Transcript: Mayor de Blasio Appears Live On MSNBC

September 21, 2016

Rachel Maddow: Joining us now on the set is New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. Mayor, thanks for being here.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: You’re very welcome, Rachel.

Maddow: Let me just ask you – just watching these images, knowing the cause of the protests, looking at how these police in Charlotte are handling it – I’m sure you don’t want to pass judgement through the TV screen on how they’re dealing with this but what’s your impression of what’s going on in North Carolina tonight?

Mayor: I think it’s a bigger reality we’re facing in this country that we have a lot of work to do in the relationship between police and community because this is organic stuff, right. This is because there’s been a pattern of conflict and people feeling that their rights are not being recognized. So, I can tell you in New York City, we spend a lot of time working on this exact situation – how to diffuse protests, how to work with the protest organizers to give people their right to protest but keep it safe. A lot of communication.

I don’t know the situation exactly in Charlotte but the underlying issue is what we have to get at – the relationship between police and community, the kinds of things that will give people confidence and a sense of accountability. Body cameras are a great example. This is something we’re starting to do a lot more in New York City. It’s going to be happening all over the country.

People have to have confidence that if something happens they get the full truth, and they have to have confidence that police are being trained to de-escalate any situation, any encounter with a citizen. And let’s face it some of the things we’ve seen in recent months do not suggest, in some parts of the country at least, that the training’s been there. That the careful training to help people overcome biases – that’s one thing we’ll be doing in New York City – implicit bias training to help all of our officers of all backgrounds not carry through biases they may have gotten from their families, their youth, their culture; really working on de-escalation tactics, and close working relationships between police and community – neighborhood policing, actual relationship building between police and community.  Those are the organic solutions in my view.

Maddow: Are there better and worse ways for big city mayors across the country – is there an acceptable or an accepted set of best practices in terms of how to police a big, angry, contentious, set of protests like we’ve been seeing in Charlotte? Do we know the right ways to do this in terms of police?

Mayor: I think we know a lot more. I think one of the things one of your previous guests said was right – that a lot of the major police forces in this country are working on more communication with the protesters, pulling back a little more, giving them a little more space. Now, again, violence can’t be tolerated. And it’s always the case, there’s a few who might try and propagate violence, and the vast majority who are peaceful and just trying to exercise their rights. So, you know, we have to be very mindful of that.

But the broad notion of working with protesters, trying to set up a mutual understanding. You saw that in Dallas – that famous set of images before the shots rang out in Dallas some months ago where protesters and police felt successful. They have had a protest without incident. They were taking pictures together. That’s about communication. That’s the protest element. But I think the bigger question is broader, deeper communication between police and community. And that means, also, getting rid of some of the things that have stood in the way.

In New York City, we ended the unconstitutional practice of Stop-and-Frisk. That was something that was creating tremendous tension between police and community. That was a bigger decision that actually minimized the likelihood of protests because we got to the core of the matter.

Maddow: On that issue of Stop-and-Frisk – that’s back in the news today. It’s part of the reason we asked you to come into tonight before we knew these protests were go this direction in Charlotte. Donald Trump, today, did an event in which he was asked how he would like to deal with how he, as President, would deal with – what he was asked about was black-on-black crime, violence within the black community. And he said the way that he would deal with it is by going nationwide with, as you mentioned, this discarded New York City policy of Stop-and-Frisk. And you just described it as unconstitutional. A federal judge ruled that it was unconstitutional on a couple different grounds but for our viewers who may not know what that is – it’s newly important now that he wants to bring it back nationwide. Can you describe how it worked?

Mayor: Absolutely. And I can say that Donald Trump does not understand the policies. He’s had nothing to do with policing or public safety in whole career. What we used to have in New York City was – people were stopped, just on suspicion, no reasonable cause, no specific evidence required. They were stopped essentially on speculation. And what it was, was overwhelmingly young men of color. The high point was 700,000 stops – that was 2011.

Maddow: In one year – 700,000 stops.

Mayor: And here’s a situation where NYPD’s own statistics prove that over 90 percent of those stops had done nothing wrong in any way, shape, or form. What this caused was tremendous anger. Imagine parents, grandparents having their young men treated like suspects and criminals who were just walking down the street, going to school, going to a job. This was prevalent in the city. A whole movement built up in this city to end it.

When we ended it, there were dire warnings that things would get more dangerous in New York City. Guess what? Three years straight, crime has gone down. And Bill Bratton, who has been one of the foremost police leaders in America, made very clear that Stop-and-Frisk ultimately was proven not to be effective as a safety tool, that the absence of it allowed us to become safer because we could work on deepening the relationship between police and community.

So, New York City, the biggest laboratory in the country, has proven that Stop-and-Frisk was not only unconstitutional, and a blatant disregard of people’s rights, but on top of that it was bad policing strategy.

Now, Donald Trump doesn’t know anything about communities of color – by the way Stop-and-Frisk affected Latinos just as much as African-Americans. He has no clue that it wasn’t an effective strategy. And I tire of the notion of Donald Trump thinking he knows more about policing than Bill Bratton or our new Commissioner, Jimmy O’Neill, who have been at this their entire lives.

Maddow: Well, you now are about to venture – if past is any prologue you are now about to venture into political territory now that he has broached this and now that people are talking about it, where he insists to his followers, he insists on TV, he insists on Twitter, he insists at his rallies that Stop-and-Frisk was dramatically effective and that crime skyrocketed as soon as they stopped it, and it’s this liberal Bill de Blasio’s fault. I mean, that is where he will go with it if past is any prologue. If that happens, what do you say? How do you fight it? How do you correct the record?

Mayor: When we have the NYPD, the leading police force in the United States of America, having continued to drive down crime. They’ve had 25 years, almost, of continued drops in crime. Look at how few – we had the fewest shootings to date this year of any year in the history of New York City. That’s since we got rid of Stop-and-Frisk.

Believe the NYPD statistics. They are very consistent. And in fact, one of the things we’re doing – this neighborhood policing point, so important – if you actually build a bond between police and community, actual relationship building, actually knowing each other’s names. Our cops are now giving community members their cell phone numbers and emails so they can be directly in touch with an individual cop who they know by name. That changes everything.

And instead, what we used to have in the past was something that put a huge distance between police and community. So, what I actually think Donald Trump is saying here, he wants to build a second wall – a wall between police and community. That’s literally what would occur if we reinstated Stop-and-Frisk in cities all over this country.

Maddow: New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is with us. What you’re looking at on your screen, here, are live images of what’s happening in Charlotte, North Carolina. We’re seeing arrests happen now outside the Omni Hotel which have been a flash point, point of confrontation between protesters and police. We’ve seen a lot of tear gas in the streets tonight. We’ve seen a lot of police. We’ve seen armored vehicles. These protests, of course, in anger after yet another police shooting of an African-American man yesterday afternoon in Tulsa.

We’re going to take a very quick break. We’re going to come back with continuing coverage of what’s going on tonight in the streets of Charlotte. Mayor Bill de Blasio, it’s an honor to have you here tonight, sir, thank you.

Mayor: Thank you.