year issued the most extraordinary report.

I've never seen a government report with this kind of language, essentially a five-alarm fire saying the level of violence is out of control, as he said, it's not normal, it's not typical, and noted the exponential levels of violence above even when the consent decree was in. It would be a dream to get back to those unconstitutional levels of violence. We have three times the amount of deaths, six times the amount of stabbings and slashings.

Brian Lehrer: Why?

Elizabeth Glazer: Well, the monitor says that two things are happening. The first thing that he's been beating on for a while is that the department is just coming apart at the seams. They are unable to manage or supervise or have discipline to such an extent that last year he finally said, "You know what? Forget about those 300 provisions of the consent decree. Let's just focus on a couple of basics like security, closing doors, management, training people."

You get a sense, it sounds so anodyne to say, "Oh, it's a management problem." You get a sense of how deadly those problems are when you think about not just the number of deaths, already 23 since the 1st of January last year, but the manner of the deaths. One guy died choking on an orange because he was in an unstaffed unit, and his fellow detainees had to bang on windows to get attention. Another guy died, he somehow got a razor and slit his throat in front of officers and bled out.

As you mentioned, yet another death yesterday. There's this problem of seeming to be unable to have a functioning department. More recently, in the past couple of weeks, what's come to light is that it's not just that the city is unable or appears unable, from the monitor's reports, to get things under control, but actually they seem unwilling to do that. What happened in May is there are these five incidents over nine days. I hate to just call them incidents. It left two detainees dead, one a quadriplegic, one in the ICU, and one with life-altering injuries.

None of these, or rather all of these, the monitor did not learn from the Department of Corrections itself. He read about some in the newspapers, he got tips from others. Meanwhile, the administration is shutting down access to information, information that's key to management and to oversight, whether oversight is by an external body or whether it's by reporters. The administration has now said that they will not report deaths publicly.

They've said unilaterally that they will not give the oversight body access to videos that show uses of force that are crucial to figuring out responsibility. This is an incredibly troubling turn of events, and behind it, has been a lot of concern about how do we fix this situation? It's one thing if you're unable to do it, it's another thing if you're unwilling to make the reforms.

A number of people, including me and a couple of former corrections commissioners, some advocates, other people who have worked at DOC, some oversight people, have suggested that perhaps the time has come. We say this very, very reluctantly that the city handover the keys to what's called a federal receiver. That's a person that's appointed by the court. This person essentially stands in the shoes of, really, the mayor and the commissioner to operate the department, has the ability to cut through red tape and other things.

Brian Lehrer: We're way over time.

Elizabeth Glazer: Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry.

Brian Lehrer: I didn't expect such an in-depth answer, but I'm glad we got it. I have to go even a little more over time, I apologize to everybody involved, to just say, if you are making the claim that the Adams administration is not just unable but unwilling to fix these problems, are you saying that they're doing it intentionally? Is Adams trying to send, and is Commissioner Molina trying to send a message and tamp down crime by saying, "Hey, look, you go to Rikers, that's going to be no picnic. Look what it's like in there. Look what's happening to people in there," or is that too cynical?

Elizabeth Glazer: I think it's a little cynical and it may not be that direct. I think it's a complicated thing to run a corrections department, and there are a lot of different players with a lot of different interests. I think right now, and this has now come out in emails that have been released and it's being played out in the courts as well, is that it seems that the focus of the administration is on beating back this idea of a receiver, that may be the reason why they're not releasing information. That is taking up a lot of their time and effort. I think a number of the things that they have to do might put them crosswise with the union. I think that's also a complicated situation.

Brian Lehrer: Well, to be continued on this show, obviously. Elizabeth Glazer was the Criminal Justice Director under Mayor Bill de Blasio. She is now the founder of a new New York City policy journal called Vital City that has a summertime special edition out. It is called Summertime! How life changes when things get hot. Liz, thank you so much for joining us with all of this.

Elizabeth Glazer: Thank you so much, Brian. It was really great.

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