[MUSIC]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now, as usual on Wednesdays, after Mayor Adams' weekly Tuesday news conference, our lead City Hall reporter, Elizabeth Kim, it's only that one time a week when reporters can ask about topics of their choosing, not just the mayor's choosing. Yesterday's session was pretty contentious as these things go after some leaders of the NYPD used their social media to post derisive comments about members of the media who've dared to be critical of the department. These were largely focused on an article by Daily News columnist Harry Siegel and a tough interview that Mayor Adams got on the nationally syndicated radio show, The Breakfast Club, from lawyer and activist Olayemi Olurin. Here's a 30-second excerpt of that.

Mayor Eric Adams: I didn't put the National Guards in the subway, the governor did.

Olayemi Olurin: I know, but I know what you said.

Mayor Adams: You said "Eric." I never--

Olayemi Olurin: You stood with Governor Kathy Hochul and you co-signed that decision. You did. I'm not saying this as someone who's following social media. I'm saying that as an attorney in the city and an activist who follows everything that you do.

Mayor Adams: I'm glad you do, but then you'll realize how I turned the city around if you follow everything I do. You realize that I--

Olayemi Olurin: I would say no, but we could get to that next.

Lenard McKelvey: Loosen up your tie, Mayor Adams. Going to be a long day.

Brian Lehrer: All right, a sample from The Breakfast Club there and that actually went on for quite a while. Elizabeth Kim here. Hi, Liz, welcome back to the show.

Elizabeth Kim: Good morning, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Give our listeners more context about that interview. When was that and what happened there?

Elizabeth Kim: The interview was taped last Thursday morning. This is a show. It's called The Breakfast Club. It's a nationally syndicated show. It has an average of four million listeners and it's very powerful. It's very politically influential. The President, President Biden, has been on this show. The mayor appeared on the show with the lawyer and activist, Olayemi Olurin. We first learned about it when they tweeted a picture of the two of them together.

Now, anyone who follows New York City politics knows that Olayemi Olurin is a fierce critic of the mayor. Just do a Google Search of her name and you will see that she has called the mayor the worst mayor in history in America. There was a lot of surprise when a picture came out that he was going to do the show with her. Sure enough, a lot of people tuned in. This is not a short interview. This was 50 minutes. The clip you played was just a taste of the kind of sparring that went on between the two of them. The mayor was clearly on the defensive.

The interview was actually taped, so you can watch it on YouTube. You do see the mayor looking quite uncomfortable. In the clip you played, the host makes that joke, "Loosen your tie, Mayor. It's going to be a long day," and that really set the tone for the rest of the interview. That came about six minutes into that interview. This was the buzz in the political world because it's not just that we're seeing this person grill the mayor in this way. As you and I have talked about, the mayor has really tried to limit questions from the media.

Here, you have 50 minutes of basically this unfiltered sort of opportunity for someone to really be critical of him and press him on a lot of issues. It also put pressure on something that a lot of people have been talking and writing about, which is about public safety and whether the mayor's own rhetoric and his policies on crime such as supporting the National Guard being deployed into the subways, has fueled the perception that the city is unsafe. That was something that Olurin, from the very beginning, tried to pressure him on.

Brian Lehrer: You reported that Olurin never thought the mayor would actually show up for the interview. At yesterday's news conference, the mayor was asked, why did he show? Did he know Olayemi Olurin's politics? He said this.

Mayor Adams: With The Breakfast Club, it doesn't matter to me who's sitting inside the room. People aren't going to tell me who the hosts are. They don't got to tell me who the guest is going to be. That just doesn't matter to me.

Brian Lehrer: Can you put that in context and did he know she would be there?

Elizabeth Kim: Olayemi told me that she only learned maybe a few days before her scheduled appearance on The Breakfast Club that the mayor was going to be there. She told me. Her reaction was like, "No way. There's no way this is happening." She told me she thought that the producers were pranking her. I asked the mayor whether he knew because this show has a lot of clout. I think a show like this can do something like this. They're very good at creating viral moments. I think what happened was the mayor didn't know.

I asked him and he didn't answer it directly. What he said was, he said, "I don't care who comes on with me. I will debate anyone," which I think is the answer he would give, but I think listeners might read a bit of bravado into that too. What Olurin said to me was she didn't think that he would ever go on again with her or do that in that kind of format again, but I guess we'll see. The mayor said that he's not afraid at all. I think towards the end of that clip, he said something, "I'll go on with five critics."

Brian Lehrer: Right, although it is a little surprising. We know that the mayor doesn't come on this show very often like the previous mayor did. The mayor doesn't go on Inside City Hall with Errol Louis. Very different kind of tone that's kept there than on The Breakfast Club, and yet he sat for this. How do you understand his choices?

Elizabeth Kim: I think that speaks to the clout of the show, Brian. Like I said, The Breakfast Club, one media expert called it "appointment listening for people of color." The mayor, in this moment, has done a lot of media in which he's trying to speak to his base. This is the perfect format for it. I think that what must have happened was he was caught by surprise. He probably wasn't expecting her to be on the show with him, but he also couldn't refuse in that moment either. This is too important a moment. It's a great opportunity for the mayor to get out his message. I'll be very interested to see if the mayor does that show again.

Brian Lehrer: How did anyone in the administration react to the interview afterwards? Did they disparage Olurin?

Elizabeth Kim: Well, prior to the mayor appearing-- so it was pre-taped. The deputy mayor for communications, he put out a social media post in which he acknowledged that the mayor was going on with her. He said that this is just a reflection of how the mayor wants to engage with all different New Yorkers of all different kinds of opinion. They tried to spin it in that way. Afterwards, there were allies of the mayor. In particular, the NYPD that came out. They criticized Olurin on social media. I think one of the NYPD top brass disparagingly referred to as a "woke activist." It was clear. Olurin put out a social media post where she put out a clip. That garnered over three million views. People are still watching these clips.

Brian Lehrer: Now, we get to the other media person in their social media crosshairs at City Hall, Daily News columnist Harry Siegel. What did he do?

Elizabeth Kim: This is Harry Siegel who has been a guest on this show. He wrote a column that was critical of policing. Then over the weekend, what happened was with several members of the NYPD's top brass took to the social media platform X to criticize him. Now, this is part of the NYPD's own self-professed strategy of trying to reshape the narrative around crime and push back on what they see as inaccurate coverage. Now, I will say that as a reporter, it's not uncommon for city officials to try to criticize what they think is unfair coverage. The mayor's office, for example, will do it quite frequently. They will do it with phone calls.

Increasingly, they do take their complaints to social media and it can sometimes get a little nasty. What I will point out though in the situation, this is not just any city agency that is going out of its way to call out and attack a reporter by name. This is the NYPD. This is the largest police force in the country. It's not a flack from the mayor's office or the Department of Education. These are high-ranking brass in the police department. They made very personal but also inflammatory attacks against Harry. I will just read one of the tweets that came from John Chell. He's the chief of patrol.

He writes, "The defund crowd will cry 'boo-hoo' to 911 when they need us. The problem is that besides your flawed reporting is the fact that we are calling you and your 'latte' friends out on their garbage. Well, get your popcorn ready. We have a strong platform too." That is the kind of tone that was fired at Harry. This was amplified because a tweet like this was then retweeted, resocialed by other members of the police department. The police department's own official account came out with a very disparaging moniker for Harry calling him "Deceitful Harry Siegel."

Brian Lehrer: Deceitful, it was almost like a Trump name, Deceitful Siegel, right? Picking up on the IE sound, "Deceitful Siegel."

Elizabeth Kim: Right. On the one hand, you could call this, it's very childish. It seems almost bullying. I think Errol Louis got on social media too to say that this was really beneath them. Then he got into it too with one of the members of the NYPD. I think it might've started Saturday, but it certainly through Sunday. We all saw these tweets pinging back and forth on the internet.

Brian Lehrer: At the news conference yesterday, the mayor was asked if he thought these kinds of social media attacks were appropriate, and he said this.

Mayor Adams: I don't think they attacked anyone. They responded. The columnists shared his opinion. They shared their opinion. I think the police department, the criminal justice system, elected officials, I think all of us must be held accountable for our actions. All of us. I'm a big believer in the free press. I don't agree with everything I see in the press, but I believe in the free press. The free press should be held accountable too. I don't know why we feel the free press should not be held accountable.

Brian Lehrer: Some responses by Harry Siegel, he has reacted that they picked out one factual error that he made and hammered him on that. He corrected the factual error once he realized that it was a factual error. He says they sidestep the main argument of his column, which is that police are not dealing effectively with the subways. They're flooding the zone with more police officers, but they're not being effective. That was one of Harry Siegel's pushbacks that they didn't address the underlying issue about the effectiveness of the NYPD. Was the mayor asked about that yesterday?

Elizabeth Kim: Well, I put a question to the mayor that I've been thinking about for a long time that I think speaks to Harry's criticism. What I wanted to know was we do see all of this police presence on the subways now. No one can deny that. When it comes to what New Yorkers are seeing and feeling, a lot of listeners on your show have called to say that some of those things are seeing vulnerable people who appear to need help but are not getting it. What I put to the mayor was what--

Brian Lehrer: Hang out. I'm going to jump in here because we have the clip. Here's about a minute of Liz Kim's question to the mayor at his weekly news conference yesterday and the mayor's response.

Elizabeth Kim: What is the directive that NYPD while working in the subways are given when they come across, A, a homeless individual or someone who looks like they might be in distress? I know that when you talked about your mental health plan, you talked about giving them some training to start engaging. I take the subways every day. I haven't seen that.

I do see the NYPD there, but I don't see them having conversations with homeless people. Sometimes they'll ask them to get up because they're taking a space on the subway and they said, "It's rush hour. You need to leave." I don't really see them starting that conversation, "Do you need help? Do you need a place to stay? Are you hungry?" I'm wondering if that kind of protocol is being given to them.

Brian Lehrer: That was the question. You'll tell me if this is Mayor Adams' response to your question right there or if this is something he said that was related at another time. Here we go.

Mayor Adams: I saw that yesterday that if the person had no shoes on or they was sitting down, clearly, they needed help. The officers were not willing to engage. We need to sit down with Deputy Mayor Williams-Isom and her team and Brian and others. We need to figure out how do we tweak that more because I would like to see the officers get more engaged just in that initial contact.

Brian Lehrer: That sounded responsive to your question and kind of acknowledging that your premise was true.

Elizabeth Kim: Right. I was a little surprised, Brian, because when the mayor first rolled out a plan where he wanted police to forcibly remove people who appear to be mentally ill, for example, and he gave an example of someone who's talking to themselves or someone who doesn't have shoes, he, at the time, said that he was going to give police the training they needed to do it.

What he told me yesterday was he actually went out on Monday night, I believe, with the NYPD. What he told me was, you're right, they're not doing it. He said that a lot of police officer uncomfortable with doing that. He also talked about how, in the past, there was an effort to do this. They had outreach teams. I think he's referring to in 2019. I went back into the clips to look this up.

Mayor de Blasio had announced this massive multi-agency effort. It was $140 million. It involved 18,000 city employees, not police, but it involved city employees who would file 311 reports for people that they saw living on the streets or in the subway system. The response was, I believe, mostly by the FDNY like EMTs. Now, this program, I think it was ultimately disbanded. That's what the mayor said yesterday.

I think what happened was 2019 and then the pandemic hit in 2020. I believe it might have been a casualty of that. That's something that is one of the critiques, right? We've mobilized this huge city resource in the form of police. Now, you might argue that they are not the appropriate people or city employees who should be responding to what is, in fact, a mental health crisis, a homelessness crisis.

It is fair to ask, "How should we be using then this sizable resource?" What they're doing right now is they're there to respond when there's an incident. They're there also to act as a deterrent. The question is, should they be doing some preventative work? That would be the role, as I pose to the mayor, of starting to ask people some questions. "Do you need help? Do you need a place to stay? Are you hungry?"

I think that that might start to have policymakers start thinking about something the mayor talks about so often, right? Going upstream rather than downstream. I will say that even de Blasio's program was criticized by homeless advocates because they didn't feel that it fundamentally did affect the root causes of homelessness, which is housing and also an unsafe shelter system. I think that is part of the conversation that maybe the mayor is starting to think about as he said in those remarks yesterday.

Brian Lehrer: A few minutes left with our lead Eric Adams reporter, Elizabeth Kim, who was at yesterday's weekly news conference by the mayor. We've been playing clips and getting her analysis. Let me get a couple of calls in here before we run out of time. 212-433-WNYC. Here's Kenini in Harlem, I think, reacting to the tough interview of the mayor on The Breakfast Club radio show that we played the clip of. Kenini, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Kenini: Hi. Good morning. Thank you so much. Thank you for your reporter asking those tough questions, the mayor, I'll say that. I think Adams did not answer that actual question. I think that he is very pompous and dismissive and arrogant and enamored with his own grandeur of, "Started from the projects, and now I'm mayor." That's a reference to, "Started from the bottom, and now we're here."

For me, he didn't know who she was because he thinks he doesn't-- He said so. He was like, "It doesn't matter who I talk," which is, again, in the same school of this free-speech movement that's starting to poison social media, by the way. I can talk to anybody, Joe Rogan, Elon Musk. They're all in this wave of school politics. That's what's wrong. If you listen to Eric, he does toe that line a lot.

He used to be a Republican, by the way, not to disparage all Republicans, but you hear this level of, "I'm above that fray. I don't need to know what side of the argument you're on. I'm mature enough to have a conversation." That met with staunch resistance by an audience that he obviously thinks that he is simpatico with, right? Again, The Breakfast Club audience is younger. They're hip-hop.

Here comes Mayor Adams thinking he's the "hip-hop" mayor, right? He thinks that he can do what I see him do all the time when I'm at events and he talks. He says the same thing, "I started from the projects." He thinks that that "started from the projects" is going to eclipse his policies. What he met at The Breakfast Club is, "No, your policies stink, Mayor," and so he had nothing else to do.

Brian Lehrer: There's diversity in the community, right? Kenini, thanks for dropping a Drake lyric on us among everything else that you said.

Kenini: Very good. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Liz, that is his base. Kenini got that right. I guess a question is, how much political diversity is there among that base that he tries to reach on shows like The Breakfast Club? I don't expect you to be able to be a pollster right now and say exactly how much, but I wonder how you'd also feel about being lumped in with Elon Musk and Joe Rogan there.

Elizabeth Kim: Right. The show does have some right-leaning guests often. To the caller's point, I think what was powerful about that moment was here you had a fellow guest on the show with the mayor who was acknowledging the real concerns among Black and brown New Yorkers about how policing can be racist and how it is applied unequally. She cites a real report.

She cites real data to the mayor. On the other hand, there is this other feeling in the community that they have not been protected enough, that they have been underserved by the police. I think that was inherently the tension there. This is also, in many ways, the perfect forum in which the mayor to have this conversation to acknowledge that duality and give a policy response to it.

Brian Lehrer: One more call. John in Rockville Centre, you're on WNYC. Hi, John.

John: Hi, Brian. How are you? As you know, I was in the police department for 34 years. My wife recently retired as an inspector. She was in charge of the homeless outreach and shelter security section. It was a unit that had over 400 people in it and altogether supervising the shelters as well, probably about 1,000. She started a strategy. This was in cooperation with the Department of Social Services, where the police officers would go out with nurses.

The nurses were trained in the mental hygiene law. I think it's 359 in the mental hygiene law where you can forcibly remove somebody to be evaluated. Well, 593, I forget the numbers, but they went out in teams. If the person wasn't eligible under the mental hygiene law, just talk to them. They were highly successful in getting people to get into the shelters in the head of transportation system. They got them in. If the nurse determined that, yes, they met the criteria, they'd be forcibly removed.

A lot of times, they were able to get them to cooperate and be evaluated. The program was really successful. They were also removing encampments as well. Then, unfortunately, right after the George Floyd demonstrations when 10 of their vans were burned during those demonstrations, Mayor de Blasio just disbanded the unit. Because of the backlash that was going on, he just did away with the unit. A highly successful program was just totally deleted.

Brian Lehrer: John, I'm going to leave it there. Liz, I don't know if you're familiar with that or fact-check any of that narrative, but it's the kind of thing, if John remembers that correctly, that really you were asking about that. That's implied by your question. By the mayor's answer to your question, really, that if the police officers don't feel comfortable in many cases, engaging the people who they would like to help as well as get out of the subway system that there are programs that have existed in the past or there's training that needs to take place that they haven't engaged yet.

Elizabeth Kim: That's right, Brian. Yes, that's an example. The mayor, I believe, himself referenced that. Now, there was a stick for homeless people to accept room at a shelter or accept services. What that stick was that in order to avoid a summons, they needed to agree to accept services. That actually drove some of the critique of the program from homeless advocates was they didn't like this idea that police were basically threatening to issue a summons to a homeless individual who might be lying on a bench.

They could have been ticketed for obstructing a public space, things like that. They didn't quite like that kind of approach. I think there'll always be some kind of criticisms, but the idea is, yes, this is not a new idea of how do we get the right people maybe with the right training to do this kind of work that would help maybe prevent the kinds of what the mayor says, some random acts of violence that we've been seeing, especially in the wake of the pandemic and the mental health crisis.

Brian Lehrer: Elizabeth Kim covers City Hall for WNYC and Gothamist, including the mayor's weekly Tuesday news conference. She usually comes on with us on Wednesday mornings after that with clips and analyses and to take your calls like we just did today. Liz, thanks as always.

Elizabeth Kim: Thanks, Brian.

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.