J.R. Giddings: Audience, tell a friend to tell a friend we have Mayor Adams joining us right now. Mayor Adams, good morning. Welcome back to the Reset Talk Show. How are you this morning?
Mayor Eric Adams: Quite well, brother. How are you doing? And to your hundreds of thousands of listeners, good morning.
Giddings: Mayor Adams, the doctor, Dr. Vasan, just segued right into one of the talking points that I want to raise this morning. Mayor Adams, we have a mental health crisis unfolding across the city and the country, and you have put forth an initiative to aid in combating this crisis. Can you expound on that?
Mayor Adams: Yes, brother. Thank you. Well, first we have to be at a very clear place that the status quo is not an option. As Dr. Vasan indicated, walking past people that clearly exhibit signs that they cannot meet their basic needs and that they are in danger to themselves by a trained eye and acting like we don't see it until they harm themselves or others, is not acceptable in this administration. We've done a series of things to get to this level that we're at now. January and February immediately after becoming the mayor, I went into the streets at night and visited people inside camps, inside cardboard boxes. And J.R., I saw some things that it’s just inhumane. I saw people living with human waste in the tent, stale food, clothing, unkept, hallucinating, bipolar, schizophrenic and we were just pretending as though we did not see them.
And so we started the first round of stating that this no longer would be the status quo. We did our subway safety initiative. We went on a pursuit to remove the encampments and tents and gave people care. We partner and led front with mental health professionals. Whenever we talk about this, J.R., the media attempts to distort it and talk about police. That is not who leads this. It's being led by mental health professionals. Police play a role if the situation gets violent or dangerous, to protect the individuals and the mental health professionals.
But this is not — round up innocent people, round up everyone who has a mental health illness. No it's not. The initiative we announced last week was for a specific group of people who have reached the level of mental health illness that they cannot take care of their basic needs and they are in danger to themselves because of that. Plus a small group of people that we have taken to the hospital to have an evaluation, so that they can get the services they need so we don't wait until they do something harmful to themselves and others. Then we are going to continue to evolve this as Dr. Vasan stated… I'm not sure if I lost you.
Giddings: Yeah, we lost you for a minute but you're back.
Mayor Adams: Okay. I was giving you the overview of what the entire initiative is. It is going to assist those small numbers of people who have severe mental health illnesses that can't take care of their basic needs and they are a danger to themselves. This is totally legal within the restraints of the law.
Giddings: Thank you for that, Mayor Adams. Bringing clarity to a situation is very important. Because like you said, when we look at the media, when we listen to the media, a lot of mainstream media, we are seeing a lot of pushback against what you're doing. I'm glad that you're here and you could bring some clarity to what you're doing. I think it's important. I think it's important for our listening audience.
Before I move into the next question, we have nurse Patricia here. And nurse Patricia is the nurse who inoculated Madame Vice President. We've been talking all the time. She never really got a chance to put forth a message to you, so I have nurse Patricia here. Welcome in, nurse Patricia. How are you? Mayor Adams is right in front of us now.
Patricia Cummings: Good morning, J.R. Good morning fellow panelists, our listeners and good morning to you, Mayor Adams.
Mayor Adams: Good morning.
Cummings: Thank you for the wonderful work you're doing thus far with the greatest city on the planet. My question has to do with your plan. Obviously there are several critics and opposers to your plans. Well first of all, let me say that I am a proponent. I truly agree with what you're suggesting. I think that just as a health professional, many of these persons with severe mental illness are not even aware that they need the help, and they will not seek the help, so I think helping them is a great place to start.
My question is there are concerns about whether or not police officers are adequately trained to identify these individuals. And to properly secure them to get them to the place where they need the help. My question is just for our listeners, can you tell us what is being done to ensure that police officers are indeed qualified and trained to identify these groups of individuals?
Mayor Adams: No, thank you for that. As you know as a nurse, by the time many of the individuals we are talking about with severe mental health illnesses, by the time they reach the medical facilities on their own, it is normally through an ambulance because their acute medical conditions have eroded so bad, many of these individuals are also dealing with high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease. By the time we see them for the first time in an emergency room, they are mainly on life support or they're in terrible conditions.
And so not only are we going to assist them in their mental health issues, but we're also going to help them in their medical issues. And so this initiative, which is so important in which the media continues to try to portray that this is a police led initiative, it is not. Police are being partnered with mental health professionals. They're being partnered with them and they're going to go out together. This is what we have been doing for the last few months. As you have noticed, there has been no cases of people saying, "Look at this person being arrested or wrestled or treated harmfully." We've been doing this for at least six, seven months with this partnership because we found with the outreach workers, that if you allow a good engagement, a good conversation, you can normally convince someone to come and seek some form of assistance and that is the goal here.
Police are being retrained on how to do this engagement when they are needed. Sometimes police officers see the people in need before the outreach workers because you have more police officers on patrol than not. They will call the specialized group to come, that will be with an outreach worker or mental health professional. If there are questions that a police officer (inaudible), they will use either a phone call or telemedicine to speak with a hospital personnel. Give them a visual of what they're dealing with and allow that professional to make the evaluation to assist them just to get to the hospital. Once at the hospital, then a proper diagnosis could be made.
Cummings: Excellent. Thank you so much for your response, sir.
Mayor Adams: Thank you.
Giddings: Audience, if you're just joining us, we have New York City Mayor Eric Adams here on the Reset Talk Show. Mayor Adams, you are putting forward so many initiatives. We don't have a lot of time with you, but I definitely want to touch on this one. I think the audience will definitely be enthralled by this. You have formed a partnership with the American College of Lifestyle Medicine to provide every New York City healthcare practitioner with free introductory training in nutrition and lifestyle medicine. Why is this partnership important?
Mayor Adams: I often talk about upstream. Archbishop Desmond Tutu stated, "We spend a lifetime pulling people out of the river. No one goes upstream and prevents them from falling in in the first place." We have a downstream mindset. We allow people to fall in the river, healthcare, lack of education, homelessness, unemployment. All we do is wait downstream and after people fall in the river, we pull them out. I say let's go upstream and our approach to healthcare is an upstream mindset. Food is medicine. Its Greek terminology stated, “Let food be thy medicine, let medicine be thy food.” We want to focus on nutrition and how nutrition plays a role in healthcare.
The American College of Lifestyle Medicine has contributed $44 million to tell every healthcare worker, nurse, doctor, nutritionist, dietician, that they can take this free course when they do their continuing education to introduce them to lifestyle medicine. It was lifestyle medicine that saved my life, that reversed my diabetes, allowed me not to be on medication. I should not keep that to myself. I'm sharing this and this is a great partnership. We have it with H + H already. Now we expand it to all of the other private hospitals in the city and we are really excited about this announcement. This is a huge announcement. It is a betrayal that doctors only get one course on nutrition in medical school, and only a quarter of our medical schools give that one course. We are now making up for what the medical schools are failing to do.
Giddings: Thank you. Thank you, Mayor Adams. You're doing what you always do. You're empowering our audience. You're supercharging them. I think a lot of people are on the wrong track when it comes to healthcare and for sure what we eat is important. Pastor Stracker, one quick question before I let the mayor go.
Pastor Louis Stracker, Jr.: Good morning Mr. Mayor. It's so good to have you with us once again.
Mayor Adams: Always, pastor.
Stracker: Quick question. We are seeing reports that New York City, the city that we love, is now one of the most expensive cities to live in. The most expensive city to live in, tied with Singapore globally. And so we're feeling the pressure and a lot of people are reconsidering living in New York. I know in our congregations, even in my congregations, I've lost a lot of key leaders and people who just can't make it here anymore. I was joking with my wife last night. I said, “I may have to leave the pulpit and apply for the position for rat czar in order to live here."
We had the housing summit on Wednesday and there are things that I know that you're doing to help ease the housing crisis and how expensive it is to live in the city. But what can be done right now? Are there any plans to ease the burden of living in this city and keeping some of our great talent in this city due to how expensive it is?
Mayor Adams: A great question, pastor. First of all, I just really want to take my hat off to you and the other clergy members. You responded to the call of how do we come together and do housing? Building housing and affordable through our faith-based initiative is crucial because you're not doing it for profit, you're doing it for people. Those are going to be years out but I'm a big believer in intervention and prevention. The long-term stuff is prevention but you're right, what are we going to do right now?
A couple things we did. We put money right back in the pockets of everyday New Yorkers. Number one, we were able to get an increase in earned income tax credit. Those are dollars that go right back to families with children. It's so important. We were able to give hundreds of millions of dollars around childcare when it brought down the cost of childcare for families so that our parents can go back to work with adequate childcare that's not expensive. What we did around the Fair Futures for our children in foster care. We have an initiative that we are going to pay their college tuition throughout the entire four years up to $15,000 with a stipend to assist them. And our fares on the reduced MetroCard, money right back in the pocket. We expanded the amount to make sure we were able to do that, summer youth employment. We're doing all the things that are within our span of control of paid internship programs so young people can help their family members out. We're pushing for the increase in the minimum wage so that people can start making more. And so inflation is real. It is hurting families. It is becoming too expensive to live in cities and we must do everything within our control as City Hall to find ways to put money back in the pockets of New Yorkers.
Let me conclude with the most important part, a job. We have hundreds of jobs, pastor, that we are looking for people to fill. Everything from school safety agents to attorneys, to architects, to engineers. There are so many jobs that are open and I need folks to come back to work. I need folks to really fill these jobs that are available. Every corporation I speak with, they're stating that they can't find employees. We have a 6%, 8% vacancy rate in the city government. The city council has a 14 percent, the controller's office has a 14%, these are high numbers. Part of making the city affordable is people coming back to work. It's time to come back to work, fill these jobs so that you can build the future for your families.
Stracker: Thank you so much, Mr. Mayor.
Mayor Adams: Thank you. Brother, I've got to hop. I'm at the Corrections graduation. I've got to hop out and just tell these officers that are coming in, thank you but as always, I'm here for you. We started out together. Drake said it best, "We started on the bottom, now we're here."
Giddings: Absolutely, Mr. Mayor. You said, "Hundreds of thousands." I think we're over the million mark now. Simply because every time you are on, people are not only downloading one application but they're downloading with five or six family members. I think we're over a million. Thanks for your time.
Mayor Adams: All right, brother. Take care.
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