Transcript: Mayor de Blasio Appears Live on CNN's The Situation Room

December 30, 2019

Brianna Keilar: We're following new hate crime charges filed in the Hanukkah stabbing attack in New York State. Authorities say they discovered anti-Semitic journal entries at the home of the suspect accused of using a machete to wound five people. And this comes as anti-Semitic incidents are on the rise in the New York area. Joining me now is the Mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio. Thank you so much for coming on to talk about this, sir.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: It's an important topic, Brianna. Thank you.

Keilar: It's so important. And the details of all of these attacks, but this one specifically, are just horrific and New York's Jewish community has been targeted in these anti-Semitic attacks, really almost every night of Hanukkah this year. What do you think is behind this violence?

Mayor: Brianna, there is a very dangerous growing anti-Semitism in this country, let's start with this. It has been appearing more and more all over the United States of America. Just in the last year or so, that horrible massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, the attack in Poway, California, we're talking about what happened in Jersey City, obviously. We've never seen anything like this. I think it is directly connected to the rise of hate speech in this country over the last few years. It's connected to the real American problem of how social media is giving, you know, open season to hate speech without a serious effort by social media companies to create some boundaries and some limitations. All of this is conspiring, and what we're seeing is – you know, we're in a city – this is a city with the largest Jewish population of any city on earth. Historically, there's been good relations between our Jewish community and surrounding communities. Something is changing because, I think, of this bigger backdrop, but we have to answer it very assertively and make clear that hate is not going to be given any opportunity to grow here, and that means a lot of police presence, a lot of work educating our young people and making sure they understand how wrong it is to act on hate or think in terms of hate. We're going to have community patrols that are multiethnic to show solidarity, to show whoever is thinking of hateful things that people from their own community are going to be there to interfere and stop it. We've got to do all of the above, but the bigger problem in this country is that this hate speech is getting normalized and people, including folks with mental health challenges and young people who are impressionable, they're hearing this and they're acting on it spontaneously and that's a danger to all of us.

Keilar: So, what do you do? I mean, I'm hearing you say you want to counter this with young folks. Is that going into schools? Is that adding something to the curriculum? And then, just social media is such an issue – I mean, how do you police something like that?

Mayor: Well, Brianna, we can in our schools give positive messages. We can help young people to understand what the Holocaust was, what the Jewish community has gone through for centuries. We can help young people understand when you commit an act of hate it spreads a kind of domino effect that's going to come back hurt all communities. That's something we're going to be doing immediately in our schools, particularly in some of the neighborhoods where we've seen these problems. But this point about having Community Safety Coalitions, having folks from different ethnic backgrounds banding together to be an out-in-the-streets, in-force community presence. And we've seen this with our Cure Violence movement here in New York City. It's worked really well to stop shootings and stop other violence at the grassroots level. When it's community members banding together and intervening, particularly with young people, even gang members, to dissuade them from acts of violence – we're taking that same concept, but we're applying it to these hate crimes and the bias that's out there. Young people need to hear from people of all backgrounds, but particularly from people from their own communities, that this is a very destructive and negative path. And I think that kind of intervention makes a big impact.

Keilar: You say that Governor Cuomo's idea of having a State law about domestic terrorism, not just hate crimes, but calling this domestic terrorism, you say it has merit. What sort of legislation would you want to see?

Mayor: Look, we need the right kind of penalties to add to our efforts to stop this kind of thing from happening. I'll give you a really powerful example, Brianna. For years and years, the NYPD built a strong intelligence-gathering capacity, focused almost entirely on international terror threats to New York City. We still take those very seriously, but more and more we have to focus on domestic threats. We have a new unit we've created to focus exclusively on racially and ethnically motivated extremism. That wasn't needed even a few years ago. But we know this is a growing problem. We're going to try and identify these trends and any systematic efforts that may be growing out there, but then there has to be the penalties to go with that. Anybody who's plotting acts of hate on a systematic level, violence on a systematic level, those penalties have to be really, really strong so people know there's no coming back if you do something like that.

Keilar: Mayor, thank you. Mayor Bill de Blasio, joining us – we really appreciate you coming on today.

Mayor: Thank you, Brianna.