Transcript: Mayor de Blasio Appears Live on Keepin' It Real With Reverend Al Sharpton

November 25, 2019

Reverend Al Sharpton: We’re keeping it real, I’m your host, Reverend Al Sharpton and we’re back and I’m joined now by one who is known around the country, and certainly by me – the Mayor of the City of New York, who has, I feel, performed in a way that is appreciated by many of us when we were told stop and frisk would make it safer and that if you removed it that we would in fact see crime skyrocket. Bill de Blasio ran, said he would bring stop and frisk down to almost none, and he did it, and crime went down record numbers. And I wanted to talk to him because the face of stop and frisk at that time was Mayor Michael Bloomberg who just last week apologized for it. So I have on the live line, the 109th Mayor of the City of New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio. Mayor de Blasio, thank you for coming on.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: It’s my pleasure, Rev., and thank you. And I want to give credit where credit is due, you were an extraordinary leader of the movement for years to get Michael Bloomberg to pay attention and realize that stop and frisk was a broken and degrading policy, and he never listened, as you remember. But we proved him wrong and I hope now this – I hope this topic will get real attention, because we cannot make that kind of mistake again in the future. And this apology seemed to me an awfully conveniently timed one.

Sharpton: Now it’s conveniently – what do you think it’s conveniently timed for?

Mayor: Look, I think – what’s so striking to me, Rev., is that we disproved the theory that he clung to and the Police Commissioner Ray Kelly clung to for years that, you know, only stop and frisk could bring down crime and the very punitive approach – remember, Rev., there was also lots of arrests, not just the stops. And we disproved that immediately when my administration came in, and for six years now we’ve been reducing the stops, we got safer, as you said. We in – in 2018 – we arrested 150,000 fewer people than in the last year of the Bloomberg administration, and the city got safer.

So this is about changing policing entirely and making it much more focused on relationship with the community and with every-day people and neighborhoods and, you know, at any point Michael Bloomberg could have said, I was wrong. He could have owned up to his mistakes. And by the way, when Donald Trump – you’ll remember when Donald Trump started praising stop and frisk in 2016 and started saying police departments all over America should use more stop and frisk, that would have been a natural time for Michael Bloomberg to say, no, you know what, I was wrong, we can’t go down that road. But it only took to it a moment when it was in his political self-interest and that’s – it’s just, you know, it’s part of a bigger record that I think can and must be examined here. And I’ll be honest with you, I spent six years trying to fix things he broke and rebuild things that he tore down, whether the topic is the relationship between police and community or whether it is in our schools, the relationship between, you know, the schools and our parents and our teachers, or on the topic of affordable housing, or how he dealt with landlords and developers who he gave, you know, real preferential treatment to and it led to an exacerbation of our housing crisis. There is a lot here that needs to be examined and I think it has not been, and now this is the time when people deserve to hear the truth about all of that.

Sharpton: Now, the fact also is – and the reason that I’m glad you have been vocal on it, because as you said, we both agreed with this and were very involved in the whole movement around the unfairness of stop and frisk, it has now been advocated nationally by Donald Trump. It’s not like this has gone away, Donald Trump has said that we need stop and frisk nationwide. What happened in New York under Bloomberg became a national model in other cities so it’s not like an apology wipes all this away, it is being done now, nationwide, and it’s being advocated by the present occupant in the White House.

Mayor: Yeah, and you know what, it is a symptom of something greater, and there’s been an awakening in recent years, a recognition that American policing went in a very bad direction and it connected to the movement for mass incarceration, the whole trend towards mass incarceration that happened with the crime bill in the ‘90’s and so many other milestones. Look, something went really wrong and it’s not going to be undone with half measures, it’s got to be really radical change. And it’s going to take acknowledging what we acknowledge here, that a punitive style of policing can only hold us back. So, you know, here we have the biggest city in the country, the most renowned police force steadily reducing - not only stops - but steadily reducing arrests. All sorts of things that used to be arrests are now summonses. The City of New York – and I’m very proud of this Rev. – you know, we’re closing Rikers Island. We are greatly reducing incarceration, and we find that we do these things and we get safer because in the end it was all about the relationship between police and community. And for decades and decades and decades, what was American policing? It was race based. It was punitive, and in so many cases unfortunately based in structural racism.

And so you can’t just get rid of that a little bit. You know, you have to recognize that that needs to change to its core. And here in this city we’ve proven it works. And so you know, the great irony that we have to fight Bloomberg tooth and nail to overcome these policies – he’s talking about wanting to go out and rebuild America, but you know he left a real trail of destruction here in terms of human lives. I mean five million people overwhelmingly young men of color, five million stops. What a horrible corrosive impact that had on so many lives and the pain - and I’ve talked to families, Rev. - the pain that they felt seeing their young people degraded by authority figures and the way that undermined every effort to give young people self-esteem and self-confidence, that’s not something you could just snap your fingers and act like it didn’t happen.

And so – I, you know - I think we’ve gotten to a point where we understand that we’ve got to change things very, very profoundly. And, to me, Mike Bloomberg is a status quo guy. He represents – you know he’s very satisfied with the way life has worked out for him and he thinks the free enterprise system is just perfectly fair the way it is. And you know he’s someone who was really a tremendous booster of the status quo in this city, including the rich and powerful. They looked to him as their friend. And he is of and by and for the one percent. And I just hope and pray that today’s Democratic Party says that does not fit who we are or where we have to go as country.

Sharpton: I take it that you will not be endorsing former Mayor Bloomberg for president?

Mayor: Rev., you are a perceptive man.

[Laughter]

You know, I tell you, it’s – and you know I’ve had some concerns about other candidates, and I think there are some who are much more in tune with what I’m talking about. It’s a big field. I still believe Bloomberg and all the others will be better than Trump. And that’s, you know, where I’ll draw the line. I’ll support the Democratic nominee. But the Democrats have to have an honest conversation about in our deep, deep desire to get rid of Trump. We should not think that just going back to the status quo before Trump is acceptable. And it’s only going to regrow the crisis.

Sharpton: No, I think you’re absolutely right. I think that we cannot lose our principals and our values. As you look as one who was in the race, do you think that at this point that this party can come together with a nominee that can beat Donald Trump?

Mayor: I do, I do Rev. I think what’s happening is the central lesson of 2016 is playing out now. That lesson is that – and I’m sorry to say it, because I had a lot of respect for Hillary Clinton and I do have a lot of respect to her. But she did not articulate a message that was moving to the base of the Democratic Party. And we just see it in the fact that so many people did not come out to vote and some even drifted away. And now we have an even more advantageous situation where there are so many people who have soured on Donald Trump. We see that consistently, including folks who have a lot of buyer’s remorse. A lot of working people thought he might actually be on their side and they feel stabbed in the back by that tax legislation, all the things he has done for the one percent. It’s quite clear he’s not on the side of working people. So, I think the field is drawn in our favor. But what we need is a candidate to come out and really stand for change and motivate young people, motivate African Americans and Latino’s, motivate progressives. All the folks who did not vote in the numbers they could have in 2016 – if they’re motivated, you know, we can absolutely sweep this election.

Sharpton: Absolutely.

Mayor: It’s there for the taking.

Sharpton: Absolutely. Let’s thank you – thank you Mayor. Mayor Bill de Blasio, thank you for coming on today.

Mayor: Thank you, Rev.