Office Of The Mayor Of New York City: Transcript: Mayor De Blasio Appears On Inside City Hall

Press release from Office of the Mayor of New York City:

July 12, 2021

Errol Louis: Welcome back to Inside City Hall. As we mentioned before the break, Eric Adams, and other City leaders from around the country met with President Biden today to talk about ways to curb an uptick in gun violence. This comes as our city has seen a spike in shootings, with three teenagers killed in separate shootings over the weekend. Mayor de Blasio joins me now from the Blue Room inside City Hall to talk about all of that and more. Welcome, good to see you, Mr. Mayor.  

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good to you, Errol. How are you doing tonight?  

Louis: Very well. Thank you. I wanted to start with this tragedy that we've been reporting on. Four teenage boys were shot over the weekend, three of them were killed. What is your message to communities who find this violence intolerable? 

Mayor: That we've got a lot to do, but we're moving constantly in the right direction. We've had many more gun arrests than literally any time in 25 years. We are re-bonding police and community and really powerful ways and investing in community-based solutions to violence. We saw – we Commissioner Shea and I announced this last week – the beginning of some real big changes, some real reductions in what we've seen with shootings and homicides. But we’ve got a long way to go. We're trying to overcome the perfect storm of everything that got unleashed around this country with COVID, but we have the tools and we're going to keep applying them, that's the bottom line. 

Louis: Does the City, Mr. Mayor, have a response team for the trauma that people in these neighborhoods, especially young people, are now experiencing? It strikes me that if this was a school shooting, we would rush counselors into the area, we would craft a message for the kids, we would check in on them and so forth. What do we do in a case like this?  

Mayor: It's a great question, Errol. I think it's an area where we've got do more. I mean, I know locally by supporting the Cure Violence Movement and the Crisis Management System, we've been able to do a lot to provide community folks who are trained to support other folks who go through that trauma. But we want to get our mental health teams as deeply into communities after situations like this as possible. It's you're right, with schools, I think we've gotten to a point where, thank God, we have really extraordinary people who can provide support to kids if, God forbid, anyone goes through this. But it's an area where we've got to do more. I mean, I think everything related to mental health it's become clear to us there’s so much trauma as a result of COVID and all the aftereffects, including the violence. That's why very importantly, for example, we're screening all kids, literally, all our public school kids for mental health challenges when they come back in September. I think that much broader approach is going to be needed in the months and years ahead as we come out of COVID.  

Louis: Yeah, and some of that I would imagine would need to be keyed into what some of these kids have seen. I mean, if they – you know, if they assume that they are not going to get any help, that they're going to then, you know, maybe get with a group, figuring out how to protect themselves, or simply hide from the streets. I mean, neither of those things is healthy. This was a big point of debate actually in the primary for mayor.  

Mayor: Yeah. Look, for our kids, we've got to give them positive options. We've got to show them that there's a way forward and a lot of that will be done in school communities with schools coming back, thank God. That's the best delivery mechanism we have. But this summer we're going to be doing a lot. We just announced the Saturday Night Lights initiative. We started as last weekend – 100 gyms are going to be open around the city on Saturday nights to give kids a positive place to go. That's a collaboration between the NYPD and Department of Community and Youth Services and Youth Development and local organizations. And that's the kind of thing, like giving kids positive options, making mental health services available – we've got to do all of that constantly this summer, and this next school year, but then beyond. I think these kinds of investments are the way of the future. Certainly, when we just went through the budget with the City Council, that's where the Council has had their major, major focus on summer youth employment, for example – it's the highest it's ever been for this summer, which is great. But we – I think you're right, kids have gone through a lot of trauma and the answer to it has to be both the mental health support, but also the positive options.  

Louis: Let me ask you about this thing we've all reported on with Eric Adams, going to the White House today to participate with mayors of other cities and talking with the White House and with top administration officials about ways to deal with the violence. I just can't see this as anything but a calculated snub of you and of your administration. 

Mayor: No, of course not, Errol. Look, Eric Adams, who’s someone who's spent over 20 years as a police officer. He has something very particular to offer. I don't have the whole roster of the meeting, but my understanding it was a few mayors, it was police officials, it was some community activists. This was not a gathering for mayors from all across the country. It was a very select group. But I think it makes sense, that here's the Democratic nominee. Obviously, Joe Biden wants to connect with him on that level, but someone who really brings something very particular and helpful to the debate over gun violence and how to address it.  

Louis: I mean, he left the NYPD in 2006. It's not like he's – you know, I mean, that's a couple of administrations ago, and the techniques and everything else are far beyond anything that he would have seen when he was there, right?  

Mayor: But he’s – look, he's the Borough President of one of the biggest counties in the country. He's the Democratic nominee for mayor for the next term. I think it – when you look at it, it's not mysterious. It makes a lot of sense that they would want to engage him. 

Louis: Earlier today you said that federal assistance would be welcome. What would you like the White House or the Justice Department to do for New York?  

Mayor: Look, what I think we need more help on is keeping guns from coming here to begin with. And, you know, we have a great partnership going between the NYPD and the ATF that's been very productive. And I think the Biden administration is, you know, taking a lot of the right steps address the crisis of the proliferation of guns in this country. But the more they can do, the more aggressive they can be, the more they can beef up the efforts of the ATF, disrupt gun shipments into this city, every single step helps. I mean, look, there are too many guns here right now, but if they're not being replenished constantly, it would help us immensely. So, that's the piece that the federal government and only the federal government can do effectively.  

Louis: My impression of the iron pipeline – I haven't researched this deeply – is that the guns come two, three and four at a time, that it's not necessarily going to be, you know, an 18-wheeler full of weapons where you can disrupt guns in that way. It's somebody's cousin, somebody's friend, and they kind of go down and make a bunch of straw purchases or by some other means launder them into a car and then just drive the car up I-95. 

Louis: Here in New York, I was under the impression – I seem to remember this from, I believe, the third term of the Bloomberg administration, that there was a State law that had mandatory – pretty serious punishment if you were found with an illegal firearm. I’m wondering whatever became of that. We have district attorneys now, or nominees for district attorney who were talking about not necessarily invoking those kinds of laws or imposing those kind of stiff penalties, doing some investigation about why somebody might've had the gun and whose gun was it and all of this kind of stuff as opposed to making it so that these things are like radioactive, that whatever else happens, if you were found with a gun you will go to prison. Is that no longer on the agenda?  

Mayor: Well, I think for sure – let's separate the two pieces. Using a gun should lead to very profound consequences and that doesn't enough of the time. Carrying a gun, I agree with you, is unacceptable on its face. So, I want to first see more follow through on when a gun is actually used. And there's more work to be done. You're right, different DA's handle it differently. I think there's more work to do in terms of refining our laws. But, in the end, there has to be consequences, first and foremost, for using a gun and even for just having a gun illegally. There has to be more of a culture of consequence.  

Louis: Okay. Let's take a break. Stand by, Mr. Mayor. We'll be back with the Mayor in just a minute. Stay with us. 

[…] 

Louis: We are back Inside City Hall. I’m once again joined by Mayor de Blasio, who is joining us from the Blue Room. Mr. Mayor, I wanted to talk about the coronavirus. The City's back open, most restrictions on mask and on capacity, they've all been eased. At the same time, we see cases slowly creeping back up and we keep hearing about this Delta variant. What are your health advisers telling you about the transmissibility of the variant and or whether or not vaccinated New Yorkers should be returning to wearing masks? 

Mayor: We've talked about a lot, including today. The bottom line is – yeah, the Delta variant’s a real challenge for us, because it is very transmissible. But it is also addressed by vaccination. Bottom line is vaccination. 9.6 million doses as of today. We're going to keep going. I think we've shown that, you know, every single day we can get thousands and thousands of more people vaccinated. We've got to deepen that effort, just keep it going, keep building. That's the best way to address the Delta variant. We also see, thankfully, really low levels of hospitalization. And that's the interesting kind of X-Factor here, Errol – yeah, we've seen some increase in cases and positivity, but we've also seen hospitalization rates continue to go lower. So, that speaks to the power of vaccination, for sure, particularly among older New Yorkers. So, I do not anticipate a change in the current rules or restrictions. I do think it's imperative that we get more people vaccinated. 

Louis: You are still calling on City students to wear masks in classrooms when they return this fall, that's despite the CDC guidance, which is kind of moving in the other direction, at least for the fall. What's going to be the controlling decision in that case? 

Mayor: Look, we act on this one out of an abundance of caution. We've had incredible success in our schools. We set a gold standard of health and safety standards that really worked. By the end of the school year – literally, the last days of testing COVID was almost non-existent in our schools. So, we've got a good formula. We want to stay pretty close to it. It'll be a different reality in September for several reasons. There's new information that tells us there's some new ways to do things, but, for now, our assumption is everyone wear masks. When we get closer up to opening day of school, we might alter that, or, obviously, CDC guidance might continue to evolve. But, for now, we feel it's a formula that's been working, let's stick with it for the foreseeable future. 

Louis: So, that's for the kids, you can tell them what to do. What about teachers, administrators, building staff who are not vaccinated? Are you going to have a way to detect who has been vaccinated or will this be on the honor system? 

Mayor: Look, I think that goal right now, because you do have a mix of vaccinated and unvaccinated folks in a school setting, is that everyone would keep masks on to the maximum extent possible. Different, perhaps, for example, when you're outside. But, again, I think we've got two full months until school begins. We like the approach we've been taking. We want to stick with it for now. If we choose to amend it based on new information, new data, okay, great. But, for now, I want to stick as close to what we're doing now as possible. 

Louis: And there’s – I guess you're assuming on some level that some percentage of adult staff in these buildings are not going to get vaccinated just because – not because they can't, but they just choose not to. 

Mayor: Yeah, and that's true across the society. But I think it's fair to say with our school staff vaccination rates have been higher than with the general population, but there still are some people not yet willing. I hope we can over time convince them, obviously. I do think time is on our side in terms of people seeing the positive effects of vaccination and seeing how a few of the negatives are. But there's always going to be some people in each group who aren't willing and we need to keep that in mind. 

Louis: Let me switch topics to infrastructure. We saw these storms last week. We've got some more this week. The whole world, in fact, saw videos of New Yorkers dealing with flooding and failing infrastructure, flooded subway stations, treacherous highways. There's billions of dollars that are being sent by the federal government and the latest stimulus. Is any of that going to help us deal with the problem of this aging physical infrastructure? 

Mayor: By definition, yes. But I would say that most of the stimulus up to now, Errol, has really been about bringing back our city, bringing back our economy, making sure our core services to the people the city were strong, bringing back our schools, you know, all the health care costs. The piece we need is that infrastructure plan. Now, I'm hopeful. I mean, there's obviously been real progress. And I think President Biden, if anyone knows how to get an infrastructure bill through the Congress, it's him. That's going to be the piece that's exciting to me in terms of addressing some of these core problems. 

Louis: But even if you have, you know, X-billions of dollars, is there a plan here at the local level to somewhat waterproof some of the subway entrances or deal with what happens on the FDR every time it rains hard? 

Mayor: Well, those are two different realities. I mean, we have – look, we have a very substantial capital budget right now, even without the stimulus, because we know we have to keep fixing New York City. It's an aging city, and wonderful city, but it needs constant upkeep. So, our capital budget is very aggressive about addressing our infrastructure needs. Now, if you bring a lot more federal money into the equation, whole new ballgame. From the City perspective, yeah, there are places like the FDR that definitely needs some work and that would give us some of the money to do it. Subways are the responsibility, obviously, of the MTA. I would hope this would be a priority for them when they get infrastructure dollars. But if we get a serious infrastructure package, it's going to allow us to go at a lot of these basic things that for years could be attended to. It could be a very, very important moment for this city. 

Louis: Would that include the Housing Authority? 

Mayor: Oh, by definition. Look, one of the big discussions and one of the big fights – I know Congress Member Nydia Velazquez has been the leader on this – is to include public housing in the definition of infrastructure, absolutely must be. Now, the original proposal by the Biden administration, noble though it was, put enough money in for the entire country that was literally exactly the amount we needed just for New York City, $40 billion. So, my hope and my prayer is that as these different pieces of legislation move, the public housing piece of it really gets built up. We need that. But it is core infrastructure and so many people depend on it. And I believe that's the direction that the Congress and the President want to take. 

Louis: Yeah, I mean, it's sort of an endless list. I mean, I didn't want to ask you about them each individually, but I mean, the report that City courthouses in the non-public areas have, you know, mold and all kinds of different ventilation problems and other kinds of issues. It just seems to me that, you know, somehow this doesn't make its way into the capital plans with the urgency that some of these problems require. 

Mayor: Oh, I wouldn't say that. I would say there's a lot of problems and not enough money to go around. I mean, when you look at what we're focused on in that capital plan, it is about the most basic infrastructure in the city. It's about fighting climate change, which obviously is going to be the existential crisis. It's about our health care infrastructure. We still have a lot to do with our schools. No, there's a lot of sense of urgency. It's just, sadly, we need a lot more money to really cover all the things that matter. And we'll make choices within whatever amount of money we have, this is what we do every year with the budget. But for the first time, in a long time – I remember I got involved in 2015 fighting for a new transportation and highway bill, and, you know, we were able to get a few tens of billions more in for the whole nation. A bunch of us mayors, bipartisan group from around the country, we thought that was a great victory back then, even to get a relatively modest amount nationally, at least it was forward motion. Now, you're talking about an entire massive infrastructure program. This is something we've needed for literally decades, and it will be the first time in our lifetimes that it’s going to be possible. This could be a transcendent moment.  

Louis: Okay. And you'll be – I take it, you'll be involved in that. 

Mayor: You know it. And if we can get those resources, we have plenty of good projects to apply them to right away, I assure you.  

Louis: Okay. All right. We'll leave it there for now and we will see you again next week. Thanks, Mr. Mayor.  

Mayor: Take care, Errol.  

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This press release was produced by Office of the Mayor of New York City. The views expressed here are the author’s own.