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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now, part four of our six-part series, The Year of Bill and Rudy, How 1993 Helped Give Us The World of 2023. Bill Clinton became president in 1993 and Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor. Why did America move left and the city move right? How did those choices help give us the world and the issues we're living with today?

For today's installment, it's the Clinton crime bill meets Giuliani's NYPD. Crime went down nationally, and in New York, how much did their policies have to do with it? How much was unnecessary mass incarceration a side effect? Are there lessons to be learned for crime fighting today which New York and other places are struggling with? Our special guests for today are former police commissioner, William Bratton, and a little later, the Reverend Al Sharpton.

They were both active in 1993, of course, and still paying close attention today. Commissioner Bratton is up first. He was first hired in New York by Mayor David Dinkins to lead the city's transit police, became NYPD Commissioner under Giuliani, and served as commissioner again under Mayor de Blasio. He's also been the police chief in Boston NLA, and he is co-chair of the Federal Government's Homeland Security Advisory Committee, so he has a national as well as New York perspective.

In 2021 he published a memoir called The Profession: A Memoir of Community, Race, and Policing in America. Commissioner Bratton, we always appreciate when you come on with us. Welcome back to WNYC.

Commissioner Bratton: Great to be with you and your audience this morning.

Brian Lehrer: The purpose of this interview is to ask you to give us some oral history of the period 30 years ago and get your take on how that help set up where we are today and what we can learn for today's challenges. Can you start with your role as transit police chief under Mayor Dinkins beginning in 1990? How bad was violent crime on the subway compared to today? What was your approach to fighting it?

Commissioner Bratton: Certainly. In 1990, I was recruited by Bob Kylie. He was the chair of the MTA and Mr. Gunn who was the president of the Transfer Authority. He come down from Boston and take over the 3,800-person Transit Police department. In 1990, New York had three police agencies, transit, housing, and the city police force. The city police force had 25,000, housing had about 4,000, and I had approximately 3,800.

Part of the mission that I was charged with was to take back the subways, being quite frankly, that crime in the subway, there were 22 murders in 1990. There were, on average, 50 to 60 serious crimes each day in terms of robberies. There was widespread fare evation. The subway system was counting 175,000, 200,000 are evaders every day out of a 3 million riding population.

It was estimated there were over 5,000 people attempting, homeless people attempting to live in the subway platforms, in the subway cars, and also in the tunnels. That same year, I think a 100 some odd people died on the subway system, many of them, the homeless, the narcotics addicted, in those tunnels, and on those platforms. I described it as Dante's inferno that the fare evasion, the chaos below ground. It was much worse than up in the streets in the sense she was so confined.

There was a great deal of fear at that time. We were able to turn that around. Within two years, crime went down dramatically. We basically eliminated the fare evasion and a lot of the crime related to the issue of fares, token booth robberies, et cetera. It was that success that attracted Mayor Giuliani as he was getting ready for the 1993 mayoral campaign. He had lost to Dave Dinkins back in 1989 and spent the next four years prepping, if you will, for that 1993 campaign.

He met with George Kelling and I, and we explained how we had gotten crime down so dramatically in the subway. Even as crime on the streets was only going down by 1% or 2%, and going down in a way that nobody noticed up in the streets but they were noticing that the subways were different, that they were much safer.

Brian Lehrer: Much of the fear of subway crime today revolves around people with mental health issues who might become violent against you randomly, not even necessarily a mugging to get your money. How similar or different, or more or less prevalent was that kind of crime or fear of that kind of incident in the early 1990s?

Commissioner Bratton: Very similar. Very similar. The homeless population that was attempting to live in the subway and we had an expression of the subways are not for sleeping, and we very aggressively ejected people out of the subway system at all hours of the day. We went to [unintelligible 00:05:11], provided bus transportation shelters, so we weren't ejecting them into the winter weather.

The circumstances were very similar. We have a very similar riding population, ironically, at the moment because of the loss of ridership during the coronavirus epidemic. I think they're around 3.5 million a day. That's about what we had back in 1990. Amount of crime, however, is much, much less. The crime for the last several years in the subway system is averaged maybe 6 to 10 incidents a day versus the 50 to 60 I was dealing with back in 1990.

However, there is, once again, a phenomenal amount of media interest in what's happening in the subway. Unfortunately, a lot of the incidents we're seeing today that are getting so much press attention, even with a much smaller number of incidents involve the mentally ill. It's that population that is really creating the fear and the issue of what to do with them. I'll be very frank with you, I've been dealing with the situation for 50 some odd years.

We've made a mess out of it and we're still making a mess out of it. It goes back to when we closed the mental institutions back in the 1970s. Well intended like so many of our criminal justice efforts, well intended, but it turned out to be a disaster because basically, we empty the metal institutions and they dumped them on the streets and into the subways. 50 years later, we're still experiencing the same thing.

Brian Lehrer: Without the support of housing and other services to serve people without being institutionalized but not create these problems, would you say?

Commissioner Bratton: Exactly, Brian. What we did also was we reduced significantly Governor Cuomo, others that the number of beds where you could effectively put a mentally ill person into custody to treat them because they really-- it's terrible to leave some of these poor souls on the streets in the conditions that they exist. The beds steadily reduce that, and one of the big challenges when police are asked to do something or all these entities that are now out there trying to help the homeless and the mentally ill make up a significant part of that street population, about 3,000 to 4,000 homeless on the streets that they go in for 3 days observation and they ride back out again.

We've got effectively a merry-go-round system. Good news is that Mayor Adams have been campaigning for, Governor Hochul is responding that they're increasing, I think the bed capacity by over 1,000. That's still probably not enough, but at least it provides the opportunity to try and give these poor souls treatment.

Brian Lehrer: Continuing on the oral history from circa 1993 and moving to the national stage, did the crime bill pass by Congress and the Clinton administration contribute any way to the effort in the city, either financially or substantively?

Commissioner Bratton: It did contribute, I would say significantly. However, there were parallel efforts underway. New York effectively was way ahead of the national government in the sense that Peter [unintelligible 00:08:28], Mayor Dinkins had spearheaded safe city, say streets in response to the crime crisis of 1990, 1991. The New York Post, "Dave, do something," that very famous headline, they funded 6,000 additional police officers. In beginning in 1993, they began to hire those officers.

Unfortunately, for Dinkins, he waited too long to hire them, so effectively, Giuliani and I, in our first 6 months, 4,000 of those officers came on while we were coming into positions of commissioner and mayor. New York was already doing a lot to deal with its problem. It was making great efforts at Rikers Island to straighten out the crime problem on Rikers Island, which it boggles my mind why they can't fix that damn place because it was fixed back in the mid-1990s with a population back then on average of 20,000 people on Rikers Island at that time.

Now, it's running around 6,000 or 7,000 and it's worse than it's ever been. In any event, what the Clinton crime bill did, effectively, it was the Clinton-Biden crime bill. Back then, Biden was a chair of some of the significant committees. Newt Gingrich, I remember sitting with Mayor Giuliani many visits to Washington DC to lobby for that. Clinton and Giuliani in those days had a great relationship. In 1993, I was commissioner in Boston. I was invited down to the Rose Garden to represent American police as Clinton announced the crime bill. Then in 1994, I had been appointed police commissioner in New York, was invited back when the crime bill was signed in the Rose Garden. I saw that transition and with Giuliani I very actively participated in the lobbying of Gingrich and others for that bill.

What the bill gave was additional momentum for the country, but for New York, it gave additional resources. [unintelligible 00:10:23] for example, that for a period of time, with 100,000 extra cops that that bill funded, New York went up from 38,000 to 41,000 police officers, now that perhaps it has about 34,000, about 7,000 less than back in those days. Arguably, a lot less crime, but arguably also right now, the equivalent fee is what we had back then. Bill crime bill also passed the assault weapons ban, that 10-year ban, which was helpful. New York has never had a problem, interestingly enough, with assault weapons. Our problem in the city has always been hand guns and the increasing use of semi-automatic handguns, but assault weapons, unlike many other cities has never been a problem.

It also provided the building of more prison facilities around the country. That's the term mass incarceration was created because it was effectively one of the results you had more places to put them, more people went to jail. In New York City, however, the goal was and in fact, it was achieved that for a period of time, we were going to crack down significantly on crime. The population at Rikers did go up, but I predicted successfully that it was a bell curve.

As we change behaviors, we control behavior, that population would be reduced. Effectively, when I came back in 2014 with Mayor de Blasio, the jail population at Rikers was averaging about 8,000 to 9,000, down from 22,000 on average in the early '90s. What a change, we change behavior. How was that reflected? It was reflected in the fact that overall murders in the city were down 90%, overall crime down 80%, better statistics than any other city in America. American's crime went down by about 40% overall. New York City it was 70% to 80% overall, with murders down 90%. The good news was, fewer people going to jail. Why? Because we had changed their behavior.

Brian Lehrer: Bringing this forward to the present and as we start to learn at a time, I read that you've come out against the New York bail reform and prosecutors ignoring some smaller offenses as contributing to crime in the city, but I also saw that you were part of a group in 2015 called Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime and Incarceration, that said, "Incarceration, not just crime, was a crisis in the country."

You pointed out that the US has 5% of the world's population, but 25% of the prisoners. The report your group issued said, "With momentum for criminal justice reform accelerating, we want to leave no doubt where the law enforcement community stance. We need less incarceration, not more to keep all Americans safe." With your decades of experience, how much have your own views evolved, and where are you today on where the right balance is to achieve the most harm reduction for everyone?

Commissioner Bratton: The views have really not changed back to the '90s, I just recounted, we were predicting for a period of time, it's like a doctor dealing with severe cancer, he's going to have to hit you with a lot of radiation, a lot of chemotherapy. He's going to make you sicker for a shorter period of time to cure your illness. We had to increase our arrests, we had to take the city back but focus on broken windows, minor offenses. This was one of the concerns about mass incarceration.

When 80% of the prison population at the state prison have been there for violent crimes, and the vast majority at Rikers, nobody is up there in Rikers serving time for fare evasion, it was the idea of balancing a position focus through the cop set system in New York on serious crime and also enforcing quality of life that we predicted comfortably. It's been proven correct, that five would go down, as well as the unnecessary incarceration of individuals and incarceration, oftentimes ruining many lives.

We're not living in a perfect world, but I have been basically supportive of criminal justice reform my whole career. I have successfully implemented it. I think New York is a perfect model, in the sense that what incenses me at the moment, Brian, is that in 2018, the legislature without consulting the police, without consulting the district attorneys, in the middle of the night passed the Criminal Justice Reform Act. They passed the Law of the Age Act, 18 to 16 or raise it from 16 to 18. That a bunch of well-intended but poorly conceived legislative reforms that are crippling District Attorney offices, impacting significantly on businesses throughout New York, particularly on the minor crimes in shoplifting instead of the sense of disorder.

Brian Lehrer: We just have 20 seconds left, but they would say that crime hasn't gone up anymore in New York than other cities around the country that didn't just pass a bail reform law, so the stats wouldn't, therefore, bear it out. 20 seconds.

Commissioner Bratton: Everybody can basically focus on statistics and make them say what they want. The reality is that the criminal justice reform passed by the legislature is having over time negative impact. In every city that's appointed one of these progressive elected, one of these progressive DAs, you cannot find one city in America where crime is going down as a result of the reforms. If the reforms aren't working for what they were intended to do, they're keeping the people out of jail, but those people are being kept out of jail, they're still committing crimes.

Brian Lehrer: Former New York City Police Commissioner, Boston Police Commissioner, LA Police Commissioner, William Bratton, thank you so much.

Commissioner Bratton: Great to be with you as always, Brian. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Continuing, we are in part four of our six-part series, the Year of Bill and Rudy, How 1993 Help Give us the World of 2023. Bill Clinton became president in 1993, and Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor. Why did America move left and the city move right and how did those choices help give us the world and the issues we're living with today? For today's installment, it's the Clinton crime bill meets Giuliani's NYPD. Crime went down nationally and in New York. How much did their policies have to do with it? How much was unnecessary mass incarceration a side effect? Are there lessons to be learned for crime fighting today, which New York and other places are struggling with?

The Reverend Al Sharpton is ready to join us after we flashback to 1993 with one soundbite from the Senate floor during the Clinton Crime Bill debate. Speaking on the floor is the senator from Delaware, Joseph R. Biden.

Senator Joe Biden: We must take back to the streets. It doesn't matter whether or not the person that is accosting your son or daughter or my son or daughter, my wife, your husband, my mother, your parents, it doesn't matter whether or not they were deprived as a youth. It doesn't matter whether or not they had no background that enable them to become socialized into the fabric of society. It doesn't matter whether or not they're the victims of society. The end result is they're about to knock my mother on the head with a lead pipe, shoot my sister, beat up my wife, take on my sons. I don't want to ask what made them do this. They must be taken off the street.

Brian Lehrer: Senator Joe Biden in 1993, one of the many ways that 1993 gave us the world of today. The Reverend Al Sharpton is with us now. He is founder and president of the National Action Network, host of Politics Nation on MSNBC Saturdays and Sundays at 5:00 PM Eastern. He has two recent books Righteous Troublemakers: Untold Stories of the Social Justice Movement in America published last year and Rise Up: Confronting a Country at the Crossroads which came out in 2020. Reverend Sharpton is in the news today calling for criminal charges against five Memphis police officers who have been fired for excessive use of force against 29-year-old FedEx employee, Tyre Nichols, during a traffic stop on January 7th. Nichols died in police custody three days later, as you may have heard already on the news.

Reverend Sharpton made news in New York three weeks ago, when he convened a summit of New York's top Black elected officials on public safety. A meeting that included Mayor Adams, Assembly and Senate leaders Carl Hastie and Andrea Stewart-Cousins, State Attorney General Letitia James, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, and others. Reverend Sharpton, we always appreciate when you come on the show with your busy schedule. Welcome back to WNYC.

Reverend Al Sharpton: Thank you, Brian. Glad to be with you.

Brian Lehrer: Would you like to comment first on the death of Tyre Nichols and what Justice would look like in your opinion in that case?

Reverend Al Sharpton: Well, I think that case screams out for prosecution. Clearly, you have an unarmed young man, and all that they could say is there was some traffic violation and they got into an altercation around that he was unarmed. From what the lawyers and the family have seen of the body cam tapes, they have not been fully released, he was beaten to death and the cause of death by the hospital and coroners was by the assault. There's no justification for a policeman to beat an unarmed person, even if they're a suspect to death and the fact that these five police officers are all Black does not give them immunity from our calling for their prosecution and for them to face the full extent of the law.

The US Attorney's office down there has met with the family and this young man will be funeralized on next Wednesday and I'll be doing the eulogy and attorney Ben Crump will be speaking and he is, of course, representing the family, but this is reminiscent of Rodney King some 32 years ago and I was involved then and I'm going to be just as involved seeking justice for Nichol's family here. I'll be candid, the fact that the cops were Black is even more of an outrage to me because I do not think they would've done so themselves if it was a white.

Race is still involved this way, the opposite way and some of the New York media say they're surprised that I'm going after Black cops. It was Black cops I went after Nishaun Bell case right here in New York. We are not against white police brutality. We are against police brutality no matter who the brutality is being done by.

Brian Lehrer: You just said you think that these Black cops would not have beaten a white suspect who was doing the exact same thing in the way that they beat Tyre Nichols?

Reverend Al Sharpton: I believe that they would not have behaved that way because I believe they know they would've been held accountable. I think that they believe that maybe in the case of doing it to another Black, that the Black community would say, maybe it was a little over the line, but it's not racial. I think that they have a sworn duty to uphold the law and you do not beat someone to death in the name of enforcing the law.

Brian Lehrer: I'd like to ask you to give us some oral history from 1993 New York and National and let me start on the National, you heard the Joe Biden clip there. I imagine you're very familiar with it. How much does it make you cringe and how much, at the time did language like that seem reasonable to you if you can recall?

Reverend Al Sharpton: I remember during the whole debate around the omnibus crime though, which ended up passing in '94. We had been outraged all over the country and a lot of what we were doing in New York at the time with the outbreak of crack cocaine and in fact people that are old enough may recall, I used to go to where crack was being sold and lead a delegation of young people and paint red Xs saying the police know that crack is being sold in here, why don't they stop it?

Then they came up with the crime bill. A lot of this started around the death of basketball star Len Bias off of crack. I took the position then that the omnibus crime bill and the language that then Senator Biden and others were doing was over the top. We wanted to see people prosecuted, but when they started saying that they were going to have a different sentencing for crack cocaine, that is where we departed.

I actually marched on the crime bill. I marched on Clinton's White House and the Senate because the bill said that if you were convicted of loose cocaine, that you do not have mandatory sentencing that is the same, that if you were convicted of crack cocaine and the racial disparities in that was clear to us and the fact that you can't even make crack cocaine without having loose cocaine. It just did not make sense.

Brian Lehrer: That's one issue, but the congressional Black caucus did vote in the majority for the crime bill with 26 out of the 38 members and a Brookings Institution article I was reading said a Gallup poll at the time showed 58% Black support, just 49% white support for the bill. With 30 years of hindsight, why do you think the vote in the caucus and Black public opinion were what they were at the time?

Reverend Al Sharpton: Because I think that there was reacting to the fact that our communities were being inundated with crack and all that comes from that in terms of children, of people were being hooked on crack, but I think that it was an understandable outrage, but I think the remedy exploited the outrage rather than solve it.

Brian Lehrer: Turning to local history. We just had William Bratton on, I don't know if you were able to hear the last few minutes of that, where he basically said from his perspective and I'm paraphrasing him, so I hope I'm doing him justice, but he more or less said mass incarceration was necessary as a temporary measure to get to the incarceration that he was presiding over by the time he was Mayor de Blasio's police commissioner and so mass incarceration acted as a deterrent and is not the end goal just to lock up a lot of people, which of course is disproportionately Black and Latino people, young males disproportionately as well. Do you remember him saying that 30 years ago and what's your 30-year lens on that debate at that time and where you are now?

Reverend Al Sharpton: 30 years ago, I don't remember him saying that. I do remember that he was the police commissioner for Rudolph Giuliani. When we sought to meet with him, Rudy Giuliani wouldn't even let him meet with us. When he came back as police commissioner under Bill de Blasio, he not only met, he came and spoke at Nash Action Networks House of Justice, but I consider it questionable how anyone would say we needed to do mass in incarceration to lead to doing the opposite later.

What data supports that one would lead to the other and am I now to be told, if I had a relative that was locked up and given disproportionate time, this was a social experiment and it was not based on criminal law? I think that that is outrageous. There is no evidence that the lowering of the crime at that time was based on mass incarceration. If you look at the data, while de Blasio was mayor, there was not those policies in, stop and frisk and all of the quality of life laws were not in and crime was down. The data would speak against that.

Brian Lehrer: Coming up to the president, you convene that meeting on public safety this month of top Black elected officials in New York, which means most of the people who hold the major levers of power in New York now with the Mayoralty Senate Assembly leader position, state Attorney General Manhattan DA. I know you've wanted to hold the contents of that meeting as private and not for the media, but is there anything you can tell us about either the results or the premise of that meeting, or if you see a more well-rounded approach to crime fighting than when almost everyone in power was white?

Reverend Al Sharpton: I think that there will be some things that come out of that meeting. The staffs of all of those involved have had two meetings since then convened by deputy Mayor Wright and Carole Wallace from National Action Network and what we are trying to do is come out by hopefully the New York State, Black and Puerto Rican caucus weekend in February to announce two or three areas that we can all agree to and that there's a consensus.

It was my feeling along with Reverend A.R. Bernard of Christian Life Center and Hazel Dukes, NAACP, that we have an unprecedented amount of Black elected officials at the top of city and state government and they had not been in the room to discuss this issue. They may differ on how we get there, but they all want public safety. We wanted to convene them.

We're glad that they all agreed to come and we did not violate the discussions in the room. They were candid, but I think respectful and all agreed to let's try to find common ground and their staffs have been trying to work toward that since the meeting.

Brian Lehrer: We just saw the New York suburbs almost single-handedly lose Congress for the Democrats largely over the issue of crime, I think it's fair to say. Are there echoes to you from 1993 of why Dinkins lost to Giuliani and perhaps a failure to learn from history so New York Democrats repeated it?

Reverend Al Sharpton: I think that the fact that Rudy Giuliani was able to exploit the crime situation in '93 and wrongfully putting it at Dave Dinkins door among other exaggerations and the help that he got with the Staten Island trying to succeed and that drove a vote out and the distortions he did in other matters is was not remembered or even studied by those this year because you would think from the media coverage that Speaker Heastie and a Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins was trying to say open up the doors of the jails and just let people out.

That's not what they were saying but the distortions were there and I think they whipped people into a frenzy and I do think that they largely cost four seats. When you can elect somebody that is least likely to have been vetted than anyone in my lifetime, George Santos, in the middle of this crime hysteria, it shows you how out of using what was the adequate and appropriate ways of running a campaign, we were running on total hysteria and we ended up in the name of fighting crime to electing a fraudster and still not being able to address the issues that we collectively need to address to deal with fighting crimes but at the same time not committing crimes against people's civil liberties and civil right.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, looking back one more time you said Giuliani didn't even let you meet with Commissioner Bratton when he became NYPD Commissioner. How about when Mayor Dinkins had hired Bratton to run the transit police and crime went down a lot in the subway system? Did you have a reaction to that at the time remembering back?

Reverend Al Sharpton: I don't remember what my reaction was but again we never held anything against Bratton personally because of when he was appointed by de Blasio later, like I said, I hosted him at the House of Justice. He was operating under the Giuliani administration. If you remember one of the biggest cases of police brutality at the end of the 20th century, '99, was Amadou Diallo, it was a historic civil disobedience campaign.

We had 200, 300 people a day including former Mayor Dinkins come down with me and do civil disobedience in front of One Police Plaza and Giuliani wouldn't meet with Black leadership then. I'm talking about you had former mayors and members of Congress and Oscar-winning performers going to jail right in front of One Police Plaza. He wouldn't meet. His political operations and strategy was always us against them. He played that, and I think Bratton and anyone in his administration had to go along with it.

Brian Lehrer: Last thing, what's your brief report card for Mayor Adams on a well-rounded set of public safety policies? He talks about the many rivers feeding violence that need to be addressed with both law enforcement and root causes but he often gets criticized by racial justice advocates for being too law enforcement oriented. What's your take?

Reverend Al Sharpton: I think that it was clear to me that Eric Adams had a long history of reform in the state senate and as head of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement. Since he's been in, he's in the first year tried to have a balanced approach. In this private meeting, a lot of that was brought up. Public Advocate, Jumaane Williams, was there, didn't bite his tongue and I think that we have to separate some of what is being put out in the press and some of what is the basic policies of the mayor.

I think when we come out with the consensus programs that everybody agrees to, that will be obvious. I was on Morning Joe with the mayor this morning. I do not think the mayor is in any way the way he's being projected, though I think he firmly wants to do some things about crime but it's certainly not anywhere near like going back to 1993.

Brian Lehrer: That's part four of our series, The Year of Bill and Rudy, How 1993 Helped to Set Up 2023. Tomorrow part five of Brian Lehrer show editorial board, three guests compare notes on how Clinton and Giuliani CIRCA93 led towards good and bad about the city and the country today. For now, we thank Reverend Al Sharpton. Thank you so much for your time today, Rev. Good luck with your involvement in the Memphis case.

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