Transcript: Mayor Eric Adams Appears Live on MSNBC's "Morning Joe"

September 1, 2022

Willie Geist: And joining us now to discuss this, New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Mr. Mayor, thanks so much for your time this morning. So explain this a little bit for our viewers and for New Yorkers watching, how you decided where New Yorkers can and cannot carry concealed weapons.

Mayor Eric Adams: Well, there are two new definition that have been introduced into our lives, and that is restricted areas and sensitive locations. Times Square is considered a sensitive location. As you know, in the ruling, they indicated we could not carve out all of Manhattan. So we looked at those areas where you have a high volume of people for sensitive locations. Any given day, you could have over 475,000 tourists and New Yorkers in that area. So we wanted to make sure we stayed within the lines of the ruling, but at the same time protected those areas where we knew we had a high volume or high capacity or sensitive areas in our city. Restricted locations are those private businesses that don't want firearms inside their businesses, for the most part, and they could have signs or there's a natural default that if there's not a sign welcoming you to bring a gun in, that you're not allowed to bring it in.

Geist: We know that some of these mass shootings we've seen, we've gone back and almost always there's something on social media that we've seen that perhaps would've tipped people off. But in the case of going through three years worth of social media accounts before granting a permit, who will decide the “good moral character” of the person? What's the line that person has to cross to be denied a permit?

Mayor Adams: And that's a great question because we want to make sure that, again, we stay within the boundaries of the ruling which it's really just almost a common sense of — basically analysis. If someone is spewing hate, if someone is making a dangerous threat, if someone is part of some form of hate group, the police officer or the detective or the investigator is going to use their investigatory skills to determine if there's something that's a red flag there. And it is really about using the good, old fashioned methods of doing investigation. When I became a police officer, people knocked on my neighbor's doors and interviewed them and asked what type of person am I. And I think those are the same skills that's going to be used to look at not only social media, but also knocking our neighbors' doors, speaking to people, finding out who this individual is that we are about to allow to carry a firearm in our city.

Jonathan Lemire: Mayor Adams, good morning. It's Jonathan Lemire. This measure, of course, you're hoping will reduce where firearms can be brought across New York City. But there are some pressures on the other end, increasing tensions about the number of the prevalence of guns and numbers of shootings. Shootings have gone up across the country in the last year or two, as we know. New York City has also had that sort of spike. There's the Supreme Court case, which will allow — it's easier for people to carry weapons in states across the country including New York. So just right now, how concerned, even with this new measure putting into place, how concerned are you about the prevalence of firearms and gun violence in the nation's largest city?

Mayor Adams: Extremely concerned. I stated at the time when this was being deliberated that it kept me up at night. I know what it is to have guns in the hands of not only dangerous people, illegal guns, but even innocent people. We saw what happened in Florida when we had a young man shot merely because he was basically wearing a hoodie. Having a gun is not a way to keep your city safe. Now we've witnessed some success here with a 10% decrease in shootings, 10% decrease in homicides, but there's so much more we can do in our country to stop the over proliferation and fixation on guns in our cities. And this is an issue that's going to impact cities in a real way.

Mara Gay: Mayor Adams, Mara Gay. Nice to see you.

Mayor Adams: Hey, Mara, how are you?

Gay: Great, thanks. What does this mean for the more than 30,000 police officers on the street today? Are their jobs more dangerous? And also beyond that, does this change the way that they plan on policing here in New York as they look for guns? And of course, are they going to be deployed to more sensitive locations like around schools to make sure that there are no guns there that shouldn't be?

Mayor Adams: A great question. Cosmic shift, a cosmic shift, because now you are in an environment where anyone could have a gun for the most part. Any citizen can have a gun and now you have to deal with the citizens carrying guns and the bad guys carrying guns, and having bad guys next to someone who legally can carry a gun as well. You are going to see different ways of people allowing individuals to carry guns for them. Sort of what you see with the straw purchases, are taking place now in the southern parts of our country. And so this is a game changer for public safety, particularly in a densely populated area like New York City. But we still have to police in that environment. We have to pivot and shift to adjust to it. And we're not going to take police officers from those areas where we need police protection because of violence, upticks, but at the same time, it is going to really stretch out our law enforcement capabilities.

Geist: Mr. Mayor, when we talk about the bigger picture of crime in New York City, you and I have spoken about this, we've had people on talking about this bail reform question. And I certainly don't have to tell you the frustration police officers are feeling about seeing the same criminals on the streets day after day, week after week, arresting them, letting them be recognized on their own reconnaissance and being back out on the street. How do you change that perception among people who might commit crime that, I can walk into the Duane Reed and put a bunch of stuff in a bag and walk out — nothing's really going to happen to me. Or I can wrestle an officer in a subway station. I think I can probably get away with that, too. How do you change that? And is there any movement to perhaps reform the bail reform that went into effect a couple of years ago?

Mayor Adams: And I said it over and over again, there are many rivers that feed the sea of violence, not only gun violence, but violence and disorder. And one of the rivers we must dam is our criminal justice system and the various components of it. And it's including, I think we need to tweak, not take away those criminal justice reforms that I fought for as a state senator and as a police officer. But we need to look really at the bottle necking of our court system. And our judges must do a better job of using the powers that they have. And I think our prosecutors can look at some of the cases that should be prosecuted that we are taking far too long to get cases through the criminal justice system. And then as a job we must do as police officers, we as a Police Department, as I analyze we're looking in the mirror and saying, what can we do better as well? All of these rivers must be dammed, but they're far too many people in New York and in cities across America that believe the criminal justice system is not ensuring that they don't inflict violence on innocent citizens. We have abandoned the innocent people of this city and country, I believe, based on what we're doing in our criminal justice system.

Geist: New York City Mayor Eric Adams, thanks so much for your time this morning. We always appreciate it.

Mayor Adams: Thank you. Take care.

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