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Fred Kreizman, Mayor’s Commissioner for Public Affairs: Ladies and gentlemen, let’s get started. I just want to welcome everyone here today for the mayor’s talk to the community about public safety in north queens. First, we just want to thank everyone for coming. We know it’s raining, which keeps some people from walking normally, but it’s important to the mayor. The mayor wanted to fix everything. He has a police superintendent at each table, a director or superintendent, a member of the city hall who takes notes so that we can discuss any ideas you bring to the town hall, and key agency personnel as agency coordinators at each table. The part of this thing has three parts. This is the first part. There’s Q&A cards as well on the table in case your question is asked to the dais. There’s Q&A cards as well on the table in case your question is asked to the dais. There are also question and answer cards on the table in case your question is asked on a raised platform. There are also question and answer cards on the table in case you ask questions from the podium. Then we went to as many tables as possible and asked questions directly to the mayor and the podium. The highlight of the show is that the Mayor, County President Donovan Richards will be speaking, and we’ll have Attorney Melinda Katz speaking. thank you very much.
MAYOR ERIC ADAMS: Thank you. Many thanks to the commissioner and the whole team here. We would really like to hear from you directly. This is my steering group and we have to discuss these issues in the five districts. We want to keep doing this for the next three years and three months to make sure we can stay engaged and connected. This is the best part of the job because I prefer to speak to you directly rather than through the tabloids or through other people who want to explain what we’re doing. We want to rely on our records. We believe that we are really moving the city in the right direction. Here are some real Ws and we want to talk about them and share them with you, but with your opinion on the ground. It’s about quality of life. It is about this direct communication and interaction.
I want to thank our congresswoman Lynn Shulman for being here. Glad to meet you. We have a graduate, D. A. Katz and her son, who attended the school. Councilor Donovan Richards is also here as mayor… (Laughter) He said, “Did you demote me?” And here was Borough President Donovan Richards. I went to Queens this morning – you were stealing my pockets, man. (Laughter) But we want to tell the D.A. and the D.C. and then we want to hear from you directly. GOOD?
Melinda Katz, Queens: Good evening everyone. I want to thank Mayor Adams for being here. I thought you chose this school because I went here. I grew up a few blocks from here, as many of you know. This is my alma mater, this is… Hunter is on his way here now.
I want to thank Mayor Adams for his frequent visits to Queens. At our last town hall, Richards County President and I joked that Mayor Adams was actually running for President of Queens County, and we had to worry about it. But I’m here to support the mayor’s initiative, to support his work to ensure public safety. I want to start right now, just to tell you how sad I am, and of course, I’m just acknowledging the loss of Lieutenant Alison Russo-Erlin. As you know, we’re handling this case in my office. We can’t talk about the details, but the whole city sympathizes with this family and the woman who dedicated her adult life to serving the community.
I really think that’s one of the reasons it’s so great to have city hall meetings. There must be trust in our system. There must be confidence in public safety. We need to know that we want to hold people accountable for what they do in their cities. Accountability can mean prosecuting delinquent drivers, but it can also mean mental health services and workforce development, and making sure drug rehab exists as a distraction program. Most importantly, make sure today’s youth are not picking up weapons that we just picked up from the street yesterday.
Mayor Adams and the city have really taken the initiative to make sure we do this. I have to thank Michael Whitney, who was my deputy head of (inaudible) homicide. He’s leading the prosecution of a man who attacked a woman on the Howard Beach subway. As you know, a criminal complaint was filed last week. We are in the same situation now. Hold people accountable for important city responsibilities. But, Mayor Adams, you deserve to be commended for the initiatives you’ve taken with our anti-violence programs, our mental health, and our city’s youth. Thank you all for being here tonight.
Richards County President: Thank you. I want to thank the mayor, he really cares about what’s happening around this area and it’s so important to make these special public town halls. Not only to enter into a dialogue, but also to reaffirm the commitment of his administration. So I want to thank all the agency leaders here, who I’m sure will hear from the shy North Queens tonight about places that could be better.
But I want to start by thanking the mayor. Every time he comes to Queens, he says, he brings in a big check. We often say that public safety is a shared responsibility. what does it mean? This means that the driving force behind crime – in many cases, if you look at what is happening in Northern Queens – is also poverty. And you can’t get out of poverty with a prison. So investments like the $130 million he has given to my office over the last 19 months will help us, especially as we enter the new year and start to see the reduction in crime that we are focusing on.
I just want to focus on mental health because that’s what we see too. Obviously when you see what’s happening on the subway, when you hear when you pick up a newspaper or read the news, you often see people in distress, traumatized people who never get their really needed services, and then a pandemic hits. And these problems have only gotten worse. We are following this closely with the mayor, but our office is also leading the effort to make Queens a health center. On October 11, we will announce BetterHelp, a $2 billion initiative to provide free counseling and therapy. We’re going to be working with community organizations all over Queens to really try to get to the heart of the problem early so we don’t read about people who get hurt 30 or 40 years later.
Finally, I want to thank the mayor. You might have seen him on the news, we were with him, I think it was midnight, driving trucks through Queens. I would like to thank the North Queen’s patrol, who I know will also take this initiative. So, I want to take it easy because we want to hear from you. Let me conclude by saying that we will never tolerate hate crime in our community, Queens is the most diverse county in the world with 190 countries, 350 languages ​​and dialects. That’s what this room is. The people on the ground are the ones most likely to, and often have solutions based on our communities that move them forward.
So I want to thank each and every one of you for coming. We still have a lot of work to do to build a more fair and just Queens. And it all starts with the fact that each of us is here. Thank you all.
B: Good evening. Good evening, mister mayor. Good evening, Admin. The question on our table is: what are the plans of the city’s agencies to work together to alleviate systemic poverty, the effects of inflation, and ultimately improve safety and empowerment?
Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright for Strategic Initiatives: Good evening. I’m Sheena Wright, Deputy Mayor for Strategic Initiatives. The mayor instructed the government to unite all departments. We formed the Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, which includes representatives from all New York City agencies. The task of this working group is to develop a comprehensive upstream strategy.
what does it mean? It’s about identifying areas with the highest crime rates, analyzing poverty rates, analyzing homelessness, analyzing educational outcomes, analyzing small businesses, and bringing each agency together to really target and direct resources to provide coordinated support to this community. .
So the working group worked hard. We work with some other non-profit organizations. We can’t wait, and we will be one of the followers of these meetings, to have a joint program on the ground in those specific areas with the highest crime rate, so that we all work together. But again and again, you don’t just refer to it downstream. You must swim against the current. All of this contributes to the results we are seeing in public safety and in all institutions. That’s why we’re all here, focused on this.
Question: Mr. Mayor, good evening. The question in the second table is how would you deal with the mental health issues caused by COVID, which affects everyone in our city, from our youth to the homeless who are driving crime in New South Wales. Rising crime rates in York City?
Mayor Adams: Dr. Vasan will go into detail about what we are doing. We must connect the dots when we talk about public safety in our cities. I use this word all the time, there are many rivers that feed the sea of ​​violence, and there are two rivers that we want to block. One is the proliferation of guns in our cities, and gun violence is real. Today I spoke with the mayor of Birmingham. All my colleagues, mayors across the country, St. Louis, Detroit, Chicago, Alabama, Carolina, they all saw this incredible increase in gun violence. We have an immediate plan to address this issue, and it is multi-faceted.
But mental health issues, I think firearms and mental illness can have a big impact on our psyches. Walking a block and getting attacked for no reason, what we see in the subway system… it just affects our mental capacity to feel safe. Was talking to Dr. Vasan and our team this weekend. We brought in several mental health professionals to discuss how we can comprehensively address the violence we see coming from people with mental disorders. Michelle Guo was pushed onto the subway tracks and is mentally ill. Several people filmed on the subway in Sunset Park are mentally healthy. Lieutenant Russo was killed and mentally ill. If you just go through scene after scene, you will keep coming up with the same coordination. Even those people that we find with firearms, many of them have mental health problems. Mental health problems are a crisis. We need all our partners to be involved in solving this problem, because the police alone cannot solve it.
This is a revolving door system. Forty-eight percent of the inmates on Rikers Island have mental health problems. Arrest someone, then put him back on the street, take him to the doctor, take him to the hospital, give him medicine for a day, and bring him back until he does something life-threatening. It’s just a bad system. So Dr. Vasant is on a project called Fountain House, so I invited him to join our government because he wants to take a holistic approach to what we need to do to address mental health. Dr. Vasan, could you tell us about some of the things we are going to do?
Ashwin Vasan, Health and Mental Hygiene Commissioner: Absolutely. Thank you. Thanks to the community. Thank you Northern Queens for welcoming me and us into your community. This is a big problem for this administration. We have three main priorities: addressing the youth mental health crisis, addressing the rise in drug overdoses, the mental health crisis behind it all, and addressing the mayor’s event-related crisis of our serious mental illness. Most closely related to what is being described and what you are both asking about. People with severe mental illness, about 300,000 of them in New York, are basically taking their own lives. They may even be among us today. They are just like you and me. They are just sick. A small percentage, really a very small percentage, need help or maybe more support.
But one thing is clear: everyone with a serious mental illness needs three things: they need medical care, they need a home, and they need community. We often work hard on the first two, but don’t think enough about the third. And the third one really keeps people isolated, socially isolated, which can escalate into a crisis and often end up with the events we have seen causing us so much pain and trauma. So, over the next few weeks and months, we will publish our plans for these three key priority areas and really showcase the architecture that we are going to build in this administration over the next few months and years. But this is not our crisis. This is not a crisis that any of us really caused. How we treat people with serious mental illness is generational. We need to get to the root of the crisis. We swim against the current to think not only about emergency care and how people interact, but also why. Social isolation is one of the main causes of the mental health crisis. We will attack him very vigorously. Thank you.
Question: Mr. Mayor, good evening. Thanks again to Board Member Shulman for being with us. Concerns have been raised about the lack of safety on our trains and public transport, especially in our schools. Where are we as a city with our school safety inspectors who would rather work in correctional facilities than in our schools because of the low wages on offer? What can be done to address these inconsistencies?
Mayor Adams: Principal Banks is here, and he likes to keep reminding us that before he became principal, he was a school security officer. You remember during the campaign there were loud voices saying, “We have to get the school guards out of our schools.” It’s clear to me: “No, we’re not like that.” If I were mayor, we wouldn’t be kicking school security specialists out of schools. Our school safety inspectors are still at our school. They are more than just safety. If anyone knows the role of a school safety inspector, then you know that these are the aunts, mothers and grandmothers of these children. These kids love those school security guards. I was in the Bronx with school security collecting clothes for kids who lived in homeless shelters. They know how to respond to early warning signals. They play a vital role in the school community’s efforts to protect the school.
We’re looking at some of the other things that Prime Minister Banksy looks at from a security standpoint, like locking the front door but having the right mechanism so we can open it when we need to. We were lucky enough not to witness real mass shootings across the country, but we are very concerned about the safety of the school security guards. Our goal this contracting season is to really talk about how to compensate for them in different ways, how we can get creative.
I think I managed to convince the former mayor to make the school security officers police officers after I watched them work for two years, and if they have the proper skills to communicate with children, I think this is a great opportunity for them to get a promotion in positions. rank of police officer. This is what I want to revisit. We did this for a short time and it was removed. But I think we need to reconsider this because our school security officers can be good law enforcement officers if we give them the opportunity to do it and give them room to improve by letting them do it.
We have the CUNY system. If they want to go to college, why don’t we take half of their college courses? Our goal is to put them on the path to career advancement, and we want to do this with the help of our school security guards, our traffic police, our hospital police, our personnel police and all law enforcement agencies. a bit of traditional NYPD. Deputy Mayor Banksy is looking at how we can continue to strengthen this. But principal, if you want to speak directly to school security.
David K. Banks, Head of Education: Yes. Thank you Mr Mayor. I think it’s very important for all of us as a community to make sure the school security staff understands that you really care about them. If you follow the media, they get a lot of negative coverage, a lot of people say, “We don’t need them.” As the mayor notes, they are part of the family, an integral part of any school, and they have every reason to ensure the safety of our children. Nothing is more important than the safety of our children. We are fine. Mark Rampersant also came. Mark, get up. Mark is in charge of the city’s school safety department. Trust me, he’s open 24/7 to make sure we’re doing our best.
So I just want to reiterate that the mayor said that we are looking at a number of initiatives, including cameras and a door lock system that we could end up locking the front door with. For now, the front door is left open and guarded by the school’s security staff, but we want to provide a higher level of security in this area as well. So this is what we’re working on. This will require another level of investment. But it’s on the table for us. We think about it when we speak.
We’re in Queens, and a mental patient just out of an orphanage breaks into the school and gets into a fight. Thank God for the school safety inspector, thank God for the director and school help. The three who pushed him to the ground. It could be worse. So, like the mayor, I endure this every day to keep all of our children safe. So, we are working hard to fix all issues. We have increased the number of security personnel, and the mayor is looking for ways to expand careers. But with the ones we have now, whenever I go to any school, I will definitely go straight to the school security and thank them for your service. Thank you for everything you do for them and I encourage you to do the same.
Question: Mr. Mayor, good evening. Our question is: what can you do to empower judges and tougher penalties for repeat offenders?
Mayor Adams: No, don’t get me started. I think my focus on what’s really going on in the four areas of public safety translates to the fact that it’s a team effort. Those of us old enough to remember when we freed the city from crime in the eighties and early nineties were all on the same team. We are all focused, including the media. Everyone is the New York security team. I just don’t feel that way anymore. I feel that for the most part, our police should do it themselves. When you get someone to shoot a cop in the Bronx, then shoot themselves, and the judge says the cop was wrong, the shooter did everything his mother taught him, and he gets arrested. His mother did not allow him to carry weapons.
So I just think there’s a mismatch between what New Yorkers want every day and what every part of the criminal justice system provides. We want our streets to be safe. When we were doing the analysis, Commissioner Corey and the Chief of Police were doing an analysis of the violent criminals. I was shocked to see how many of them were repeat offenders. There is a “catch, release, repeat” system. A small number of bad guys, violent people do not respect our criminal justice system. They made a decision. They can be cruel and they don’t care what we do. We have not responded accordingly. We need to focus on these aggressive minorities. How you get arrested 30-40 times for burglary and then you come back and commit burglary. How do you get caught one day with a gun in your back, another gun in the street, and you’re still going through this system?
We have removed over 5,000 weapons from the streets since January. And the number of militants we’ve taken off the streets just to bring them back. I take my hat off to the police. Even out of frustration, they keep responding and keep working. Thus, judges play a vital role in three aspects. First, they had to eliminate the bottleneck in the system. You have sentencing shooters who are involved in more sentencing shootouts. Why does it take so long to judge someone? They were found guilty, which allowed us to expedite the consideration of the case. Then there is the reluctance to use the power they have. Yes, Albany did us a favor, I’ve said it over and over, but judges still have the authority they need to use to put dangerous people in jail.
We have to eliminate bottlenecks in the system. For the people in prison, they were given too long sentences to serve their sentences and complete these ordeals. So the only way we’re going to do that is by appointing some judges, and I’ll take that into account when I do that. But you raised your voice and made it clear that we need a criminal justice system that protects not criminals, but innocent New Yorkers who are victims of crime. We went back. All the laws passed in Albany over the past few years protect people who commit crimes. You can’t tell me that a law was passed to protect the victims of crime. It’s time to protect innocent New Yorkers, and the judges have a duty to do so. By raising your voice as a public figure, you can send a strong message to those on the bench that we need to start protecting innocent New Yorkers. Yes?
District Attorney Katz: So if I agree with Mayor Adams, the District Attorney and a lot of people around town are saying we’re one of 50 states – one of 50 states – judges have nothing to do with it. community safety at all costs. All we can see is that when someone may not show up for court, it’s a risk of flight. But there are many things we can do. I have to tell you, we do this in Queens, we ask for detention when I think someone should be taken into custody while they are awaiting trial. Now if there’s a DAT for misdemeanors, if there’s pending cases in the DAT, at least now the police can relax a bit and actually make arrests and go through central orders before it ends up back in our courts, which I think is very important. .
Now we can only use collateral. We have increased the use of electronic surveillance in Queens. If someone goes out on bail, especially in those violent crimes where the mayor is absolutely right, many times they get out, it’s a repetition. Do it once and do it again. But the law also changed and we had more power to control these people or subject them to some consequences for repeat theft, like they go to the pharmacy and steal from the shelf, and then there are quality of life problems and they go outside, through system and then back to the pharmacy. Therefore, I think that judicial discretion should also be increased. There must be some consequence of the threat to public safety. I believe that. Here in Queens, that’s exactly what we’re trying to do. Thank you Mr Mayor. I have to tell you that the police department is an incredible partner, taking care every day to protect us in Queens. Eric, Mr. Mayor, you know.
Q: Hello. Good evening, mister mayor. We have too many cuts that compromise our security. Do you plan to use the full service reserves to meet the needs of our students, retirees, the homeless and the homeless?
Mayor Adams: We’re in an economic crisis because dollars don’t come from Wall Street. Historically, we have indeed been a one-dimensional city, and much of our economy has been very dependent on Wall Street. It was a big mistake. We are diversifying in many ways, especially in the technology industry. We are second only to San Francisco and continue to attract new businesses here. But in the next few years, we will face a staggering $10 billion budget deficit. You talk about the difficult choices we have to make. We did something in the first round of the budget, we have a 3% PEG plan to close the gap. I tell all our institutions that we must find better ways to run our government. We are doing it again in this budget cycle to increase PEG, including City Hall.
We had to find a more efficient way, the way you do it every day. Those of you who run a household only spend what you earn. And our expenses far exceed our income. We cannot continue to run our government in this way. We were inefficient. This is an inefficient city. So when you see, people will understand that the contraction means that it sets us up for the future of the dollar, it just won’t be the future. We’ve been able to balance a lot of our law enforcement, our hospitals, we’ve been able to balance them to make sure we don’t run away from security and handle some crises. . We spend money on sanitation because there is nothing worse than a dirty city. We want our new commissioner, Jessica Katz, to keep the city clean and give our police departments, our hospitals and our schools the tools.
Prime Minister Banksy has done a fantastic job, and we’re going to get over the financial cliff with federal money. If we don’t start doing well now, we’re going to have to rely on the city’s already high taxes, the highest, I understand, outside of California. We don’t want to do this. We must spend better, we must manage your taxes better. We didn’t. My job as mayor and our OMB is to make sure we look at every agency and ask, are you making a quality product for city taxpayers? You don’t get your money’s worth. You don’t get your money’s worth. We want to make sure your money is worth it and taxes are being spent properly.
Any discounts we make at any establishment will not affect our services. We have not cut staff or reduced our services. We say to our commissioners who are with me today, look at your institutions, find funding and continue to produce better products in a more efficient way. We are incorporating technology into the way we run our cities, we keep track of more of what we do. We look at key performance indicators. We are rethinking how cities can be run more effectively. You deserve. You deserve. You pay taxes, you have to deliver the product you paid for, but you don’t get the product you deserve. I strongly believe in this and I know that we can do better along the way.
Question: Mr. Mayor, good evening. One of the issues we discussed was the feeling of this order associated with bicycles. There were bicycles on the sidewalks, crowds of dirty bicycles on the streets, and robbers of motorcycles and electric bicycles. There is general agreement that there is a lack of enforcement in this area. What are people doing about this problem?
MAYOR ADAMS: I really hate this, Chief Madre, maybe you want to reconsider what you did with our motorcycles, illegal bikes, dirt bikes. Chief Maddry and his team are working on something. And interestingly, we learned from the traffic police at that time that the people who crossed the gate also committed crimes, robberies and other crimes. That’s why we stopped them from jumping over the turnstiles. We learned that a lot of people who have these illegal SUVs, we catch them at gunpoint, they want to rob. So we are proactive. So, sir, why don’t you tell them what you are doing about this initiative?
Police Department Patrol Captain Geoffrey Maddry: Yes, sir. Thank you Mr Mayor. good evening. Queen. North Queens, thanks. really fast. When I took over as chief of patrol in May when I first rode out of the area, the first things I thought of were dirt bikes, illegal ATVs and SUVs. They flew down Woodhaven Boulevard towards Rockaway and terrorized Rockaway. We immediately started looking for a solution to our ATV problem. We know we made a lot of mistakes. It took us some time to learn how to catch them, how to corner them, how to do it in a safe way. Because as much as we want to catch them, we still have to keep everyone safe. But we are working with our road department. The road transport units began to train our patrol units, we started to succeed.
This summer alone, we received over 5,000 bikes. Just summer. More than 5000 bicycles, ATVs, mopeds. I think we are on track to get over 10,000 bikes this year. But even though we accept them, they seem to keep coming. Not only do they terrorize the streets while driving, we’ve seen a lot of bad guys use them. They use these ATVs and these illegal bikes as getaway vehicles. We have put a lot of effort into this. We have a lot of plans, mainly for the robbery mode and other crime modes that use quad bikes. We are very successful. We grabbed a lot of weapons from our ATVs. So not only do we get bikes, we get illegal guns on the streets, and we take people wanted for other crimes, robbery, grand larceny, whatever.
So it’s still a challenge for us, but we got a lot of help from the community. It’s important that the community let us know where they are most likely to be found. Because when we know where they meet, we can catch them and take a lot of their bikes. Many residents of the village told us which gas stations they would go to and where they would park their cars. Sometimes we can go to places where they hide bikes, we can go into our legal department, the sheriff’s department, we can go to these places and pick up the bikes brilliantly that way. So we’ll keep going. We will continue to work to keep bicycles off the streets. Again, we need your help to make this happen. Therefore, when you see something like this, please contact the head of the local area, non-commissioned officer, public relations.
They provided information to the precincts, and all the precincts, all the districts, and Queens participated in the operation. I think that’s why we’ve been so successful. So we’ll keep doing that and make sure we’re going to target those illegal bikes. I just want people to know that people who legally ride motorcycles, licensed motorcycles and the like, we don’t take these motorcycles. If we see violations, in most cases we warn them, because this is not part of our task. Our focus is on illegal street bikes, illegal ATVs that shouldn’t be on the roads. so thank you.
MAYOR ADAMS: And ATVs, SUVs, they’re not allowed on our streets. Therefore, we focus on them, we have a holistic approach. Quite frankly, the problem with our city is that the police are being told not to do their job. I mean, we see it, we know about these illegal SUVs that appear and drive through the streets, but no one has come out with a statement that this is unacceptable. Our cities have become a place where there are no rules. I mean, let’s legalize open urination. Like anything you want to do in this city, do it. No, I didn’t. I didn’t do it. I refuse to do it. So all the resistance and all the screaming, you know what, Eric wanted to be tough on everyone.
No, every day in New York is worth living in a clean and safe environment. You are entitled to it. Therefore, we volunteered that running up and down Queens Road and driving on the sidewalk in these three-wheeled SUVs is enough. We must learn. They are smarter than us. We learned, we implemented our initiatives. We started getting calls from elected officials telling them where they were mobilizing. And I don’t know if you heard what he said, 5000 bikes.