Robert Hennelly: The New York Times is reporting that despite the latest rate of judicial intervention, federal agents of the National Guard are free to continue patrolling the streets of the nation's capital, a move Trump says was necessary, despite a widely documented drop in crime. After a similar deployment in Los Angeles that involved the U.S. military, President Trump has repeatedly threatened similar action targeting other cities that are led by Black democratically elected mayors, where crime is actually declining.
Don't listen to Fox, folks. Pay attention. Crime is declining. This is one of the topics I've covered in my sit-down with Mayor Adams up at Gracie Mansion last week. So Mayor Adams, one of the things that's happened in this campaign is affordability has become a critical issue. It has always been. Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani has fired up a younger generation who might just say capitalism stinks. I'm living in my parents' basement. I can't discharge my college debt through bankruptcy.
If you're a plumber and you buy too many trucks, you can discharge that spending. But if you're a kid that invested in the wrong college major, you're going to have to pay them off. What do you say to them? Because capitalism, they feel, isn't working.
Mayor Eric Adams: Okay. And what is so important and what we must do is that there are a lot of things that are not working in the country. And it's not working for people who are struggling. We are clear that affordability is a national problem that we're facing. But we need to be clear on what mayors can do for that. That's what's important. I knew when I sat down with my team, I said, what can we do to help struggling New Yorkers? And we came up with ways of putting money back in their pockets.
I don't control the price of bread, but we like to put bread in the pockets of New Yorkers. $30 billion. So if you're a low-income New Yorker that's a foster care child and you live in NYCHA, we are saving you almost over $100 a month in high-speed broadband. We're paying off your college tuition. If you have a child, we drop the cost of your child care from $220 a month to less than $20 a month. If you are on the subway, we're giving you a reduced fare MetroCard.
So what am I trying to say? If you're dealing with a medical issue, we're excusing your medical debt. I am showing you how low-income New Yorkers have benefited from this administration. Because we knew before people started talking about it and using it as a soundbite, we knew there was an affordability issue in the city and country, and we addressed that. And that's what we need to continue to do. And I know what young people are feeling and their concerns.
And that is why we put in place real policies, not broken promises. Because I grew up in a household where poverty was prevalent. And I knew that I don't want people to do what they did to my mother and my parents [where they] promise things and didn't deliver. And I delivered. If you were to do an analysis and say, let me take a look at everything Eric ran on. And let me compare it to what he accomplished. We accomplished just about every item we ran on.
Hennelly: So pulling back a bit, looking at the fact that New York City had, when we first started out working, 2,000 homicides, even over that. It's below 400 today. At the same time, we've seen undocumented and immigrants coming to New York City. I think New York City has several hundred thousand undocumented. Neighborhoods that capitalism had kind of ignored or burned down for the insurance money. These immigrants, undocumented and documented, came in and rebuilt these neighborhoods. I'm sure you patrolled some of them.
So somehow or other, it's in the national consciousness in some outlets, that immigrants per se are a criminal element. We see even your fellow mayor, Muriel Bowser, dealing with the fact that her data shows that crime is down in D.C. But the perception in the media, there's a high profile incident that happens, like this horrible thing that happened in Midtown. And we lose track of this success story in urban America. Am I wrong?
Mayor Adams: No, and you're right. And the story has been successful. Particularly in cities where Black mayors have driven down crime in these cities. And these high profile stories, they strike at your consciousness and they play on your perception. We got that– I mean, the horrific incident that took place a little over a week and a half ago of someone walking into a building with an automatic weapon and taking the lives of innocent people. It plays on your psyche. But when you peel back and say, okay, let's do an analysis of the numbers.
We know in the last six months we had the lowest number of shootings and homicides in recorded history. We know that in the last seven months we had the lowest number of shootings and shooting victims. And all the major crime is going down. And then you look into the subway system. The subway system is the safest since recorded history when you take away the two months under COVID. And so we're doing the right things. 23,000 illegal guns off our streets. Over 130,000 illegal mopeds and scooters and ghost cars.
What we need is federal help in dealing with these laws. We had a shooter that came into our system with a mental health issue.
Hennelly: And an AR-15.
Mayor Adams: Right. I mean, think about that for a moment. So it's not so much what I am doing within the border of New York, but what are our national partners, what are they doing to stop this fixation we're having with guns?
Hennelly: So I wanted to ask you, what role do you think being in the civil service and being representative of the union played in Mayor [Adams’] success story? You personally.
Mayor Adams: My success story? Mayor Adams' success story? A lot. I cannot tell you from being a clerk in the district attorney's office many years ago to being a police officer, knowing that inside these agencies are good, hard, working class people, and you are receiving the concerns of those who are city residents. Because no one calls ACS to invite them to a birthday party. They invite them when the person is a child who's abused at their party.
No one calls the cop just to say, “Hey, do you want a cup of coffee?” They call you because there's some disorder. And so we see New Yorkers at their best and at their worst, and far too often at their worst when something terrible has happened to them. And because I had years of witnessing that, I was able to come into office knowing the unexpected. And it really honed me into a caring and compassionate mayor that is allowing me to ensure that I'm fighting on behalf of working class people.
Hennelly: So one of the things is that civil service is merit-based. You take a test and you can advance yourself. And so what role do you think union representation plays in building the foundations of middle class life?
Mayor Adams: It is so important. Unions are ways of making sure employees are not placed in hostile environments, but also to make sure that their standard of living continues to increase. And I am really proud of the contracts that I gave to my DC 37 members, my firefighters, my police officers, [and] my supervisors. It meant a lot. My human service workers, we gave them one of the largest increases in years. My ferryboat operators went 13 years without a contract. And we were able to settle their contract and give them a fair and decent salary.
So I am really pleased with what we've been able to accomplish. But I'm also pleased with what unions have done for working class people in this city. To allow them to go to school, buy a home, take care of their families, that means a lot. And unions play a vital role. I was a union member. I'm probably the only mayor in this history that was ever a New York City union member.
Hennelly: You know it's coming. What about my EMTs? You know I would be– What are you doing?
Mayor Adams: We're going to settle. We've got to make sure it's done right. I believe there's some things that we're going to do. And I have been in conversation with Renee Campion, the commissioner there. We want to make sure they have a fair contract. They deserve it. It's a challenging and difficult job. And we're going to do what's right by them.
Hennelly: I was wondering if you're concerned at all. There are hundreds of thousands, including thousands, who live in New York City who are federal employees who are losing their collective bargaining rights or being stripped of that protection. Is that something that you would be concerned about?
Mayor Adams: Not here. On the federal level, we're seeing those challenges. We would never support taking away the collective bargaining rights of city employees. And I think that we should advocate that everyone should have the right to collective bargaining.
Hennelly: Would you favor, we've talked about this before, we know during the pandemic you were out in it, you were working through it, that undocumented individuals who served in essential capacities, delivering us food, taking care of our loved ones in nursing homes, should there be some kind of pathway to citizenship? Because we've had a conversation about what we're not going to permit, but don't we need some positive articulation about a pathway to American citizenship?
Mayor Adams: Yes, I do. I think that just as those who serve in our armed services, those who carried out those basic functions here in the city during COVID, while New Yorkers were sheltering in place, while they were carrying out social distancing, you had everyday working class people who were not documented. They were delivering food, they were keeping our small businesses operating, and we should really consider how we can put them on the pathway to citizenship.
Hennelly: What do you know now that you didn't know when you first assumed office?
Mayor Adams: Many things. Three years and eight months is a long time. And especially for someone like me, that I am a person that is in a constant state of observation. And I constantly evaluate at the end of the night, end of the day, what could I have done differently, what could I have done better? I trusted people that I should not have trusted. I'm not going to become jaded because of that, because shame on them for violating my trust.
But you have to learn from any missteps. And I've had missteps. You don't get to this age in life and you're not going to be disappointed by what people do. But you learn a lot. And I've learned a lot, but we've done a lot. And if I was just living through life being cautious at every step, we would not have accomplished what we have accomplished.
Hennelly: I just want to ask you, during the crisis that you had tens of thousands of undocumented folks coming from Texas in summer clothes in the middle of a New York winter, New York opened its heart. And would it have made a difference had President Biden come to that migrant center and greeted them with you? Would that have made a difference?
Mayor Adams: I think so. But what I believe is that his administration underestimated the impact a porous border would have on the country. America shows a great level of humanitarian action, but we can't save the globe. We don't have the capacity to have everyone that needs a house to be housed in America. We need to do it in a responsible way.
And I've said it over and over again. If we would have allowed people, after vetting them, to roll in a very controllable way into our country, go into a city or state that needed manpower, because we're decreasing manpower in our country, or womenpower in our country, and organized it better, we would not have saw this onslaught in Chicago, Houston, Denver, New York, Massachusetts, Los Angeles. This was just not right.
Hennelly: Do you think it also was compounded by the fact we hadn't really recovered from the pandemic? You saw a tremendous demand on your social safety net here in New York City.
Mayor Adams: Yes, and that's an important observation. Because the same social safety net that had to deal with COVID, the same workers that had to deal with people who were needing medical attention, housing, food services, pantries, those same individuals had to deal with the migrants and asylum seekers. And it was just an unbelievable, continuous, not only physical strain, but a mental strain. I take my hat off to them, because they still got up and did it every day.
Hennelly: So you talk about the disconnect that you described between Washington and immigration. The same can be said about assault weapons. We had an assault weapon ban in this country, and it worked. Is that another example of this disconnect between what the country's crying for and what our national government can't seem to deliver?
Mayor Adams: Yes, I think nationally, we need to really finally come to an understanding [of] what country we want to live in. A country that's made up of mass shootings, or a country that's going to make sure that the population is safe. And that's a very important place I believe we are in this country. Not only because of what happened at 345 Park Avenue, but what's happening with mass shooters all across our country.
Hennelly: Thanks very much, Mr. Mayor.
Mayor Adams: Thank you.
###