Transcript: Mayor Adams Hosts Community Conversation on Public Safety

December 16, 2024

Video available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tM7gQj5XyFM

Commissioner Fred Kreizman, Community Affairs Unit: The mayor's 35th community conversation, are we aimed to go around to all five boroughs and switch communities to make sure to hear the voices of the people? There are three parts to this community conversation. The first portion we had the first hour we had an opportunity to sit down with members of the Mayor's Office and NYPD to listen to community concerns. Diligent notes were taken down, so in order to make sure that policy-makers in City Hall hear issues that matter most to you.

The second portion we're going to have is opportunity for the questions that you formulated at your tables to be asked to the mayor and to the dais. The third thing, you'll notice a card in front of you. If your question is not asked, please fill out the card in order to ensure that our office follows up with you directly. We track all the questions that come in within a two-week timeframe. We make sure not only that it's acknowledged, but we send it to the appropriate agency and we make sure there's a follow-up conversation that you get a response to your issue. Make sure to take the time to fill out the card.

It's great to be here in Goddard. It's a great human services organization. It's wonderful to be here in Community Board 7. We have great representation, as I said, from the Police Department here. We're joined today by Jeff Maddrey, the chief of the department, Kaz Daughtry, the deputy commissioner of Operations for NYPD. We have Deputy Commissioner Mark Stewart, who's the deputy commissioner of Community Affairs for NYPD. We have Chief of Patrol Borough Manhattan, North, Ruel Stephenson.

We also have MOCJ, first Deputy Director Jill Starishevsky. We have H&H, senior vice president of Ambulatory Care, Ted Long. Department of Health, the Mental Hygiene Executive Director of the Division of Mental Hygiene, Dr. Jean Wright. Office of Community Mental Health, Deputy Executive Director Laquisha Grant, and gender-based violence, deputy commissioner for External Affairs and Community Initiatives, Tesa Arozqueta.

To my right, we have the Borough President of Manhattan, Mark Levine. We have Gale Brewer, council member. We have Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal. We are joined by DSS Commissioner Molly Park, DYCD Commissioner Keith Howard, ACS, Associate Commissioner Raymond Toomer, New York City Public Schools Chief of Safety Mark Rampersant. NYCHA Executive Vice President Daniel Greene. We also are joined by Parks Manhattan Borough Commissioner Tricia Shimamura.

We also joined by New York City Health and Hospitals CO Matthew Titmuss. We're also joined by the NYPD COs of the 20th Precinct Deputy Inspector Pun-Sullivan, the NYPD 24th Precinct CO, Deputy Inspector Noreen Lazarus, NYPD 26 Precinct Commander, Deputy Inspector Jose Tavares, NYPD Central Park CO, Captain Timothy Magliente, PSA 6 CO, Captain Juan Moran, and Chief Richard Taylor from Community Affairs as well. We're also joined by community resident, our Commissioner of International Affairs Ed Mermelstein.

I just want to thank everyone who's here from this wonderful dais. Our run of show this evening, we're going to have an opportunity to listen to the Borough president, with our council member and our senator first, and before the mayor arrives, and then when the mayor comes here we'll make sure he speaks and listen to all the concerns of the community. I'll just hand it over to the Borough president this time.

Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine: Thank you. Thank you, Commissioner Kreizman. Good evening everybody. I'm very happy that Goddard Riverside's open its doors to us. Shout out to Roderick Jones, who's a phenomenal leader for Goddard Riverside. They do so much for this community. Can we give them a big round of applause? They're awesome.

Senior services, housing, and much, much more. We are in the 24th precinct. We're part of the Manhattan North Borough Command, and I just want to tell you how grateful I am for the current commander of this borough command, Chief Stevenson. Chief, could you just wave so people know you?

One of the best law enforcement leaders I've ever worked with, so Chief Maddrey and Commissioner Daughtry. I just want you to duly note that in the record, that he's doing great. We actually have, I think, four precincts represented here. I think we have the 20, the 24, the 26, and Central Park precinct. We do have good commanders in all of them, but there's a common challenge across all those precincts. Actually, all the precincts in Manhattan, which is they are down in staffing relative to a few years ago. I would say on average in Manhattan, precincts are down 25 officers from five years ago, so that when I call a precinct commander and I say I have a real problem on a given block and I need more staff representation on the ground, they'll often say, "Okay, but I'm going to have to take people off another location."

This is what we're dealing with in a limited staff environment. This has been years in the making. We currently have 3,000 vacancies approximately in the PD. Maybe the chief will update me or correct me because of early retirements and resignations. I want you to bear this in mind tonight. A lot of what we're talking about. We need to fill those vacancies to restore the resources on the ground that many of you are concerned about tonight. This is a community, and I know we're going to hear tonight with a lot of concern about homelessness and homeless shelters.

I think we all understand that the win-win for everybody is to not have people in homeless shelters, but to have them in permanent housing. This is what we want. This will take creating a lot more housing across the borough and the city. We have a lot more work to do on that. I think we need to keep that in mind is the big picture, but if we do have shelters, as we do, then we have to make sure they're well run. The truth is, we have a spectrum of quality of management in the shelter system. Thinking a lot about how we can have better oversight, good oversight for deliverables and accountability, so that when we have shelters, they're run as well as they can be for everybody, for the residents, for the neighbors, for the city, for the taxpayers, for all of us.

Some of the mental health challenges we're dealing with, they're on the street, they're people who are not sheltered, they're not residing anywhere but in the street. There was a horrible incident actually yesterday, maybe some of you saw it at the Herald Square subway station on the F train, 34th Street. A friend of mine actually was pushed onto the tracks. He's currently in Bellevue, he's going to have spinal surgery. There's going to be a big story in the Daily News about it tomorrow. I say it because it's personal to me.

This is yet another reminder of our painful failure to bring people in off the streets who should not be on the streets, who should be in for care and treatment, the treatment they need and deserve, and that's not an easy policy to solve. It requires both expanding the treatment options and the resources in our hospitals and permanent residential settings, but also finding a way to bring people in off the street who might not want to be brought in off the street, because that is the nature of mental illness. That's called involuntary removal. We have a mechanism for that, and that is going to be required. Maybe if such involuntary removal had been applied to the individual who pushed my friend, he wouldn't be in Bellevue right now. Something that we certainly need to talk about and address.

Just very quickly, I'm in a battle against scaffolding. I'm bringing this up at a public safety forum because I do believe it directly connects to public safety, and in fact, often we have problems under the darkness of the scaffolding. We have an excessive concentration here on the West Side. This problem can be fixed by– that may be my time. This problem can be fixed by good legislation. We've got to reform Local Law 11. It's way out of date. Some of you are co-op and condo owners, you know this.

There is legislation in the City Council that's going to be voted on, I believe, in two weeks. Gale, maybe you'll update us. That will fix a lot of the problems in scaffolding, that will get them off the street quicker. That's a win for public safety, a win for economic development, and it just makes the neighborhood more beautiful. Thanks to all of you for coming out, I just see the Mayor's joined us. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, for doing this forum on the West Side, for doing it here at Goddard Riverside. I look forward to the conversation. Thank you so much.

Commissioner Kreizman: Thank you. Now Councilmember Gale Brewer.

City Councilmember Gale Brewer: Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, for bringing us all together. I'm Gale Brewer, City Council. I want to echo what the borough president stated about the wonderful work that Chief Stevenson and the 24 and the 20 in Central Park and 26 all do. They are amazing leaders. I also want to thank Kamar Samuels, who's head of the District Schools here. Thank you very much. The Superintendent of Schools does a great job in District 3.

The issues for me are similar in the sense of, unfortunately, here in the neighborhood in the last couple of months, we've had shootings and punchings and people with mental illness acting completely out of control. Public safety is number one. It always has been, but it has increased dramatically. What we're all looking for in terms of solutions is what I think Dr. Katz is suggesting, which is we need a place for those with mental illness to go, not Rikers, but some place that is secure, that has the psychiatric support that they need, because they have to get off the street. I want to say that is my number one request.

Number two, I want to indicate that we are very concerned about, as we approach closing some of the health and hospital centers, and I'm glad if it's appropriate for these families, but I want to keep them in the school system. I think that is also part of public safety in my mind because these kids are going to get a great education on the Upper West Side. As they move, I want to keep them in the schools. Something very small, but those West Siders and others who have a car and they don't frigging move it when the street sweeper is coming down the street, for God's sake, move that damn car, because otherwise, Department of Sanitation cannot clean the street. We're going to be ticketing people like crazy who don't do that.

E-bikes is a challenge. I think every place I go, it's brought up. I want to thank Deputy Mayor Meera Joshi, who's been trying to think solutions. The City Council has been trying to think solutions. I would love to see registration, but thanks to the senator on the state level with license plates, and we also need to have pop wheels or somebody who can take that damn battery, put it in, and get it out so it doesn't cause a fire, so it's a new battery and not a refurbished battery.

I also want to just say that we are working with West Park Presbyterian Church. That is a church on 86th Street. We want to try to make sure that it is kept as a church, and we would love to work with the Department of Landmarks Preservation Commission to make sure that it is not demolished by neglect, but that the local cultural group running them are able to sign off to get the roof fixed.

Finally, I want to thank Steve Anderson, who's head of all the Block Associations here, and Michael Landell, who's head of the [inaudible], and like the borough president, I really respect Rod Jones, who's head of Goddard Riverside. They have 40 locations at Goddard Riverside. They're big, and they do cradle-to-grave and a great job. Thank you for our NYCHA leaders, and thank you, Mr. Mayor.

State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal, represent the West Side. Good to see everyone. Thank you, Goddard Riverside. I represent the West Side from Christopher Street down in the village up to 103rd. From the Gay Bars to Zabar's, yes, that is true. I just want to say that we need to do our part, Mr. Mayor, in Albany to support your efforts in particular mental health. I have a bill, we call it the Help Act. Harnessing the expertise of licensed professionals to expand the pool of mental health professionals who can make that very important determination as to whether somebody should be directed into treatment. We want to expand it from psychiatrists to include licensed social workers, nurses, psychiatric professionals as well as psychologists. We hope to get that done.

We hope to get the mayor more money from Albany, too, because he needs it to deal with our asylum seekers and the insurmountable problems that could not be overcome without the assistance from Albany. As you probably can guess, New York City sends more money to Albany than it receives in return. We have to rectify that, Mr. Mayor. Then finally, I just want to say on e-bikes, I want to thank the councilmember, and her colleagues for the hearing that they had on Priscilla's Law at the council but we need to do that in Albany to ensure that commercial e-bikes are registered so they have a license plate. All of our terrific law enforcement can make it possible to get dangerous e-bike drivers off of our streets and worse off of our sidewalks. Thank you very much.

Commissioner Kreizman: Before you hand it over to mayor, I just want to say thank you very much for Gina Newman and of course, all the community organizations that are here for making this possible, including our NYCHA leaders, community board, and policing council. Thank you.

Mayor Eric Adams: I thank you so much, and I'm looking forward to a real conversation here and the way we would like to do it, like we've done with over– I don't know with 30 what now?

Commissioner Kreizman: 35th.

Mayor Adams: 35th town halls, senior town halls, youth town halls. I will be extremely quiet when you ask me a question or the team a question, and we want the same reciprocal response so we could get to the topics at hand. I just want to give you an overview, because oftentimes when we do these town halls, people often say, "I didn't know that, I didn't know that, I didn't know that."

I inherited a city that was a mess. 40 percent increase in crime, our bond ratings were low, no one wanted to get back on the subway system and we may have forgotten, but COVID was everywhere. Our children were not learning at the levels that they deserve. Businesses were closing down. No one was back in the office spaces. We were not investing in those children who were foster kids. 6 to 700 were aging out every year, slipping through the cracks, participating in crimes, dealing with mental health issues. NYCHA residents did not have high-speed broadband to do remote learning or telemedicine.

Our young people on Rikers Island, there was a pathway. Everyone was talking about closing the building of Rikers Island, and I said we needed to close the pipeline that fed Rikers Island. I was on Rikers Island, more than any man in the history of this city. When I walked inside those jails and speak with the inmates and the correctional officers, the overwhelming number of them were dyslexic, learning disability. The real crime was that we were not teaching them and giving them the opportunity that they deserve.

Mopeds was everywhere, up and down the sidewalks. We know the issue is still here, but we zeroed in. We did not ignore them. We did not ignore the ghost plates that we saw. Gun violence was ripping through our streets. I must have been in office the first month. I had to go to the hospital with an 11-month-old baby who was shot in the head sitting there with the mother. 2 years and 10 months later, more jobs in our city in the city's history. Crime in the subway system is at a 14-year low if you take away the COVID year. 4.6 million riders.

We have six felonies on our subway system a day. 20,000 guns removed off our streets. Robberies on the subway system is the lowest in recorded history. August is normally a dangerous month for shootings. It was the lowest in recorded history in the city. We build more housing in year one, year two. Affordable housing and no single years, we broke records in the history of the city. We passed historical housing reform in this city.

We invested in foster care, children paying their college tuition, giving them life coaches till they're 21 and stipend and the support that they deserve. Reduce taxes for working-class people. We're going to need the assistance from Albany to get our income tax decrease for those who are at 150 percent of the poverty line or below. 70,000 illegal vehicles off our street, ghost cars, mopeds, three-wheelers and remove them off our streets, and many of them were destroyed in the process. Free high-speed broadband for NYCHA residents. More people are participating in our FHEPS voucher program in the history of this city.

We were able to get Albany to pass real estate reforms so we can build more housing in the city. Bond raters who make the determination how well you're managing the money in the city. Increase my bond rating and double down on increasing the bond rating the way we manage the city. We made the city agencies file do PEGs in the first two years, saved a $7.1 billion. 220,000 migrants and asylum seekers that came to the city. I couldn't stop the busses from coming in. It was against federal law. I couldn't allow people to work. It was against federal law. I couldn't even allow people to volunteer and give them a stipend. The federal government said, "If you do that, we're coming at you. That's against the against the law."

We had to house, clothes, educate 40,000 thousand children. Go look at other cities. We don't have people sleeping on our streets, families, and children that are migrants and asylum seekers. We treated them with dignity. The immigration leaders that came to the city to analyze what we're doing, they said, "No one is doing what you're doing, Eric, across the entire country." We turned this city around in two years and 10 months.

Now think about this for a moment. Pound for pound, neighborhood by neighborhood, there is no other neighborhood in this city. You have more judges, probably per square block and mile, that are releasing people every day onto our streets repeatedly. You have more reporters that have been attacking us that live in this community. When we said, let's have involuntary removal to take people off the street who should not be on the street because we had ridiculous laws that emptied our psychiatric wards and placed people on the street, and we still allow them to walk around. When we tried to do involuntary removal, we were attacked by people in this community that are your writers and reporters and said, "Eric is trying to be inhumane." No, inhumane is allowing people to sleep on the street without any dignity and respect.

You have more grant writers, more proposal writers, right in this community here, folks, right here. When I went to Washington 10 times and said, we should not be taking $6.5 billion out of our budget to pay for a national problems. The city was silent. It was silent. It was silent when I said people should not be living on the streets. It was silent when I said people should not be living in our subway system when we did scouts and others. It was silent when I said we should not have laws that allow repeated offenders to come into our communities over and over again. We just had a case the other day. A person was arrested with a gun, re-arrested with a gun, and let back out again while on two gun charges and got caught with another gun.

You go to my district attorneys. We are losing DAs. We are hemorrhaging our entire criminal justice system. We're losing DAs because we have laws that were passed, the discovery laws. If you don't turn out information a certain period of time, their cases are being dismissed. I'm not talking about stealing an apple. I'm talking about real cases are being dismissed. Criminal justice system is in three sections, folks. Police, court, lawmakers. These guys are doing their job. Our arrest are up. As I said, 20,000 guns off the streets. They're doing their job. The other aspects of criminal justice, we don't see them.

When we do this meeting with my law enforcement team, you should do a meeting with all our judges. You should do a meeting with all our lawmakers. Tell them I raised the age. Do the analysis of raise the age and how many young people are now being caught with guns and doing shootings right now in the streets. Since raised the age, there's a clear correlation. They're pushing back on me because I'm saying those who come to this country and committing violent acts and violent gangs should not stay in our country. They should not be attacking migrants' asylum seekers, long-term New Yorkers undocumented.

It's a privilege to be here in this country, and if you violate that privilege, you don't need to be here. I'm not going to apologize for that. I made it clear when I ran for office. The prerequisite to prosperity is public safety. You deserve to be safe, and you should be angry, but now that angry must turn into a plan. Everyone must be engaged in the three parts of criminal justice system. I'm tired of my cops being beat up. These guys are doing so many overtime hours every day, no longer with their family.

These young cops want to be home raising a family, and they doing hours and hours. 3,000 protests we had in this city. We had to beg Columbia University to go on campus to get off those who were spewing hate every day and the level of anti-Semitism that we saw on our college campus. We had to beg NYU. This is what we are up against. We're going to answer all your questions, but I would feel very good if all my judges were here also, I would feel so happy if all my lawmakers were here, as we go back to Albany and start dealing with some of those laws that we are seeing. What's my numbers of shoplifters that we had, Kaz? Repeated offenders?

Deputy Commissioner Kaz Daughtry, Operations, Police Department: Over 500 people arrested for shoplifting. The combined arrest are about 7,800.

Mayor Adams: You hear that number? 500 arrested continuously 7,800 times. 38 people who we arrest for assaulting transit workers were arrested over 1100 times. Officer Joe makes the arrest, goes in front of the court, the court releases him, and you know what? He goes back and goes back and do it again. We made a mockery of our criminal justice system. These criminals are laughing at us, laughing at us. We're going to keep doing our job, but everyone needs to do their job, not just the police.

Everyone must do their job in the criminal justice apparatus. Our laws must be stronger, our judges must make smarter decisions, and we must make sure that this city is safe. If we're not safe, our children can't go to school, you can't go to work, our family members can't be on the subway system, then we're not in the city that I want to be the mayor of. I committed to keeping this city safe when I was a cop wearing our bulletproof vests. I'm going to continue as the mayor of this city. I want to open, hear your concerns, hear what we can do better, what we are doing, and how we can continue to make not only the Upper West Side safe, but the south side, Queens side, the Bronx side. This entire city must be safe. We open the floor.

Question: First of all, I want to say thank you, Mr. Mayor, for putting this together. It's very important all the work that you do. My name is Polly Spain, and I basically want to start out with the gate and say that I didn't hear anyone mention Police Service Area 6 Community Council. You always talk about the 24 and the 25 in this area. A lot of issues that we discussed at our table deals with public housing issues. One of the things that we do need is here to have access so that this way our officers from the PSA 6 can have access to vans. They don't have any vans or equipment to respond to issues. Also, we're short of manpower as well. We've been begging for that for years.

Along with that goes the fact that we talked about, there's no lighting in our buildings. There are scaffolding issues. We have also squatters in the public housing buildings on 93rd Street. There's a myriad of issues that needs to be addressed. In addition to that, what we're asking you Mr. Mayor, is how can we from our public housing community, you understand, get the resources that we need to live in a safer environment, because everyone on the Upper West side thinks because there's money here, that there's no problems. Public housing is forgotten. Also, our PSA 6 command is forgotten as well. They're treated like a stepchild when it comes to the NYPD. We feel that that's something that needs to change because we have a great relationship as a community with the PSA 6. That's why we talked about that.

In addition to the schools have cannabis shops surrounding the schools, they need better lighting as well, because what happens is that the kids and the parents, again, are being exposed to that type of environment where they shouldn't be. Kids should be able to go to school without smelling weed or having illegal traffic going on around their school. They should be safe. We would like for you to figure out how we can work with all these agencies here to get what we need so that we can live in a safe environment.

Mayor Adams: Housing was not ignored in this administration. For the first time in the history, we included housing and our housing plan. We put in free high-speed broadband for housing residents because when I was borough president knocking on doors during COVID, I learned that the children couldn't do remote learning. Parents couldn't receive telemedicine. We put in free high-speed broadband throughout NYCHA, and we going to expand that to other low income housing at the same time.

You are right in that you have too many homeless people that are sleeping in your hallways. We did the town hall in Harlem. A resident told me the same thing. We met her the next day and there were people sleeping on the stairways, people sleeping on the rooftops. One person was sleeping outside her door with a knife under her chair. What I need my officers to do is do good old-fashioned verticals. You need to walk up and down the stairs, see who's in the building. If they're not there, they need to get out of the building. Chief, if we're not doing that, I need– Who's housing here?

Commissioner Kreizman: Greene.

Mayor Adams: Not housing. The housing police. Will you come--

Chief Jeffrey Maddrey, Chief of Department, Police Department: I'll answer that.

Mayor Adams: Okay.

Deputy Commissioner Daughtry: He'll answer for everybody.

Chief Maddrey: Absolutely. I'm sorry you feel that way. We don't forget about housing. Before the meeting start, I'm sitting here crunching numbers about the new class that's coming out. Of course, graciously, we're going to get an extra 1,600 officers in 2025. I can't wait for that because it's going to really help out all of the commands, including PSA 6. We're not going to forget PSA 6. We're going to make sure they get their actual officers as well. I know your CO is right over there, right? One, we'll make sure that we are hitting the verticals in the buildings that we need. If you need some help, even on days you're just short, you need some help. The precinct's there. They're supposed to help out, too.

Precincts help out the PSAs. PSAs help out the precincts. If we're short, we'll make sure the respective commands go over there, the precincts get stop and do a vertical. That's what we do. Our cops on the precincts, they do a vertical in transit. They do a vertical in the development. They do a direct to patrol down in transit. This is how we help. This is how we create an atmosphere where people are seeing more cops. Everybody pitches in. Nobody says I'm the precinct, I'm transit, I'm housing. This is one city. We all chip in. We'll make sure if we need to increase visibility, we'll make sure we do that. In terms of that, I just spoke to Kaz. We do have a requisition of new vehicles coming in. Something happened last year. This year, we have a requisition of new vehicles, so all the precincts will be getting a little benefit from that.

Mayor Adams: I don't understand what the van issue is. Why don't we have vans? I don't understand what vans.

Deputy Commissioner Daughtry: The reason why you may see, I want to say, a shortage in vans is that we take the vans and we're bringing them to a mobilization point on Randalls Island. What we do is we build mobile field forces, areas that we're seeing a small uptick in crime. We bring officers in from all around the city. They go to Randalls Island. They get put into the vans and they go to other areas throughout the city for their post for the day. That's why there's a small shortage in some of the commands when you see the vans.

Chief Maddrey: Also, if there's a–

Mayor Adams: I'm still not getting it.

Chief Maddrey: No, like I said– if the van goes to mobile field force, but there's a special need, you got to reach up to the borough, reach up to Ruel, and just say we have a special need. We can get vans. Sometime, yes, we'll move vans around.

Mayor Adams: We need to do an analysis of where our vans are, because I don't want the mindset to be, "Okay, it's housing. We're going to have a lesser amount." She shouldn't be saying she's not having vans. That can't happen. Because I see a whole lot of precincts with a lot of vans. Whatever we need to do to take that away, to have those vans there, we need to get that done.

Question: Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor Adams: They got to do good old-fashioned verticals. Got to get in the building, got to walk up, down the stairs. These guys need to exercise anyway. They got to get up inside the stairs, go on the rooftops. They got to do this good old-fashioned vertical. They got to be unafraid of asking, do you live here? What are you doing here? You can't hang out in the hallway. You're going to be selling your weeds. You're not going to be doing all of that madness. They got to do good old-fashioned walking up and down the building.

The cannabis issue is a real issue. I smell weed everywhere now and our children are high all the time. All my teachers are telling me that children are coming in high all the time. Now we closed down 1,200 illegal cannabis shops. We're going to continue to do that, to close them down and stop them from reopening. The police was able to coordinate with the Sheriff's Department because we didn't have enough sheriffs doing it, to close them down and go after that illegal street cannabis that we're seeing. We passed the legislation. We didn't want to criminalize cannabis. We passed the legislation, but we got to think differently about it. Just like we don't allow people to smoke anywhere. We need to look at what people need to be smoking cannabis as well.

Question: Exactly. Thank you so much, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor Adams: Thank you. Thank you for being here.

Commissioner Kreizman: Next table.

Mayor Adams: I'm sorry, NYCHA, what is the capital hold that we're dealing with in NYCHA?

Daniel Greene, Executive Vice President of Property Management, NYCHA: $80 billion, sir.

Mayor Adams: You hear that number? Our budget is only $100-something billion. We have a $80 billion hold in NYCHA. Every year, people say the Calvary is coming. That's not the Calvary. That's tax. NYCHA is dying. That's why we were able to get the first land trust passed. We're voting on it, because we've got to think differently of how we get federal dollars. The federal government abandoned NYCHA. We were not getting the money. If we don't turn that around, we'll be sitting here year after year. We've been aggressive. We're doing voting right now for the land trust, so we get federal dollars to address that budget, an $80 billion budget. Yes, ma'am.

Question: Hi.

Mayor Adams: How are you?

Question: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you. I want to say thank you very much from the bottom of my heart for leading the city that I love, that I've lived in my whole life. I'm not used to this kind of a job and you guys are all used to it, so please bear with me if I have to read my notes.

Mayor Adams: Thank you. You're good.

Question: Thank you commissioners and elected leaders, and mostly thank you NYPD for continuing to keep our neighborhoods safe and keeping our city safe. We greatly, greatly appreciate all your hard work. My name is [Maria Danzilo] and I'm a co-founder with this table of a group called One City Rising. We are a grassroots community group. Very committed New Yorkers who really want to see this city thrive. It's amazing that you've been doing all the great work you've been doing, given that you've had a hostile City Council, judges, and legislators in Albany who aren't helping you and other very big challenges that are really quite unfair and that are preventing you from doing the great work that you've been doing. It's just amazing that you've done so much.

We're all Upper West Siders who have experienced a real loss of public safety here on the Upper West Side as Gale Brewer, our councilmember, has pointed out before. Frankly, I've lived in this neighborhood 45 years. I've never experienced it this badly. I've been here for a really long time. I've been in a holdup in the early '90s. I've had lots of challenges. I was sucker punched just a few months ago in Central Park while walking my dog. Everyone at my table in my group are really concerned about our safety for our families and ourselves. People at our table experienced some problems with some specific areas like 79th and Broadway, a nonstop hotspot, and other areas in the neighborhood.

What we are seeing is a real failure in policy, which we don't see coming from the mayor's office in providing help for people with mental illness, drug addiction and people recently de-carcerated from prison. As we have seen from the recent stabbing of three innocent people who were just going about their work and their daily lives by being stabbed by somebody who is de-carcerated and put in a facility without proper oversight or accountability. We feel that the city is just not addressing this mental health crisis that is making our streets more dangerous.

Then, to add to this, the Coalition for the Homelessness new report, 42 percent of people entering the shelter system, are prison-releases from elsewhere. They have little connection to the neighborhood and they're going into shelters with little oversight, with no metrics for accountability from the providers. Our district, the Upper West Side, has already ranked seventh in having the most shelters before COVID, yet we keep seeing new shelters. We have the Calhoun School that is recently announced that they're converting to another shelter in our neighborhood, and it's owned by private equity interests. Building is now sold for $14 million. There's a big contract on it. My question, and it took a while, thank you–

Mayor Adams: You're also good.

Question: Is what policy changes do we need to fix this problem and how can we, the community, help you make sure that we get the things we need to bring our city back? Thank you.

Mayor Adams: I love that. You, Park Slope, Cobble Hill, parks of Crown Heights, all of these communities that are doing well historically. You're right, I looked at the numbers last week and these upticks, the shootings, the randoms acts of violence, just the public display, it has to be traumatizing. It would be traumatizing for me. It's a real issue. The erosion that you're talking about didn't happen overnight. It didn't happen overnight. It was just a slow erosion of the public safety principle.

I'm different from every other mayor. No mayor in the history of the city was ever on patrol. I've been on patrol. I could see the feeders that will continue crime problems. If we don't get this fixed, we're going to lose DAs, we're going to lose probation officers. We had a critical mass for correction officers. We are going to lose our police officers. We have the biggest classes that we've had in 2005, thinking ready to come to retirement age. You are going to see folks in erosion of public safety in the city like you've never seen before. Nobody wants to do the public safety work. We have to turn that around. We don't have to be punitive in actions of doing so.

We getting ready to close Rikers Island, right? We going to build four more new jails. We just downsizing the big Rikers into many Rikers. Instead of taking one of those jails that several people have been saying over and over again, and I've been asking them to do, let's take one of those jails and turn them into a state-of-the-art psychiatric facility. You got 51 percent of the inmates at Rikers Island have mental health illness. 18 percent to 20 percent have severe mental health illness. Why not do a psychiatric facility instead of building a new jail and a psychiatric facility where we can have the state-of-the-art that we're proud of that give people the care?

When we closed these psychiatric facilities years ago, we threw them to the streets. People walking down the block with no shoes on, 19 degrees weather yelling at ourselves. We wait until they do something illegal, then we take them to Rikers. That just makes no sense. Makes no sense at all. Sitting down in rooms like this and having a smaller group where we can zero in on some of the policies that we believe we need to do and have your voices added to it.

I wasn't kidding when I said all of our judges need to be here. They need to see the results of turning someone back into the street with two open gun arrests and let them go and do another gun arrest. These policies are impacted on the ground. Now, we have to do our role. I spoke with the new commissioner, Commissioner Tisch, and said, "We need to do an analysis of all of our police personnel and see where they are assigned. I don't need a gun and shield to put barriers up. I don't need to. Why you got to be in the barrier detail?

Everybody got to get back on patrol. We need an all-hands-on-deck. You have a gun, a shield, you're not dealing with a medical issue. You need to be back on patrol. Everyone needs to be back on patrol so that we don't have shortages of police personnel. I want my people in the precincts. That is what Commissioner Tisch is going to do. She's going to do an analysis of all of these units.

Cops are masters, as good as they are at fighting crime, they're masters at hiding out somewhere. We got to find them. Go desk by desk, unit by unit, and say, "What are you doing?" Even if you are doing an assignment inside, then you got to give me two days a week when you're going out and do patrol. Everybody has to get back into the game of doing patrol so you don't have a decrease in population. That is our focus and we have to deal with.

Here's what has hijacked our narrative, three things. Random acts of violence. Nothing shakes us more than a random act of violence. Walking down a block and being punched in the face or in the subway station, someone pushes you to the subway tracks. Someone slashing you for no reason. Random acts of violence is connected to the second problem we have, severe mental health illness. All of these cases. We had a case yesterday. Was it yesterday when the 70-something-year-old person was shoved to the track? 72-year-old.

The severe mental health is causing many of the random acts of violence. They go together. That's why we want to be proactive, to take them off the streets before they carry out a random act of violence. The third is repeat offenders. Those three are the monsters of our cities in the actions that come from it. Not giving people the help that they need because they've got severe mental health before they commit a crime, and zeroing in on the repeat offenders.

That's hurting the narrative of our city and it's shaking our consciousness that any day we can feel as though we're a victim of a crime. I got to get the cops back on your streets. Someone mentioned 70-- what was that street? 79th Street. We need to look into that, chief. Okay. What are the areas? Part of the patrol deployment should come from the community. They know what they're feeling. Nothing worse than somebody saying, I used to have an uncle. I thought he was 8 foot tall, but he probably was just 6. I was a little boy. He used to squeeze my hand and I would say, "That's hurt." He said, "Boy, that doesn't hurt you." How are you going to tell me what I'm feeling? I don't want to tell you what you're feeling. If you're saying 78th Street, 79th Street is a problem. We need to deploy cops over there and make you feel better.

Commissioner Kreizman: The next table.

Assistant Chief Ruel Stephenson, Patrol Borough Manhattan, Police Department: We have to do a better job making you feel safer. Again, good evening. I'm Chief Stephenson. I'm the borough commander of Manhattan North. When we ended last year in Manhattan North, we ended in record numbers below the prior year. I said to myself, how are we going to repeat last year? This year we're ending the year again down in overall crime, down in violence, and up in quality of life enforcement. What the mayor spoke about is the random acts of violence that causes people to feel unsafe because it gets a lot of attention.

When you look at the Upper West Side, Central Park, the 20 precinct, the 24 precinct, and the 26 precinct, when you combine those four commands, you're actually down in overall crime. Now we're seeing a slight spike in the 20 precinct. Again, that's the precinct where random acts of violence, emotionally disturbed folks, unprovoked slapping, punching, and taking items from people. Those we have to address properly.

Again, I have my inspector here. She can talk a little bit more specific again about what she's doing to address it. They're not being unaddressed. The cops are taking it very serious. The commanding officers every day sit down, analyze, and making sure that they are deploying properly. We have to do a better job to make you feel safer. Inspector, you want to just talk a little bit about what you're doing in it too to address some of these conditions.

Deputy Inspector Candida Punsullivan, Police Department: Good evening, everyone. Good evening. Thank you. Thank you, Gale. I have 12 new assigned rookies. I've strategically deployed them on the main corridor on Broadway. I weakly analyze with my team of what needs to be done, and shifting the resources where it's needed to address quality of life conditions, crimes, and concerns of the public safety. I did have an uptake. I have had random acts of violence against people just randomly walking down the streets, getting punched. I happily say most of the cases have been closed out with the help of my team and also the squad.

The squad has invested heavily on trying to apprehend these perpetrators that have caused violence, unnecessary violence to the public. There is no pattern in the sense of they're all different people, but the only common denominator is mental illness. They come from all different areas. There's not one concentration area that they're all coming from, and they're not necessarily all here. It's some here, some there, other boroughs, unfortunately, but we do due diligence on trying to apprehend all these people to suppress the violence that is inflicted on the community.

Mayor Adams: Dr. Wright, why don't you talk about some of the stuff, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, what we're doing around the mental health that we're seeing? Now, something happened after COVID. It just seemed to have spiked, but some of the things we're doing.

Executive Deputy Commissioner Dr. Jean Wright, Mental Hygiene: Thank you, Brother Mayor. Many of the concerns that you are talking about, I can say the underlying effect is trauma. You mentioned COVID, and that's in every city in this country that dealt with that. What is important is the statistics tell us that people that have serious mental illness, they're not the most common perpetrators of violence, but because they're a small number and they have large, very visible and public displays, it becomes conflated with everybody that commits a crime has a mental illness. That's not true. There are people in our families, in our homes, in our churches, in our Masjids, in our synagogues, everywhere, there's a community that have mental illness, and they're not walking around punching people. That's the first thing.

The second thing, as the mayor pointed out, but those who do, we have programs that we're working together with H&H, where we're getting more housing. We have 12,100 supportive housing units that are coming. We need to do more. We need to have more services, so that when we do those involuntary removals, that we can actually put them in places where they can receive treatment. As the mayor stated, you can't just take someone off the street and then not put them somewhere where they can receive help. We're working diligently to do that. We work with NYPD to do the walkthroughs and the blocks. We have partnerships with our social service agencies, and we work together. The police officers are doing everything they can do.

As we continue to work together, we need to make sure we have housing, we need to have treatment. We need to make sure that treatment is focused. We need to understand the impact of trauma. We need to understand the disinvestment that goes on in communities that causes trauma down the line. When you think about the impact of trauma, think about it's not individual trauma, it's community trauma, as you stated.

We used to have community efficacy, meaning that we took care of one another. We were able to help one another. When you disinvest and you remove resources from a community, now we have community trauma, not just individual trauma. Treatment, housing, support, working with NYPD, all of those things are happening together, working with health and hospitals. We're doing all of this together, but mayor, we need to do more and we're going to do more.

Mayor Adams: Thank you for that. Doctor, I just think you're right. We need to become trauma identifiers to see when people are going through trauma. Think about these employees, man, these 300,000 employees that we have, particularly in DOHMH, HRA. They went from COVID, watching their own family who were working all the time, these police officers, EMTs. Then they went into migrants. This is the same population, the trauma that they are experiencing. There's sometimes I'm on the Zoom and my team is talking, and I said, "Listen, take a moment and let's just do some breathing exercises." Because you can see the trauma that these city employees are going through hours upon hours. Think about it. Vicarious trauma. Every day, all day, you're seeing the worst that's happened to New Yorkers. That stuff impacts you, that impacts you. Thank you, doctor.

Commissioner Molly Wasow Park, Department of Social Services: [Inaudible], sir.

Mayor Adams: Yes. I'm sorry. No, go ahead, Molly. Speaking of a hard job.

Commissioner Wasow Park: Hi. I'm Molly Wasow Park. I'm the commissioner for the Department of Social Services. I want to talk just a minute about how we approach street outreach. DHS, together with our not-for-profit partners, including Goddard Riverside, have 400 street outreach workers. We're out 24/7. I think that might be the hardest job in New York City, right? It is rain and snow, and everything else. You're talking with people who have fallen through every crack that there is to fall through. They have really been dropped by every level of society.

In New York City, 95 percent of the people experiencing homelessness are sheltered, which is orders of magnitude different than other places in the country. The 5 percent who are unsheltered, they have been failed by everybody. We're out there, we're trying to build a trust relationship. Sometimes it takes dozens, even hundreds, of times before somebody is willing to come inside. It has been discussed a number of times that we can't make anybody come inside. We cannot say, "You know what? You don't belong here. You must come to shelter," or, "You must go to the hospital," except in really rare circumstances.

One of the things that we've done is really try and make sure that we have sites that are right for people who are experiencing chronic unsheltered homelessness. In this administration, we've opened hundreds of safe haven beds which are low barrier, really designed for the people who are experiencing unsheltered homelessness. Now, we are in a hospital system. We aren't medical care, but there are clinicians on site. We're really there to meet people where they are to get them off the street. One of the things that I can say is that we've had something like 1,200 people go from those low barrier safe havens into permanent housing because that's the goal for everybody.

Continuing to invest, as my colleague said, in support of housing. We are doing everything, starting from the outreach all the way through the housing. There's always more to do. Please call 311, 400 people is a smallish force, so we're not going to show up 10 minutes later, but we use that data to know where we need to send people and where we need to invest in the future.

Mayor Adams: Molly has been a real, real hero of these last 2 years and 10 months, particularly around the migrants and asylum-seeking. We were getting 8,000 migrants a week, 16,000 every two weeks, 30-something thousand a month. All times of the night, she had to figure out where we're going to put them, where they're going to stay. It was unbelievable what her and her team did. An unsung hero in our city.

When I became mayor, January, and February, I went into the streets to go to all the encampments. We had encampments everywhere. When I went inside to talk to the people inside the encampment, I saw human waste, drug paraphernalia, schizophrenics, bipolar, and when I went back to the team, I said, "Listen, we can't live like this." Everybody told me, "Eric, don't do it. You'll never win the homeless battle. Never, so don't even try it."

We made an agreement that we were going to take all the encampments down and put people into care. We were beat up. We were beat up. People said, "No, people have a right to sleep on the street with no shoes at 13-degree weathers and yell and scream and walk the street." I said, "Like hell they do." That's what it took for us to, "You don't see what's happening here in other cities. Go look at these encampments in other cities and look at here." Because we were willing to take the heat to get it done.

Question: Hi, good evening. Thank you, Mayor.

Mayor Adams: How are you?

Question: I'm good. Nice to see you. My name is [Lauren Baldinger Schulz.] I am a New York native. I grew up in Brooklyn, 63rd Precinct. I now live here in the 20th Precinct. I'm sitting at the Concerned Mom's table. Mayor Adams, the growing number of homeless and migrant shelters like we've just been exhausting talking about on the Upper West Side, especially between 88th and 93rd Street on Amsterdam, has really raised serious public safety concerns. We talked about the NYPD data, about all of the crime rates up, robbery, burglary, assaults, and the most recent one, 250 percent up for gun violence and the violence, the mental health crises, the drug use, it's all increasing and it's all visible here in our neighborhood.

Recently near 86th in Broadway, a homeless man threw a garbage can at my kid, and just weeks before that, it was a stabbing recently nearby. I don't know how to differentiate from my kid, the guy throwing the garbage can, which is nothing, is he going to be the guy stabbing him next time? He's nine. He's in 3rd grade. He's aware of all of this. Trick or treating turned dangerous with teenagers shooting each other outside of McDonald's recently. This could have been me, a woman sitting on a car on 84th Street in Broadway, in broad daylight, at gunpoint, car hijacked.

Then most recently, I'm a physician and I take the subway home at night. I think it was maybe 9:30, close to ten o'clock. All of a sudden, I'm walking from 79th & Broadway coming off of the one, and I have to walk past Zabar's up to West End Avenue barely a block. All of a sudden I'm looking behind me and I start running, not because someone's chasing me, because I am just really, really scared in my own neighborhood. With the numerous government housing buildings in the area, there's this urgent need for man patrol cars to deter crime, to make me feel safer, to make our kids feel safer. What are the immediate steps that you're willing to take to restore safety and protect our families? I still have one more question after that.

Mayor Adams: No, you should ask them both.

Question: My next question is, can you please use your strong relationship with our governor to push for the reopening of the mental health beds as she promised during her recent campaign? Additionally, we know that Bob Holden introduced a bill to reopen Creedmoor, which provide critical help to so many in desperate need. How can you, with the support of concerned residents like us, help push these initiatives forward to address the mental health crisis in our city?

Mayor Adams: The both of those issues were horrific. I don't know what I would do with those garbage cans at Jordan.

Question: It's a garbage can. It's not that big, but it's really scary for our kids.

Mayor Adams: It becomes a traumatized experience. Molly, can we talk about some of the shelters? Part of the problem is that we have far too many elected that don't want to do share. We try to open one, one shelter in Brooklyn, and it was an uproar. Hundreds of people were in the streets, lying down in the streets. I said, "You have one." All these other communities, when I go up to the Bronx, Salamanca, he has 33, everyone must share this issue. I tell the team, listen, protest me, call me whatever you want. You can all share your issue. Everyone needs to share this issue. We can't overburden communities.

Now, it's important that where they are located, we have to have the presence to do the services and make sure that we don't have the loitering. We make sure people are not using drugs, sitting on your porch, injecting themselves, defecating on our streets that can't come with it. If we identify a location that's doing that, we have to combine all of our efforts not to make it happen. Hold on one moment, Molly.

Question: Going back to that for a second. There's a lot of talk that there's– I was here during COVID. I worked during COVID. I was here watching our streets get flooded with all these migrant shelters and the homeless shelters. I've been here for, on the Upper West Side, almost 15 years. I've never seen anything like it. What happened from COVID, and we were fighting and writing letters and saying, "You can't keep putting shelters here. You can't keep taking our hotels." I felt like the Upper West Side got beat up with all of it here. This has been spiraling down and now the most recent one that I'm hearing is the methadone clinic on the park by 59th Street, where my kids play baseball. I've had enough. I go to other neighborhoods. I know they're bad. My husband works up at a hospital in the Bronx. They got abused. They're getting abused also. It's not just here. We want to help. How can we help you?

Mayor Adams: Thank you for that. I've never been at one community meeting when we said that, "Hey, we got to open one of these clinics, one of these shelters, one of these homeless." People was like, "Sir, you–" Like the guy that used to be on Fonzi, "Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, I want to open it here." That's not the reality, but no community should be oversaturated.

We try, Molly and her team try their best to find the best location, but our councilmembers need to hold each other accountable. The first month in office, I showed all our councilmembers, "Here are where the shelters are located." You would be blown away. They have none, and that's just not acceptable. How do we do these placements, Molly?

Commissioner Wasow Park: Sure. Thank you. First, I just want to give a little bit of landscape of homelessness in New York City. About three-quarters of the people in the shelter system are families with children and a plurality of people experiencing homelessness are kids. We talk a lot about homelessness as if it is a monolithic issue, but really mostly, what we're talking about is children.

In New York City, there are, literally, I have a tendency to hyperbole, but this one's true, a million low-income households who are rent-burdened. I really see the shelter system as the emergency room of the housing system in New York City. We have a 1.4 percent vacancy rate. As the shelter system's too big, it is absolutely my goal to make it smaller, but in some ways, it's a miracle that it isn't bigger.

What we got to do is really focus on getting people connected to permanent housing. Homelessness happens. It is an emergency situation, but it should be a short-term thing, where people get back on their feet. It's something we've been really, really focused on at Department of Homeless Services. Last year, we moved 18,500 households out of shelter and into permanent housing. It was a record-breaking number, but there is still so much more to do.

We also need to make sure that we are investing in making sure that the shelters that we do have are quality places, not only for the clients, but for the community. Every shelter has a community advisory board. I will say that some of the emergency sites don't, but any permanent shelter has a community advisory board. We want to hear from the community. Sites have a 24/7 number, where issues can be reported in real-time. We are available, I am available. We will respond to issues if we have them.

But we've really also been trying to think about how we upgrade the physical space so that how many places can we have self-contained outdoor space. If somebody is going to go outside to smoke that they aren't doing it on the street. What do we need to do to make sure that for people who are in that emergency situations that they can be not only in a place where they can recover but that they are also being good neighbors? I will say every client is expected to sign a good neighbor policy, and we will respond when we know that we have issues.

Again, we are available and we are accessible and I'm happy to talk afterwards, offline if there's specific issues that we need to follow up on. Mr. Mayor, to your question about how sites are identified we have an open-ended RFP up on our website. Providers, not-for-profit providers bring us sites. We will do an assessment to see whether or not the site is viable. That's a land use issue, but also that level of saturation whether or not the provider is equipped to provide the level of services that we expect, whether or not the site is cost-effective.

We want to provide good services, but we also have to be good stewards of fiscal resources. It is a complex process. We've closed a lot of subpar sites over the last several years that includes what were known as the cluster shelters, which were apartment buildings. They were very poor quality. They didn't offer services and they were taking housing out of the housing stock. Also, some of the bigger congregate sites for single adults that again, they were not being run to our standards, not up to our physical standards. We have tremendous need in the city. It is a right to shelter city. It is a very low vacancy rate, and we're going to need shelters for the foreseeable future.

Mayor Adams: Yes. What–

Question: Non-for-profit because I think the one that the lower division of [inaudible] school for those that [inaudible].

Commissioner Wasow Park: All shelters are operated by not-for-profit organizations. In some cases, the building is owned by the not-for-profit organization. We are trying to do more and more of that historically, however, and we still do some of this, that the not-for-profit leases the building from a private owner.

Mayor Adams: I do this feeding on Wednesdays. When I started street-feeding of people, when I first started, it was just a group of homeless people. As the weeks went on, were working adults, people are hurting in this city. When you add the 60,000 we had in our homeless shelter with 220,000, that's almost 300,000. That is why we put the 30-day plan in place. We said we can't build a permanent 300,000 housing and 170,000 of the 220,000 migrants and asylum seekers went on to the next step of their journey.

Some said, "We want to go back to our country's origins." Some said, "We never wanted to come here in the first place." Some found their way like other immigrants. We were beat up for putting that 30-day program in place. We said, "You can't stay here forever." People, when they were challenged, were finding their way. You know what they did? They found their way. 170,000 people we said, "You got 30 days, man. You're single adult you got 30 days. Other immigrants found their way." Everybody has to find their way in this country. They found their way. Where am I?

Commissioner Kreizman: Next table four. Yes, I'm on it.

[Crosstalk.]

Question: My friend's going to tell me. Many of the things that we discussed were addressed from people and from you discussing electric vehicles, and we're very concerned about that, but let me go through with what we feel has not been addressed yet for a second. Okay, here we go. The city, yes, is great step for building new housing. How can we align everyone to incentive upgrading current housing? People aren't feeling safe in housing and current providers can't afford to do more. Currently, for many small landlords, property taxes is more than rent roll and pushing people to bankruptcy. How about instead incentivize people to provide more voucher housing safely and how to get better provisions for the people in NYCHA housing? Also–

Mayor Adams: You must be a teacher.

Question: Since I had to wait a long time– A social worker. In terms of some of the issues, in terms of safety that we feel also need to be addressed aside from the others, cameras are very effective in helping find perpetrators. Of course, holding people to consequences goes along with finding them. Currently, on the Upper West Side, many of us participate in the participatory budgeting which has given us some cameras, but I feel very insulted, I personally, when I have to vote for cameras for my safety, when that becomes something for participatory budgeting and not something that the city is providing with my tax dollars in general.

We're in competition with, and I was a social worker in the public schools, with things like providing a science room, fixing a leaky sink in a public school. I'd like to know why our city is not providing more money for cameras. I'd like to know why we don't have more foot patrols, I think we'd like to know, even given the fact that there are fewer police, and also historically, the Upper West Side was a haven for Jewish people that came here after the Holocaust. One of the things I love about this community is it is now very diverse, which is wonderful, but as a Jewish person who has lived here since 1970, many of us feel the need to hide our identity.

Antisemitism is rampant. I'm not talking about Columbia University. I'm talking about on our city streets. I would hope that police and law enforcement are given training in what is an antisemitic act so some of the things that go on can be properly addressed. Thank you.

Mayor Adams: Thank you very much. That connects with what was said earlier. The immediate response, what could we do immediately? We're going to look at some of those problematic areas and make sure police are being deployed there to make sure that we coordinate with communities, that we do use cameras. Kaz Daughtry, the deputy commissioner of Operations, what he has done with cameras, with drones, with technology to really properly identify those who are committing crimes and bring them to justice.

That's how we caught the shooter that killed the insurance CEO, executive.

Question: [Inaudible.]

Mayor Adams: It is, but the participatory budgeting process is an amazing process. It allows people to be engaged and look at how do they want to spend their tax dollars in their community. We love it. We think it's a great idea. We have expanded it under this administration. Antisemitism in this area, do we have the numbers in this precinct?

Deputy Commissioner Daughtry: For the 20th precinct, we're down 19 percent, so 13 versus 16 for the antisemitic hate crimes.

Mayor Adams: We give you that number not to tell you... we want to say you feel what you feel. I don't think there has been a mayor that has been more clear on fighting antisemitism like I have been.

I don't think there has been another mayor that– I have been extremely clear. We don't play the games of saying in our hate crime units, don't say it's antisemitism or not. No, we look at the crime, and we report it. We're not going to hide behind that. Now, I think there are things we should do. There should be a no plea bargaining for any type of hate crime. Antisemitism, Islamophobia, attacking Sikhs, attacking LGBTQ+ communities.

I think the DA should send a clear message there's no plea bargaining. You commit a crime, we're not going to drop down in a plea bargain. We have to have a real conversation in our schools about the hate that we're seeing that's pervasive. We need to go after social media. Social media is really pushing this hate not only in the city but across the country, if not internationally.

I think we need to do what Lamona right here is doing. Lamona is doing this thing called Breaking Bread, Building Bonds. We thought we were going to do just a thousand dinners across the city. When people sit around the table, they all come from a different walk of life, different cultures, different understandings, and they doing something revolutionary. They're talking to each other. This has to be a ground-up like this table here, this ground-up group and organization.

There needs to be a ground-up. We can't just police our way out of antisemitism and hate. We have to be honest with ourselves. This is a diverse city, but we live in silos. We live among each other. We're not comfortable with other groups. The real education for our children is not in a sterilized environment of a classroom. It is in gatherings of learning about the beauty of the diversity in the city.

I would encourage us for you to reach out to Lamona and you do a Breaking Bread, Building Bonds. Let's bring folks together so that we can sit down and start having a real conversation. The real gift of living in New York is our diversity, and we need to celebrate that. We're going to come to you. Let me just make sure we go to the table, and I'm not going to forget you. Okay? You have my word. I'm not going to forget you. Okay?

Question: The housing part [inaudible]. One of the questions was how do they address the costs of providing housing because right now we have a lot of units. We have city of which is great for building new stuff. We don't have an answer for how we're going to bring back dilapidated broken units where owners can't bring them online. We have unlocking doors, which runs over $1,300. You can't get money. They have unlocking doors is $25,000. It doesn't help you renovate a unit that takes hundreds of thousands of dollars to get it back on.

Mayor Adams: Okay. Listen, a bill was passing on me a deal with MCI and IAI that which I think ideally, was a good concept but in reality, when someone moves out of an apartment, if they can only spend a small amount to renovate it, many people are not doing the renovations that are needed. What we knew we had to do, we have to improve the inventory. As Molly stated, we had a 1.4 percent vacancy rate.

We had to get changes in Albany. We had to get changes in the City Council with the City of Yes. I thank the council of folks who participated. We have to build more. The supply and demand states, if you have a low stock, that's going to increase the price. We have to build more. I think we need to reexamine the MCI and the IAI of decisions that were made up in Albany to make sure that we can continue to renovate these apartments after people move out of these apartments. Yes, sir?

Question: Hi, thank you.

Mayor Adams: Thank you very much.

Question: I'm sorry I'm nervous.

Mayor Adams: It's all right I'm nervous all the time.

Question: I wanted to talk to you about the safety and security of a proposed shelter on West 74th Street. Cushman & Wakefield sold the Calhoun school to a poverty profiteer, an [inaudible] capital, that has over a dozen shelters in the city. Their business model is to make money off our taxpayer dollars. It's unfortunate that the school was not turned into the much-needed affordable housing that we need on the Upper West Side. At this point, there's been no safety outreach to the community or conversation about the 146 people that are going to be occupying a small-footprint building.

Our concern is the amount of money that's going, flowing through the nonprofit organization to the private equity firm. This business model that they have. We've written a letter detailing this that I would like to give you but thank you, and thank you for being here.

Mayor Adams: You want to talk about that, Molly? This is a Molly night.

Commissioner Wasow Park: I had a feeling. Familiar with the site? Absolutely. Listen, we have two ways of creating shelters. Apologies when I get a little bit wonky, but one version is the not-for-profit that is operating the shelter actually does the development, ground up. The contract that we enter into with them is long-term. They can use that to secure debt and to do their own development. That's great. Those take a while. There aren't that many not-for-profits who are both good at operating shelter and doing that kind of financing and development. Both of those are complicated and hard work and two very different skill sets.

We are building that kind of pipeline. We have 43 of those that are either open or somewhere in the pipeline, but the reality is that there's lots of good organizations that either don't have that capacity right now or have an opportunity to do something, but it's a different timeline. Real estate in this country, not just in this city, is a for-profit business. People make money. That is the nature of the game. The not-for-profit in this case, yes, is going to be leasing the site from a private owner. That is a model that exists fairly widely. We look at costs very, very carefully. It's not just DHS.

I answer to my Office of Management and Budget, and they certainly don't let us get away with anything that they don't feel is appropriate. The rents have to be appropriate. We are monitoring that closely, but yes, the not-for-profit is going to be leasing the space from a private owner. With respect to community engagement, the site will have a community advisory board. We will absolutely do a community meeting. We typically do them a little bit closer to opening, but we can certainly work with the council member if we want to do something sooner than that. We will be very focused on making sure that there are both adequate wraparound services as well as adequate security.

Mayor Adams: The housing crisis has been around a long, long time, and in the two years and 10 months, we looked at, we knew we had to build more housing Deputy Mayor Maria Torres-Springer and Dan Garodnick over at planning. We broke records year one and year two. What we were able to accomplish up in Albany was so important. Housing conversion, looking at office spaces, converting to housing hotel spaces, et cetera, and then the City of Yes. 80,000 units in 15 years, it is going to take a while to fix this housing mess that we were in.

Too many children are growing up in housing. If you grew up in housing in homeless, you are less likely to graduate from high school. If you don't educate, you're going to incarcerate. We know we have to attack this problem, and we went head-on in the 2 years and 10 months. We don't want people growing up into shelters and there needs to be incentive to get out of shelters and not to stay in shelters. We need to incentivize getting into permanent housing. It's a real challenge.

City Councilmember Brewer: That's what we want here. We want the permanent housing. The neighborhood wants a permanent housing and not the shelter. I support a lot of shelters. [Inaudible] but in this case, the entire neighborhood wants permanent housing and that's what we're asking for.

Commissioner Wasow Park: We did look at that. I'm not the housing finance agency, but we absolutely looked at that. Given the footprint of the site and what it would take to reconfigure it to be permanent housing, what you would get is a fairly small number of units that are really cost-prohibitive. In all likelihood, it really couldn't be affordable housing given that footprint. What it would be would be market-rate housing. Now, maybe there's advantages to that too, but I really see shelter and housing is an and not an or.

I am desperate for the day when it is an or but given the vacancy rate, given the number of people who are low income and rent-burdened in this city, we're going to be in a place where it is an and for a long time. Just to build off of the mayor's comments, there's 10,000 households in the shelter system who have a voucher where the city has said, "If you can find a place to live, we are happy to pay your rent," and there isn't a place for people to go. That is with people doubled up all across the city. We are facing a housing emergency. It is a yes to housing, yes to shelter because the need is so dire. I very much hope we get to the place where we are doing housing instead of shelter, but we are a long way from that given the depth of the need.

Mayor Adams: And the City Council, to their credit, they increased the rents that our FHEPS vouchers are allowed. Listen to those numbers, we have 10,000 families with vouchers that can't find a place.

[Crosstalk.]

Mayor Adams: As a matter of fact, go ahead, sir.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. How about changing zoning if you build affordable housing and accept vouchers so you can actually build up? Wouldn't that solve the problem?

Commissioner Wasow Park: That's included in City of Yes. I can't remember the official terminology, but basically if you build affordable, you get higher density. Thank you.

Mayor Adams: Yes, see how smart you are? You're right in the head. Your VP has been really big on being willing to think differently about housing and funding. We're looking at city spaces, and we're telling all of our city agencies, we need you to look at how you can build housing on city spaces, police lots, on top of libraries. We're looking at everywhere to build more houses. I'm sorry?

Question: I reached out on a topic, lately, but no one got back to me.

Mayor Adams: Reached out to?

Question: On the library.

Mayor Adams: What was the question on the library?

Question: I reached out on top of a library, and I tried to figure out who to reach out to [inaudible].

Mayor Adams: Got it.

Commissioner Kreizman: Sir, we'll follow up with you afterwards. We have people at a different table, so we'll follow up afterwards.

Mayor Adams: That's an important piece, because if you reached out, you know who you reached out to. They should have gotten back to you, because we want to build on top of libraries.

Question: We can reach out [inaudible].

Mayor Adams: We can sit right on Deputy Mayor Maria Torres-Springer, because she's doing an analysis for me. Andrew Kimball over at EDC, they are doing an analysis of all of our streets and city-owned property to come up with how do we build more housing based on that. Andrew Kimball, all right, Fred, connected with someone on Andrew Kimball's team. How are you, sir?

Question: Good. Thank you for having us tonight and hosting all of us, appreciate it. My name is [Lucas Liu,] I've been an Upper West Side resident for about 30 years now. I've seen the Upper West Side go through its cycles. Two comments and then a question. To add on to somebody who had mentioned about the homeless and mental health issues on the street, just wanted to add a couple extra streets that maybe could have the police go by and maybe, I don't want to just say push them off somewhere else because that just makes it somebody else's problem, but maybe just get a little bit better behavior.

86 from Columbus to West End, Amsterdam 86 to 88th, West End Ave 84th to 86. It's the same people. Another comment from someone at our table, the streets 81st, 82nd, 83rd, between Broadway and West End, it's kind of dark. She was mentioning how at night when it's dark out, she's a little concerned walking down the street alone. Now to my question, there's a lot of talk about the bikes, the e-bikes, the mopeds, a lot of them belonging to delivery people going the wrong way in the bike lanes and making that last half block they need to make their delivery, they ride on the sidewalks, they go the wrong way on the street.

Is there a way to get police on bikes when the weather is acceptable to prevent or to deter that type of behavior? It's getting more police out on the street, which then in and of itself is a bit of a deterrent. Is there a way we could get something like that?

Mayor Adams: First, I ride around at night and I harass my team. How many times I call you, send you a picture. Why is this shelter here? Why is this encampment here? 2:00, 3:00 AM in the morning? When I first became mayor, I was seeing it all over the place, and I used to wake them up in the middle of the night, send them a picture. I don't see it as much as before. If you have locations like that, let us know because we want to make sure that it is addressed and we should not have any dark corridors. If you're seen places like that, make sure we get there and make sure the lighting is proper, even if we have to do an analysis, if we need additional more lighting.

I was shocked that we didn't hear a question on the bikes in the delivery because I have not had one town hall where it didn't come up, particularly with older adults. It got out of control. After COVID, everyone started ordering in and our city did not adjust to the proliferation of the delivery bikes, of the scooters, the three wheelers, all of it. What I told the team to do, Deputy Commissioner Daughtry and other, we had to have come up with a real plan to deal with these bikes.

We do it on several level. Number one, we going out to the delivery app companies and say, you have to be held responsible for your delivery. We gave them a good deal, so they no longer had to rush because at one time they was on this timing thing that they had to rush and get as many deliveries as possible. We had a good deal with them, the deputy mayors, the commissioner of Workers Protection, and we were able to settle with the app companies to pay them more so they're not speeding through our streets.

We also need help from Albany. I'm a big believer. These guys have to be registered, you need insurance because you get hit by one of these bikes, these scooters, et cetera, who do you blame? Good friend, Michael Miller, he was hit. They still have a rod in his leg because of that. We know we have to crack down on speeding. We have to look at the bikes that have been sold with these bogus batteries, lithium-ion batteries.

We have to have a full comprehensive approach to this overproliferation of these bikes that are on our roads right now. That is what we're doing on every area. DOT, NYPD, FDNY. We're all looking at how to bring this under control. That's just really ballooned overnight after COVID. We're with you. Yes. Go ahead. He has something he wanted to add.

Question: Just just quick. The one the one time I did have to call 911 about a mentally ill person threatening people on the street and another time about a mentally ill person ripping over garbage bags and dumping it on the street, the response time by the NYPD and the Department of Sanitation was great. I just want to say thank you to Department of Sanitation and the precinct on the Upper West Side for showing up really quickly.

Mayor Adams: This team is made up of some good hard-working working people. Molly says something that's very important. What many people don't realize we can't force people to get off the streets. We can't force them. They're standing out. We are not allowed. We could go interact with them, but we can't force them. What happens often if you're dealing with severe mental health issue you have to build some serious trust. You have to go back over and over again. I was in a subway system two days last week. The amount of time my scout workers and my path workers they have to constantly visit people over and over and over again for them to build that trust.

Some people will tell you just straight up, "I don't want to leave," and there's nothing you can do about it. We have to just continuously. We had over 15,000 interaction. We were able to get up approximately 800 people off our subway system into permanent care. It's that constant over and over. It's not a one-shot. It's not just going to a person one time and say, "Hey, listen you got to come off the street."

People have been broken to the level where they would rather stay on the streets. Those who can take care of themselves is fine. If you are dealing with severe mental health issue that's where the involuntary removal needs to kick in so we can give people the services that they need. We need help in Albany to get that bill that bill passed so that we can execute the way we believe we ought to.

Commissioner Kreizman: Thanks. Table 7.

Mayor Adams: This young lady next to you also had a question. Oh, she doing your question? Or you have your–

Question: She got it.

Mayor Adams: Okay.

Question: I'm [Heather Groeger.] I'm a nurse, a mother and founder of Friends of the Ederle Playground Advocacy Group. Our question is, why is there no accountability for shelter placement and management on the Upper West Side? I know this has been pounded already, but on 83rd Street, you have a safe haven next to an elementary school where residents overlook the kindergarten playground from their beds. We have a picture.

At this location. You can see loitering, stalking, trespassing, open drug use, and child safety and mental health issues. There are not adequate mental health professionals on site as promised. We have a victim at this very table who can give you a firsthand account. On West 59th Street, you are actively building from the ground up, a massive shelter for mentally ill, chemically addicted women next to the Gertrude Ederle Playground, as well as many elementary schools and early childhood programs.

This shelter will have a Suboxone clinic open– sorry. Sorry, my son is calling. A Suboxone clinic open to residents and the public, and has smoking courtyards immediately adjacent to the playground. There's a shelter serving this exact population seven blocks away that often has empty beds. I will stress that this shelter is still in the building phase and can still be made into desperately needed affordable housing with the administration's direction.

I also have to mention that despite Ms. Park mentioning the need for children to be housed, none of these shelters are for children. All the shelters that anybody has addressed are for single adults and not families. Affordable housing, which we all support and would love to have in our neighborhood, would help these children. To sum it up, there is great concern about public safety, particularly women and children and fiscal accountability. Why aren't these resources being used to actually address the mental health, drug addiction, and homelessness problems versus perpetuating the corruption surrounding the homeless industrial complex?

Mayor Adams: Are you familiar with that area, Molly. It's Molly night.

Commissioner Wasow Park: I can certainly speak to both of the sites. First of all, particular issues with the 83rd Street site, let's follow up offline. I'm happy to give you my card. For, people experiencing homelessness are here, whether we like it or not. This is a function not only of the real estate market and the vacancy rate, but of many institutions, failure of many different systems, whether it's the mental health system, longstanding substance use. There's a host of growing income inequality. There's a host of reasons why people experiencing homelessness are here in our city.

We essentially have two choices. We can shelter them or we can have them on our street. We should be working towards housing, absolutely and we do every single day. I talked about the fact that we've gotten 1,200 people from our safe havens into permanent housing over the last couple of years. Getting people into permanent housing is what gets me out of bed in the morning. I came from the affordable housing world, and it's something that is hugely important to me, but the idea that we are going to get somebody literally from the street corner and put them into housing that same day, it's just not realistic.

I grew up in California. I go back to visit and there's a tent on every street corner, every highway overpass. It's terrible. My kid grew up in New York City too, went to New York City public schools. They are going to see people experiencing homelessness. The question is, do they see them on the street? Do they step over them on the sidewalk, or are we serving people in some kind of situation where they can be safer for everybody? Does that mean that we're doing everything perfectly?

It absolutely doesn't, but I absolutely believe that shelter is an important part of our infrastructure until we really deal with systemic changes that range from massive more housing to different kinds of mental health care, to different kinds of correctional policies to substance treatment on demand. None of those things are anywhere close to what we've got right now, so we do need a crisis management system. We heard both from, "We shouldn't rent sites," and now we're hearing, "We shouldn't have the not-for-profits on the sites." One way or another, we have to have a system that we can do it.

Question: You're not answering anything about how it's kids and how it's all about that's how we do, but that's not what you're building or putting in, single men or single women. You know what, maybe not everybody gets to live in New York City if they can't make it and–

[Crosstalk.]

Mayor Adams: Hold on. Let's do one at a time, folks. Go ahead. Hold on. I don't subscribe to "Maybe everyone should not live in New York City." I don't subscribe to that and we don't all agree on everything, but this is not going to be a city for just the affluent and those who fall on hard times because I lived on the verge of homelessness, those who fall on hard times, we have an obligation to make sure we house them. That's the law. Right to shelter is the law, and we're going to follow that. Go ahead, finish it.

Commissioner Wasow Park: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Both of the things that I have said are true. Yes. The plurality of people experiencing homelessness in New York City are children. Yes, the sites we are talking about are for single adults. There are single adults who are experiencing homelessness as well. I really don't believe that it is sacrificing children. If there is a particular site line issue, we can certainly talk about shading windows, things like that. That's something that we have done in other sites, and there are solutions that we can have, but our kids, my kid, all of our kids are going to interact with people experiencing homelessness. It is New York City.

It is the reality that we live with, and it is a question about whether we do it in a way that is managed and controlled and with dignity, or whether the people are on the street and living in what mayor has talked about as conditions that are not fit for any person. I am happy to follow up on individual-specific issues. There is always room that we can do to improve. I'm never going to be the one to say that we can't, but I do believe strongly in the value of a shelter system, not only for the people who are in it, but to protect communities as a whole.

Mayor Adams: Go ahead. You're talking to the mic so everybody can hear.

Question: Sorry, you didn't address the question or the issues at all.

Mayor Adams: Which one you wanted her to address?

Question: You basically said the same thing you've said over and over again. There's a bottleneck issue, correct? You have a shelter system that's full. People have vouchers. There's nowhere to put these people. So instead, you're just building more shelters and not addressing this bottleneck, which would keep people moving through the system. That's point one. Point two is I'd like to know, is secondhand smoke safe for children? I think secondhand smoke is [not] safe for children because I think many of us are in healthcare and we will all agree that that is incorrect, and you're bringing that directly to the children. Not right.

You're creating a problem. You're not solving a problem. Also, bringing a suboxone clinic for not just the residents. You are bringing drug addicts from all over next to a playground. There are a lot of other places for a clinic like this. You can't tell me that this is the only location in New York where you can bring this, and we all know that it's an extremely profitable business, suboxone clinics. I could go on and on, but you're really not answering the question, and you're bringing problems instead of solving them.

Mayor Adams: Sorry, I just wanted the first part about it about there's a bottleneck, and we're not doing anything about it. That was what City of Yes was about. We have a 1.4 percent vacancy rate, and if we don't build more, then we won't be able to house this real– We're at a housing crisis and actually, the vacancy rate is almost a functional zero for affordable housing. You have to be judged by your numbers.

Year one, year two, we broke records in new housing that we put in place. We broke records in the number of people who got housing through the voucher program. We broke records the number of people that went from homelessness into permanent housing. I got to be judged by the numbers. We're not going to solve this problem of homelessness, folks, in 2 years and 11 months. Let's not kid ourselves but when you look at what the indicators are to say are you moving in the right direction from the housing reform that we did to the records we did in new housing to voucher program to homelessness into permanent housing? It's a clear indicator that in 2 years and 10 months, we did far less.

What we did in housing, what we did with City of Yes, is more than 12 years under Bloomberg. It's more than double the eight years under de Blasio. We did it in 2 years and 10 months.

Commissioner Wasow Park: I'll add to that. I certainly want to make sure that I do my best to address specific questions. We work very closely with our partners at the housing finance agencies. That's not traditionally the role of the Department of Social Services. Given the scope of the need, we know we can't wait for other people to solve our problems. We've actually created a contract structure where, again, I'm going to get a little wonky, but where we are using our CityFHEPS vouchers. It's a project-based contract. Not-for-profits can use that, and they can use the contract to leverage debt.

We actually, in the Department of Social Services, are financing affordable housing. Never been done before. We closed on about 250 units of that over the summer. Those units are all fully occupied at this point. Not only are we doing something innovative, we're doing it quickly as well. Part of the reason why I'm saying the same thing over and over again is because it is the reality that I live where we cannot have a choice between shelter and housing, where we have such need that we need both.

With respect to the clinic that is on-site, first of all, I think the best way that we can address the rampant drug use and the consequences that come with rampant drug use is by making sure that people have access to substance use treatment. There's a lot of evidence, and my colleagues here can speak more detail than I can, but a lot of evidence that when you can get people into treatment, it actually does address the issues. That substance use does not have to be a lifelong sentence into the instability that people have been talking about here.

The clinic is going to be run by the same not-for-profit organization that is going to be running the shelter. This is not a business that somebody is going to be making a lot of money off of. With respect to the outdoor space, I think we've done a lot of work with– Personally, I've had multiple meetings with local community. I'm sorry, I don't remember whether or not you were there.

There've been a number of them. The developer who is doing the actual physical construction, the not-for-profit that will ultimately own and run the site, making some adaptations to that outdoor space, trying to address the concerns that have been raised. Also dealing with in addition to the physical changes that we're talking about, making that there will be operating issues. Managing the time that the space is open and things like that. Trying to be– I can circle back with you. I don't have that member off the top of my head. I know we've had a lot of conversations about hours of operation, but–

Question: [Inaudible.]

Commissioner Kreizman: Let's give an opportunity–

Mayor Adams: Go ahead. Finish.

Commissioner Wasow Park: We've had a lot of community meetings. I'm happy to have more community meetings about that site. We very often go through community board. Community is a broad term. Our ability to personally meet with every single person is challenging. We work with the community board. They bring people. Sometimes that gets the right people to the room. It doesn't always get the right people to the room, but we're happy to take another run at it.

Mayor Adams: What's the smoking part? Tell me the smoking part. What is it? What's the issue with the smoke? I'm sorry.

Question: Smoking courtyards are immediately adjacent to the playground.

Mayor Adams: What is it? The layouts?

Question: No, it's right next to it.

Mayor Adams: Is it next to it or across it?

Question: Here's the playground.

Commissioner Wasow Park: Not on ground level, but there is contained outdoor space that is a couple of levels above the playground. It is something we've certainly had a number of conversations about. Working with how we can do physical configurations to block the space, investing in technology that is smoke capturing, looking at hours of operation. All of those things are under consideration.

Mayor Adams: Let's look at that because something like that, we should be able to find a way to fix it. I don't want children exposed to secondhand smoke. I want to go over there and see what it looks like. Those are things that we should be able to fix, that children are exposed to secondhand smoke. I think, Molly, there's nothing worse than somebody coming here speaking of smoke and just blowing smoke in your face. No, we just can't lie. To me, I want to manage your expectation.

We have a homeless crisis. We're going to have to build these locations. We're going to have to– These are not easy conversations. We could easily say, "Okay, no, we're not going to build them." That's just a lie. We have a homeless crisis, and we've had it for a long time. It's not new here. I really tell people all the time, go google San Francisco. Go google Los Angeles. Go google these other cities. You don't want your children to see folks in homeless shelter? In those other cities, they don't have to worry about seeing them in other shelters. They're living on the streets.

They got people all on the streets cooking, using it as public toilets, injecting themselves with drugs. You look at these other cities, and I made up my mind, we're not doing that in New York. You're not going to have these open encampment all over our city like in other cities. We stopped it from happening, folks. That's what was starting to happen when we came into office. We saw people saying, "I'm going to live on highways. They're doing it in Los Angeles. I'm going to live on street corners. I'm going to live in schoolyards. I'm going to live wherever I want."

They were taking over communities and we said, "No, it can't happen." We removed those encampments. I drive around this city at night trying to find an encampment so I can wake them up and say, "Come meet me over here." It's because of being that dogmatic, you don't see it in our cities like you see in other cities. That's what I don't want Jordan to see. I don't want Jordan walking down Broadway and seeing a bunch of tents lined up with someone is relieving themselves on the streets. But if we don't put them there, we need to put them in a place like this. This is not an easy conversation. I wish it was.

Deputy Commissioner Daughtry: Mayor, if I could just add one thing, mayor. Last night, he called me at 12:59 to tell me about an encampment. 12:59 AM this morning.

Mayor Adams: Go ahead, ma'am.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor--

Mayor Adams: How are you?

Question: Nice to see you.

Mayor Adams: Good to see you.

Question: Just a follow-up very briefly. I think the issue that we are discussing is the sighting of these locations adjacent to elementary schools. This is not just one, this is now two. They're both what we are considering low barrier shelters where– three, but low barrier shelters where the one on 83rd street, there's active drug use because what Ms. Park is describing as meeting people where they are, we have syringes being used inside. I toured the facility because this is part of the community. You want to make sure that we are engaging with the people running the shelters.

The fact is that these were being built because we wanted to address the unsheltered population in our community. That is not happening. What you can see that walking up and down the Upper West side, I think actually the unsheltered population has grown. That is a really a deep concern for all of us. On 59th Street as an anesthesiologist, I'm very concerned about the idea of a Suboxone clinic. Yes, of course, we want to have narcotics being addressed for anyone who has an addiction, there's no debate on bringing these clinics to communities and whether or not they will also bring drug dealers. They will also bring crime.

Just take one walk to Harlem. I think though that community can tell you what has happened when methadone clinics open. That is just unfortunately what happens when these clinics do open. The concerns of the community are real. Unfortunately what I see is a lot of gaslighting from DHS. I really would hope that a more honest conversation can happen around the types of shelters opening and where they're opening. I also just wanted to address what you said–

Mayor Adams: I want to go to the Harlem piece. You're right. When I walked up and down 125th Street, they had all of these state city, all these clinics opening and dropping everyone off at 125th Street and Lexington Avenue.

We went out there around 2:00 AM in the morning. The bus comes from the shelter, drop people off there. It's just really all of those clinics are opening and your concerns are real. Please don't feel that at any time we are saying that you're concerned about your children, your families, the stability. I'm with you. No one wants that disorder. We want to make sure we find an orderly way to do it. We don't think that you are trying to not understand the reality we are dealing with. I'm with you.

Question: It's a huge profit business, by the way. Yes. They make a lot of money off of this.

Commissioner Wasow Park: On the 83rd Street site, before coming to this meeting, I talked to my team, I'd asked about feedback that we'd gotten. I didn't get that. Now I've heard it. I'm going to take it back. I'm going to follow-up on the specifics of the site. It is not okay that we are not running an operation that is being a good neighbor and we will absolutely take that back. I hear it. I believe that shelters can and should and will be good neighbors. It is our job at DHS to make that happen.

This is a story that I have told to other people actually at a group of other Upper West siders when I was meeting with them about one of the sites. I like to run. When I need to run and it's five o'clock in the morning and I'm by myself, the route that I go takes me right by a shelter. There's light, there's activity, there is a security guard. I think activity in a neighborhood is a good thing. Having buildings occupied, that there's adequate security, that we are doing our job. That is important. I hear the feedback that you've given, and I will take it back.

Mayor Adams: Thank you. Here are the takeaways because we have to do short term, we have to do middle term. We have to do long-term. The takeaways from what I'm hearing is the NYCHA incident, making sure that we're going back doing good old fashioned verticals and what have you. Identify some of those streets that were shared with us. The chief and his team they're going to go there and we have to do observation. It shouldn't be a visible disorder. The commissioner heard some of the concerns you raised around the smoking, around some of the other issues that I think are important.

We heard you, and there to be a real combination of how do we have all of our agencies that engage because if you have a shelter on your block, I was meeting with some folks out in Clinton Hill, DSNY must do a good job to keep outside clean. Everyone must be engaged. The Police Department, Molly's team, everyone must be engaged. If we're going to burden the community with a shelter, all the agencies must be in place to make sure that that place is kept clean, lack of disorder, and holding it down right.

Now here's my only ask. Get the judges in the room. Get the lawmakers in the room. Just as you did with me, it's unfortunate that when you call me, I come. There's a chief judge. We have a chief judge in the state. Reach out to that chief judge and state that we're concerned about some of this reentry, this constant revolving door in our criminal justice system. We want to hear the judges. They're never in the room to talk about how we're doing this. Why is a person arrested twice for gun let out again to carry another gun? They needed to respond to that. This is a powerful group of people. Upper West Side is the number one voting bloc of Democrats in the country. In the country. Number one.

If you're number one, when you call them to come, they need to be here. Then you need to do an analysis at all of your electeds. Do you know How Many Stops Act, do you know that cost us $1.4 million in overtime? We need to be asking folks, "Why did you vote for that?" We need to be asking folks about the race, the age, and the number of young people that are now getting caught up and carrying guns. During the '70s, they used to give drugs to young people because they know they wouldn't be charged. What they're doing now, the bad guys, they're telling the young people, "Carry the gun because you're going to be in and out." Young people are saying to us when they get arrested, "I'm going to be out in a couple of hours."

So we need to hold everyone accountable on the criminal justice system. There are two parts of the criminal justice system that we don't even hear from. Who's making our laws? Who's deciding when that person stands in front of them in the courtroom? They need to be in the room, and they should be in full meeting with the lawmakers and have them sit down in the strategy of impacting the job of these men and women who are up here keeping our cities safe. The prerequisite to prosperity is public safety. I said that on the campaign trial. I'm living through that right now as the mayor. We must be safe. Thank you for coming out tonight.

Commissioner Kreizman: I just want to take the time to thank Tiffany Brown, our Manhattan Director, for helping put this together. I know the mayor has to run to another event. Again, like the mayor said, this is the 58th community conversations because the mayor goes around to all communities.