The New Yorker Radio Hour - Eric Adams Talks with David Remnick

Episode Date: July 23, 2021

The New York City mayoral primary, which culminated in a vote held in June, was full of surprises, including the introduction of ranked-choice voting to a confused electorate, and the presence of Andrew Yang, a newcomer to municipal politics who quickly attained front-runner status. But the winning Democrat was no surprise. Eric Adams is the borough president of Brooklyn and a former state senator, making him an establishment favorite. He was also, for more than two decades, a police officer. With policing at the center of public attention since last year’s uprising of the Black Lives Matter movement, Adams occupies a unique position in the debate. He was a firebrand in the N.Y.P.D. and an advocate for Black officers; and he was, as a teen-age boy, a victim of police abuse himself. But Adams is also a strong defender of the police department. He has spoken about the correct way to implement stop-and-frisk policies, which have been previously carried out in ways that were ruled unconstitutional. He rebuked candidates to his left who talked about defunding the force. And he made the national spike in violent crime part of his candidacy, when others focussed their platforms elsewhere.   The nation’s cities face a budgetary crisis, the COVID crisis, a crisis of confidence in policing, and more. Adams doesn’t seem fazed. “We need to be very honest that our city is dysfunctional. And it always has been for a large number of New Yorkers,” he told David Remnick. “I could take you throughout the city where the conditions have remained the same through mayor after mayor. What I must do is stop the dysfunctionality of a city that has normalized being dysfunctional.” Remnick spoke with Adams on July 21, 2021. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We just had the primary election for the mayor of New York City, and the winner, the very likely next mayor, is Democrat Eric Adams. He's the borough president of Brooklyn and a former state senator. But most importantly in this race, Adams was for more than two decades, a police officer. And perhaps no debate in our society is more divisive than. questions about policing. And here Adams holds a truly unique position. In his youth, he was beaten by police. When he joined the NYPD himself, he was a firebrand and an advocate for black officers.

But now he's a sympathetic figure to the police department, a kind of law and order candidate. He rebuked other candidates who spoke of severely cutting police budgets, and he made the national spike in violent crime a big part of his rhetoric. Assuming that Eric Adler, assuming that Eric Adams wins the general election, which is overwhelmingly likely. He'll take over a city that faces multiple overlapping crises that might daunt any politician. Mr. Adams, you there? Yes, I am. There you are. What you do is you, so you go to the voice memo, you turn it on, you start a voice memo and start recording, and just hold the phone up to your ear as if we're talking on the phone. Yep, now I'm recording. Do the interview, am I holding it up like this?

Like we're on a phone call. All right, that sucks. Well, you know, life is hard. Then you get elected mayor. No, exactly. You're the one that wanted to have the second hardest office in the whole country. You can get out of it now if you want. I know one woman who'd be pleased. Now, a couple is, it seems very recently where New York politics was being talked

about as the center of, you know, the ascent of Alexandria Cassio-Cortez and the left in general. Along comes you, Eric Adams, and you're being celebrated on the day we speak in the most conservative column in the New York Times by Brett Stevens as something of a savior and a repudiation of the left. Do you see your likely assent to the Gracie Mansion and to City Hall as a repudiation of the left in New York City? No, I don't. And I think one of the greatest tragedies of this campaign was the removal of my left philosophy.

I am a progressive, and the 35-plus years of history shows that, you know, as a sergeant marching in front of Rockefeller Plaza, only to go to Albany to reverse the draconian Rockefeller drug laws, marriage equality, my conference to get that vote on the floor one year to see who were not voting for it and then later to push it through gun violence. I testified in federal court. The judge mentioned me in her ruling on why she ruled against the police department. And so I believe that I am not a repudiation of the left.

I believe I am the energy and spirit of New Yorkers. You know, darn it, they just want the lights to be on. They want their garbage picked up. They don't want their children not being educated. They're paying their taxes, and we should be doing our job with their tax dollars, and they heard me. I was confused during the campaign, and I never really got a straight answer that I could glean and help me on this. All you say is true, and at the same time, you switch parties. You became a Republican for quite a long time.

that. Yes, and it was out of real anger of the Democratic Party. You know, sometimes we view life based on our current state, but we need to go back. We were dealing with the city where we had 2,000 homicides a year. We saw a Democratic Party that created many of the draconian laws that were put in place. We were incarcerated a large number of people for small amounts of crack cocaine instead of giving them the health they deserve. We had the crime bill that devastated many of our communities. And then we saw the Democratic Party in charge, but not dealing with real crime.

And I was seeing that crime every day. And it was my protest of just saying, I'm tired of this party ignoring the plight of people in the inner cities. And that was my protest and reflection. I could have done it a different ways. But, you know, as you move through life, you learn from your lessons, you don't relive them.

Are you saying you regret becoming a Republican for a period of time? Yes, I do. There was no reason to do so. I could have found a better way to voice my outrage with the party. I could have resigned from the department and ran for office. And there were other things I could have done. But, you know, I made a lot of mistakes in life. Let me tell you something.

I am perfectly imperfect. You know, I've made so many darn mistakes in my life that you have to laugh and say, how did this guy still get here? But I never stopped. I never stopped grinding and I never stopped learning from those errors. You seem very plain spoken and straightforward. What are your biggest mistakes? Well, number one, I should have married my childhood sweetheart.

She kicked me to the curve and went to Washington to marry someone else. So, you know, there are a lot of things that I did wrong. I wish I would have spent more time with my son. That was a real impactful moment for me. I spent so much time saving the lives of children that I was really afraid I was going to lose my son. And I'm just really amazed at how much he has developed as a child. And he said to me after the Eric Gardner incident some years ago that dad, I understand why you were so determined. And our relationship is an amazing relationship, even when he was a child, but I wish I would have been around him more.

and I put the movement in front of being the dad that I should have been during that time, in my opinion. New Yorkers are beat. They're exhausted. This pandemic has been so brutal in the worst way. There's been lockdowns, death, curfews, changing mask rules, dealing with remote education for kids, no access to the arts. The list goes on and on and on. And you might soon be the leader whose job it is to restore New York. to normal. I just, what are you going to do, for example? You have 25% of New Yorkers who are still vaccine hesitant. One third of hospital workers reportedly have not gotten their shots. One third of hospital workers in New York. Why hasn't Mayor de Blasio tried to get that vaccination rate up?

What mistakes has he made? And what are you going to do? Well, you said two things. That's very important. Number one, you said, how are we going to get back to normal? And there's a book called New York, New York, New York, that I'm reading, and a woman went to Mayor Koch, and she said, Mr. Mayor, can you make the city work again? And Mayor Koch looked at her and said, ma'am, this city never worked. And that's the reality.

We call it normal. You know, you and I, we probably went to our great restaurants. We probably lived a great life. But it wasn't normal. It has never been normal. Well, that's not very reassuring what you're telling me. But it's being honest. We need to, we need to, you know, be very honest that our city is dysfunctional. And it always has been for a large number of New Yorkers. You and I are, we're insulated from that dysfunctionality. But, you know, let's be clear. I could take you throughout this city where the conditions have remained the same continuously

throughout mayors after mayors. And so what I must do is stop the dysfunctionality of a city that has normalized being dysfunctional. And that is part of our inability to get the vaccination program the way it ought to be, to deal with the failure of testing. I told the mayor from the beginning of this COVID process that we should have opened the command center down at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, that we should have built out a system using real-time governance where we can see exactly where the testings were taking place,

where we were actually seeing the hotspots so we could deploy things in real time. We must move our city to a real time. That's what we need to do with the vaccine. Every day, we can easily use a simple Google Doc. When a person comes in, get vaccinated, put the information to Google Dot, do a nightly mapping to look at the areas in real time that we're not reaching herd immunity and deploy the resources there and use all of our agencies in the process. Will you tell hospital workers that they must be vaccinated? No, I would not do that.

Why not? What I will say to them. But why wouldn't you do that? First, let me tell you what I will do, then we'll circle back to why I wouldn't do that. What I would tell them is that either you get vaccinated and I'm going to strongly encourage that or you have to get tested daily as you go into the hospital so we can know your status. I'm going to encourage vaccination. I am vaccinated.

I'm going to encourage that. When I sit down in the groups of people that I have met with, there are real fears that people have. We're going to evolve to the place where COVID is going to be our norm. Let's be clear. COVID is a formidable opponent. It's going to be here a while. But there are real fears that people have because of the method on how we develop the vaccine. And they're real fears.

And we need to get people off those fears and talk them off the cliff. We need to really use credible messengers to get people to embrace this and not feel as though we're doing something that is harmful to them. I'm going to do that. I'm talking with Eric Adams, the Democratic nominee, and very likely next mayor of New York City. We'll continue in a moment. You've got a very complicated issue to face in essentially in your wheelhouse on crime and police reform. How do you sell the police in their unions on the idea of reform? And how do you speak to the left, which is a very big constituency in this city, about the notion of defunding the police?

This is not a cartoon issue. Nobody is saying strip the police of all resources on the one hand. So how do you deal with a very complex situation in which a pandemic was probably largely responsible for a spike in certain crime statistics? It's very serious. But a lot of public opinion has changed. And you seem to be saying no, to defend the police, to even reform of the police that is, pretty profound. You seem to be saying, wait a minute, I'm not up for that. No, I'm not. I am, I dedicated my life to police reform. You know, but what many people don't know

when I was 15 years old and the police assaulted me, they don't know that around that same time I lost a good friend to gun violence, the crack wars were taking place. And so I was traumatized by police and I was traumatized by the gang drug violence. And so I come in with this dual emotion that the prerequisite to prosperity is public safety and justice. And we could have both. And I'm going to reach out to my unions and I'm going to reach out, my law enforcement unions, that is. I'm going to reach out to the credible messengers, crisis management teams, my clergy groups and everyday New Yorkers. And I'm going to tell them, let's turn the page. We need each other.

The streets of our city, those streets would be controlled by the good guys or bad guys. And right now the bad guys are winning. And it is harmful to police officers and it's harmful to everyday people. You said the bad guys are winning. I hear rhetoric like that sometimes on right-wing Twitter and Fox, as if somehow uniformly the streets of New York have gone from Placid to berserk. There's no doubt there's been spike in some crime. statistics without a doubt, and I don't underestimate that and the danger of that. But isn't that largely the result of the effect of the pandemic and all that has wrought? You want to bring back

hugely controversial, now-dispanted anti-crime unit of the New York Police Department. But that was notorious in its time for harassment and worse, wasn't it? Aren't you wary of bringing back Giuliani-era methods that led us to a bad place? in this city? No, no, I'm not. And first, let's look at anti-crime never went away. And Giuliani didn't bring anti-crime. Anti-crime, plain closed officers. They have been in place as long as policing has been in place. You know, they abused it. An abuse of a tool is the worst thing you can do. And that's the same thing was stop, question, and frisk. We went to stop and frisk. We took a tool and we said instead of using it, what you're supposed to use it for, if someone is,

you believe someone is committed a crime, we use it as a quota system. That's what I fought against and testified against. We basically said going to a community based on ethnicity and crime level and stop everyone you see. That's an abuse of a tool. Eric Adams is mayor. My police commissioner is going to know how to use tools the way they're supposed to be used legally and not abuse those tools. And so, no, we don't have a city that's back to 2000 homicides a year. But perception is reality. If we continue to see three-year-olds shot in Times Square or Asian members of our city, a tat is going to hurt tourism in multi-billion dollar industry, no one is going to return here. We're going to lose our high-income earners while fleeing because they don't feel safe.

Remember, only 65,000 people pay 51% of our income taxes. That allows us to have teachers, sanitation employees, police. We can't lose our high-income earners, and the perception of fear is hurting our economy. So your fear is that wealthy people in New York City are going to run off to Palm Beach and wherever, and we're going to lose so much tax revenue that city services across the board are going to deteriorate. I fear that and I fear large corporations stating, I am not staying in the city like they're saying to parts of San Francisco when you see tent cities and you see a total disorder in San Francisco, large corporations are leaving the city. And what's happening at Washington Square Park? I was there the other day with my son. Someone was injecting themselves with heroin right inside the park. You can't run cities the way we're running the city. and I'm fearful that if we lose our corporations, our high-income owners,

we're not going to be able to employ middle-class New Yorkers, that they're going to be able to enjoy the quality of life they deserve. Mr. Adams, you know better than anyone that despite Brown v. Board of Education and the many decades that followed, New York City still has a public school system that is astonishingly segregated. And the question is, what? to do about it. That's a great question. We're segregated city. Our schools, our schools, they are a reflection of how we're segregated as a city. We try to act like we're hip and cool and integrated like heck we are.

Are you kidding me? We live in these pockets and people, they talk about it, you know, let's all live together, but, you know, try to build affordable housing on someone's block. And they said, wait a minute, we don't want these people here. We need to stop it. But what do you prepare to do to change that when it comes to the school system? Or do you think it shouldn't be changed? No, it should be changed. You know, the quality of an education is not only being academically smart, but being emotionally intelligent. And our children must develop their full personhood, and part of that is understanding and appreciating diversity. That is our secret weapon.

Number one, I am a believer we have to upzone in affluent communities. We have headed backwards for so long. We've upzoned in poorer communities, move rich people in and displaced poorer people. No, let's upzone in affluent communities, move poorer people in, and allow them to diversify the schools in the process, because now you live in that district, allow them access to healthy food, access to good health care, where you could have a holistic approach. And then let's make sure we do what we did in Park Slope. So you just got finished saying to me, you're worried about the tiny proportion of rich people running out in New York City. If poor people start somehow,

I don't know how they're going to do it, move into Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue, don't you think that's going to hasten the departure of people on Fifth Avenue to Palm Beach? No, I do not. When I speak to my affluent New Yorkers and sit down and engage real healthy conversations, having a real affordable housing program in their communities, we're not talking about shelters, when I talk my building, NYCHA on Park and 53rd Street, we're talking about mixed income affordable units where people can come and to segregate their communities.

And a lot of my affluent New Yorkers enjoy knowing that their children are growing, up in a diverse, multicultural environment. And I think we give New Yorkers a bed, you know, really mock by thinking they don't. I think it's possible. We have to diversify our schools. We're doing a disservice to our children. So you live in Bedstuy, which is a big neighborhood in Brooklyn, for those who live out of town, as we say, New York.

Bette Stey, traditionally, for decades, has been a mainly black neighborhood in Brooklyn, big neighborhood, and it's increasingly gentrified. And how do you feel about that? How do you feel about the gentrification of your own neighborhood? Well, first, I love diversity, and we need to really understand. Gentification is not an ethnicity. It's a mindset. And when you come into a community, no matter what your ethnicity may be,

and you don't talk to the people who are there, you don't patronize the stores, the shops, you basically attempt to displace a long-term good practices. That's gentification. But if you come into a community with that old time feeling that you come with a cake, that you're now a new neighbor, if you engage in, if you're part of the school, if you involve, that's a wonderful thing. I want my son to know, I look at his friends and I see the different ethnic groups and how they engage with each other. That's an amazing, beautiful feeling. But the energy of coming into a community and believing that you are now taken over and you're going to use the police and other agencies as your tools to go after their long-term residence there and displace them, that's wrong. That can't happen and we cannot allow it to happen. One of the most complicated, perhaps the most complicated relationship you're going to have to,

negotiate as mayor. And this has always been the case in New York is with the governor. Governors and mayors get along like cats and dogs. You know it and I know it. The relationships have always been at best horrible. Horrible. Diplazio and Cuomo can barely say a civil word to each other. Now, as you well know, Governor Cuomo is being investigated for reports of sexual harassment. And you were not one of those who joined the call for Cuomo to resign. Why not? Because it's a process. What's great about this amazing country we're in is something called due process. And particularly as a black man, history has so many examples of where people have just basically stated we're going to skip over the due process part. We have an investigation taking place. The attorney general is extremely competent. Let her do her job. She did interview him as well. as the victims that stated they were victimized, let's let the process take his course. Did the accusations trouble you? Yes, they did. They were extremely troubling. I believe that

no one should be the victim of any overaggressive or any intrusive actions. I was extremely troubled to hear them, but I do respect the process, and we need to allow the process to take his court. Mr. Adams, a final question. Who's the best mayor this city has ever had? That's a great question. I will have to mix up a few. I patterned myself after Dinkins, Bloomberg, and LaGuardia, a blue-collar guy, you know, just an everyday guy, blue-collar guy, nothing fancy. There's nothing fancy about me, you know. Wait, you're not saying Michael Bloomberg is a blue-collar guy. Bloomberg was a good, smart person that knew how to use data, but when you pattern yourself on the ground, I think that's the energy. spirit of a person, a hardworking, a New Yorker. The life I live is a life that New Yorkers are living right now from being a dishwasher, going to school at night, paying my way through college,

working hard, having a learning disability, overcoming that, being arrested, but going from saying what was me to why not me, that's what people picked up when I ran for mayor. They said, this is one of us. This is just an ordinary guy that wants to do something for ordinary people in the city. Mr. Adams, thank you so much. Thank you. Take care. Eric Adams is the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, and he faces Republican Curtis Sliwa in the November general election. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Avae Carrillo, and Corby, Calli Leah, David Krasnow, Gophane and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, Annabel Bacon, and Stephen Valentino. And we had additional help from Harrison Keithline. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.