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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. As the season turns in our area, the high temperature today will only be in the 70s, they say, not the 80s or 90s. Let's remember to take note of something that happened this summer before we take it for granted and it gets too far back in the rearview mirror. In the season when shootings and murders traditionally go up in New York City, remember all those dire warnings as summer was approaching? They actually went way down, like really a lot down.

In the month of August, there were 27 murders in New York City, the NYPD reports. 27 murders compared to 51 last August and compared to 34 murders in August 2019. That's right. There were seven fewer murders in August of this year than the August before the pandemic and before the bail reform law took effect. Obviously, 27 murders is 27 too many, but we always have to compare in historical context, right?

Same thing with shootings. Shootings in the city declined 30% from last year to what they're calling the fifth fewest for the month of August since the '90s according to the stats as published on patch.com. Other categories of crime did go up. Robberies, burglary, and grand larceny, for example, were each up more than 30% compared to August of last year. We'll talk about why some things are going up, some things are going down.

The Adams administration's main focus, which has been on gun violence, is either working or it's an amazingly lucky coincidence. Here's the mayor yesterday on one of those victories, the third safest Labor Day weekend since they started keeping track with the CompStat system in the '90s, they're saying, and no homicides around the West Indian Day Parade and J'ouvert celebration on Labor Day in Brooklyn, for which the mayor thanked the NYPD and other city agencies.

Mayor Eric Adams: They were willing to do their jobs in coming together and operating as a team to make our city safe. Because of that, we saw a celebration without the traditional violence that was attached. We walked through the parkway. During the day, people stated, "We were expecting to read the headlines what we traditionally heard and what we traditionally saw." It wasn't there.

Brian Lehrer: It wasn't there. Also, and maybe related, pedestrian traffic deaths were down 11% compared to 2019 and bicycles deaths were down 35% according to the city's data. Let's talk about crime in New York City. Pedestrian and bicycle safety in New York City, crime versus fear of crime in New York City, and what's causing what with Daily News columnist and Daily Beast senior editor Harry Siegel, also co-host of the podcast FAQ NYC. Hi, Harry. Welcome back to WNYC.

Harry Siegel: Hey, Brian. Thanks for having me. I'm now, by the way, an editor at The City having left The Daily Beast.

Brian Lehrer: Oh. Well, congratulations. The City is an amazing publication, one of our most important local news organizations here in New York City, let me say, even though it's just a few years old compared to some of the venerable ones and another not-for-profit news organization like us, I'm happy to say. They're doing amazing work, so congratulations.

Harry Siegel: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: For some context about you, you were last here, not that long ago, saying, "Don't downplay the reality of crime in the city." You have your doubts about bail reform as it stands, so you're no apologist. You're no slouch for being a critic of whatever status quo was causing crime in New York City is causing crime in New York City. What do you make of the significant summer drop in murders and shootings and traffic deaths?

Harry Siegel: Brian, there were 28 murders in January. There were 27 murders in August. That's pretty incredible. I've been going back and I'm only 20 years back so far. I'm going to go further, but I don't think there have ever been fewer murders in August than in January. Just as the heat goes up, more of this happens. The Adams administration, I think, deserves really significant credit for that. That said, my two real caveats here are, one, the divergence of the murder and shooting numbers from all of the other numbers, which are up significantly.

10% to 40% rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary is problematic and actually goes back to a whole series of questions about broken windows policing. I think even as the city is getting safer in terms of fatal incidents, including murders as well as pedestrian and bike accidents as you mentioned and that's wonderful, really cuts against having a widespread or common sense, if you will, perception of safety and what people are registering with their own eyes if they feel nervous taking the trends and all that. That's the first caveat.

The second is that Adams held that press conference you played the clip from at One Police Plaza. Top police officials were there, the fire, and other departments. I'll note that, and I think this is telling, since at least 2014, those press conferences have been held monthly rain or shine, good news or bad news. Right now, we have, I think, a top line of very good news with some continuing, disturbing trends below that, that maybe the NYPD can pursue guns and cut down on the number of encountered outside murders significantly.

That's wonderful news, but maybe they can do that without creating a broader sense of safety and without removing the robberies, assaults, burglaries, and other things that New Yorkers reasonably are fearful of and that have continued to go up and are up really dramatically from 2019 and the pre-pandemic numbers. Right now, the administration is only answering questions or is only presenting this news in a forum where they're answering questions where the mayor is there when there's good news.

I don't think you can consistently do it that way and remain credible. All that said, this decline in murders and shootings is really impressive. It points to success for controlled but aggressive policing that is specifically targeting guns. The challenge for that going forward is with licensed guns coming to New York and the state and the city doing everything they can to keep that process constitutional but as slow and controlled as possible, that's going to make it much trickier to go and look for guns when many people who have them are allowed to be carrying them and when the city is not using pretextual stops like all those marijuana arrests of young, mostly Black and Latino men.

Some of those were just abusive. Maybe a handful of them were necessary, but mostly, that was actually an attempt to dragnet the men who are most likely the young men and sometimes boys who were most likely to be carrying guns. That set of tools doesn't exist in the way it did, and so there are challenges going forward. The mayor is taking a victory lap and he deserves one. I hope he shows up when it's not just good news to account for what's happening.

Brian Lehrer: Of course, when you talk about more people carrying guns legally in the city, you're referring to the recent Supreme Court ruling that says, basically, if you have a concealed carry permit from Texas, that means you can carry your concealed weapon on the streets of New York. It was a New York-specific suit, though it applies nationally as well. Well, you gave us a lot there, Harry, to dig into some of the specifics of good news, bad news, the way the mayor conducts communication with the public.

Let's dig into some of it, but let me first invite our listeners to call in. Listeners, give us a report from your neighborhood. Do you feel safer than you did six months ago or whatever point in time you want to compare to? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Looking at this from a 360 lens as we try to do, do you feel safer from criminals? Do you feel less safe from criminals because these other categories besides shootings and murders are going up?

Also, do you feel any less safe from the police, those of you who feel vulnerable yourselves, or maybe that your kids are vulnerable to being harassed or unjustly arrested by the police now that people are being put in jail again at a higher rate than in the De Blasio administration and the Adams administration is focusing again on smaller crimes? Mass incarceration, mass amounts of crime, give us your reports from your neighborhood or anything you want to ask Harry Siegel, now with the nonprofit news organization, The City. 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer.

Harry, in those Labor Day remarks that we played a clip from or remarks about Labor Day, the mayor credited the NYPD, the transportation department, and the Department of Buildings. I think your first answer made it sound like it was actions by the government as opposed to larger societal forces like more people employed and more people resuming their normal pre-pandemic lifestyles or other non-governmental factors. I think, by now, we believe that when crimes started going down in the '90s after decades on the rise, it wasn't just the NYPD. It was that things were changing in society as well. Do you have clues to pick those things apart?

Harry Siegel: It's incredibly complicated. There's still not a consensus with the '90s, for instance, where, plainly, the broader societal factors playing a role and plainly policing tactics are playing a role. This, by the way, explains why New York City, where you don't have economic or demographic trends that would account for this, is a vastly outsized share of the national drop in crime in that period.

What really stuck out to me in Adams' remarks was while he's at One Police Plaza with the NYPD and crediting the NYPD, he's also taking pains to talk about the things he was treating not mostly as policing issues. He was talking about how when you have double-parked cars around the parade and that's a big issue, instead of sending in the police, it's traffic agents. Same thing when there's loud noise and big parties and those are disruptive, and trying to have effective policing with a much wider impression or print on the entire city.

In the 1990s, the only other city that had close to as dramatic a drop as New York, where policing seemed to be driving that interestingly enough, was Boston, which really focused on expanding community relations, having the city as a whole and its police department working closely with clergy to have a better relationship with the community and a significantly wider hand.

For a time, that was really successful. For various reasons, Boston shifted its approach and that fell out of vogue. It's interesting to see Adams pointing to that in both policy and his public gesturing. I think there's actually a lot to recommend that approach. The police, of course, have complained consistently, unions, top officials, others, for years that they're asked to deal with all of these social issues that are outside of what they should be doing with crimes of poverty, with deeply mentally-disturbed people, and so on.

Trying to find an approach where police are focused on violent crimes, on guns, on murders, and the city as an administrative instrument, and the people of the city can handle smaller problems on their own without needing to resort to people who are uniformed and armed and legally allowed to use violence and fatal violence on our behalf, I think, is a very healthy thing and might help us separate out what police are really necessary for versus social issues and smaller quality of life or broken windows things that maybe can be addressed without getting armed authority there.

Brian Lehrer: Really interesting answer. How do you understand this duality, if that's the right word for it, the significant decline in gun violence while the property crimes of robbery, burglary, and grand larceny all shot up this summer just as much as gun violence went down? Also, felony assault as you point out, I guess that would be felony assault without a gun. Maybe we should talk about what some of those things are. When we say the word "robbery" as opposed to "burglary," is burglary like somebody breaks into your house or breaks into your car and steals something while you're not there and robbery is like mugging, somebody accosts you in person?

Harry Siegel: Exactly. You burgle a place, you rob a person.

Brian Lehrer: If robbery is up 30%-something, does that mean more people are getting mugged on the street?

Harry Siegel: Yes. There've been these weird celebrations of Washington Square Park, where I spent most of my youth and not always engaged in entirely lawful activities, as it's become a celebratory and, at times, chaotic place. I have a minor affiliation with NYU. I get all of the reports about crimes around their campus, which covers most of the village and students. There've been, in the course of this, just a series of incredible robberies at different times of day in and around the park.

When I'm there, I see they have these big signs still, "No skateboarding in the park." There's police officers there and there's 25 guys skateboarding. I don't particularly care about the guys skateboarding in the park, but it's very odd to have rules that exist on paper and are loudly promoted that are not whatsoever enforced, whether it's the police who should be doing that or some other less armed and aggressive authority.

I do think, as the NYPD has repeatedly said, that people feel less concerned about consequences for smaller acts. Some of these smaller acts like robberies are really big and traumatize people in their lives and they remain thinking about them. Murder's a really important number for a lot of reasons because it's fatal and because it's very close to unfalsifiable, where, the others, you can do a little more to play with them.

The New York Post argues that the city simply isn't capable of policing on these other fronts. "The city has been blue-lined, it's overstretched, it can deliver results on one front but not on all of them." I'm not sure that's wrong. I do think that you're going to have an even wider gap between the numbers and perception, which is already very wide. The last good polling we have, which is from June, shows just 3% of New Yorkers feel safer than they did before the pandemic.

To get that up at all, I think you do have to figure out some fair and regular way to deal with smaller crimes with people by offices in Midtown. I've seen interesting shakedown stuff on the streets, where not necessarily people need to be policed, but it's striking and not my experience from past years. I basically hadn't been to Midtown before coming to the city a couple of months ago.

Since the pandemic started, there are people on the streets who look like corpses. They're not heroin addicts like I'm used to from my youth, who would nod and then nod up and have a string that kept them up. They're just on the streets. I keep checking to make sure people are alive. I'm not sure there's anything to do after that. I'm certainly not going to call the police. A lot of people don't necessarily want help, but I don't know if that is an environment you can have and have people be confident about public safety.

There continue to be more mentally ill people and just socially disruptive people on the trains. These are really interesting challenges. I do wonder if the mayor may be successful in terms of shootings and murders, which he deserves tremendous credit for, but not have that apply to these other crimes. In the fight between safety and fair administration of justice, there sometimes seems to be a significant tension. A lot of this has played out around bail reform.

Seeing the one set of numbers diverge from all the others, I'm wondering if this is potentially a new normal given the political forces at work and the reluctance of the legislature, not just to go back to bail reform, which they've already rolled back parts of twice, but to find any other ways to make sure the justice system, broadly speaking, not just the police, works swiftly and consistently as well as fairly. I do wonder if the people who are concerned with fairness are surrendering those other two legs of that three-legged table to the vicious, lock-them-all-up crowd in the course of not dealing with this.

There's one other factor on the rise in all these numbers, including, until recently, murders and shootings, has been the gumming up of the court system over the course of the pandemic and really meritorious efforts to have fewer people locked up before they've been convicted and after unnecessarily incarceration like armed authority. That should be a significant last resort, not a default. For that to work, you have to be able to convince ordinary workday people who are not thinking about politics, who are not thinking about policy, that this isn't some sort of threat to their safety, and that's hard to do.

Brian Lehrer: Incarceration is way up since the pandemic started. We'll get to an Eric Adams quote on that in a couple of minutes as we go here. Listeners, if you're just joining us, we're talking about the precipitous drop in murders and shootings in New York City this summer even while other crimes seem to be going up, with Harry Siegel, who is the co-host of the podcast, FAQ NYC, a Daily News columnist, and now editor at the nonprofit news organization, The City. We have calls coming in from all over. Allie in Queens is going to be the first one of those. Allie, you're on WNYC. Hello. Is it Allie in Queens? Allie Watts?

Allie: Oh, yes. Hi.

Brian Lehrer: Hi.

Allie: No, I'm here passing this truck. Hold on.

Brian Lehrer: I guess Allie is driving.

Allie: No, no, no. No, I'm walking.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, you're walking and passing a truck. Hi, go ahead. Sorry.

Allie: I live on the edge of Ridgewood and Bushwick. I'm actually in the 104 Precinct. Last weekend, I called 311 for a rave party that's in Bushwick down in the industrial area near-- Well, it's really just outside our precinct. Our 104 guys were able to give a summon to the people and shut down the party. That's the first time in maybe 12 years of calling 311 that's happened. Our new CO is working with the other precincts and maybe that's why that was able to happen, but it's really nice to be able to report some progress that could actually develop into greater progress.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Harry, any thought on that? It sounds like she's talking about precincts working with each other, commanding officers working with each other in a new kind of way.

Harry Siegel: One interesting shift, and it sounds like they just broke up this party, weren't arresting people or anything, but misdemeanor arrests went up in the first half of this year for the first time in nine years, I believe, and significantly by 25%. That does suggest that this administration and police force is trying to figure out ways to work on some of these quality-of-life issues.

When they happen right around you, like, for instance, if there's constant loud partying and you're asking the neighbors and then calling 311 and there's just no response at all can feel incredibly frustrating and draining and like just another tax living in this city. If the police are finding calm and appropriate ways to respond to that, or the city is, which may or may not involve the police, that seems to me like a very promising sign of the present efforts to get this right.

We, I think, have a lot of work to do and are still ongoing. I do think that part of that has to be some of those misdemeanor arrests. As with the crime numbers, if you take a 30-year perspective, they're down incredibly dramatically, over 90% with the misdemeanor arrests. At some point, you have to ask, "What's the right level? When do you need some sort of enforcement when other measures have failed to deal with the problem?"

Brian Lehrer: Here's Mike in the Clinton Hill-Bed-Stuy area of Brooklyn, who I think is going to tell a different story than Allie just did from Bushwick-Ridgewood. Mike, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Mike: Hi, yes, I've been in the neighborhood for 20 years and there seems to be an increasing serious drug problem on the street, junkies everywhere passing out, and dealers. You find little plastic garbage can vials, which I've read are potentially fentanyl containers. The really frustrating thing is that Eric Adams was in the neighborhood on Nostrand Avenue a couple of months ago, observed what was going on. They sent cops to patrol. They come up and down and they clear the dealers off the street and they come right back the next day. It's just ongoing.

Brian Lehrer: Harry, sound familiar?

Harry Siegel: In the bad old days, TM, open-air drug dealing was a really serious problem. Some combination of policing, community activism, and I think, significantly, the internet changed that, where there just wasn't a reason for it. It's been really interesting to see that return and with hard drugs. I can't quite figure out how this relates to the very open sale all around the city, and especially in Manhattan and on the streets, of marijuana, which is totally legal now, but no one has a license to sell it.

I think in the course of turning a purposefully blind eye to that as the first licenses get issued to people with drug war, marijuana convictions, or family members who have them, by the way, the first 150, it's opened up a space along with some of the more radical justice system reformers, police abolitionist-decarceral types, where there has been a return in a number of neighborhoods of open-air drug dealing, not just a pot with people passed out with serious money at play and that can lead to additional violence. My gut is that the NYPD will be able to handle this. As you said, the mayor showed up there.

They've tried to symbolically show they're dealing with it. They're working out the right tools and the right level of aggressiveness to deal with that problem. Seeing that return at all is distressing. To me, one of the many signs that people who are not looking to behave lawfully or decently, who are often very aggressive people are not nearly as concerned as they once were about consequences for their actions and are proceeding accordingly. Bottom line, it's a really distressing thing to see return, especially in an era where, honestly, there's much less reason or rationale for that if you have any sort of consistent enforcement than was the case 25 or 35 years ago.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue with Harry Siegel. More of your calls. Gwen in East Harlem, I see you. You'll be next. The mayor on Rikers, and do we trust these NYPD stats anyway? Right after this.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We're talking about the summer crime statistics in New York City now released by the mayor and the NYPD, showing a precipitous drop in murders and shootings. August had fewer murders and fewer shootings than August 2019. That's right, fewer than before the pandemic. Other major crime categories went up by about 30%. Robbery, burglary, grand larceny, felony assault.

We're trying to put together what all of this means and what anybody should do about it with Harry Siegel, senior editor now at The City, that nonprofit news organization, co-host of the great podcast, FAQ NYC with Christina Greer and Harry, and a Daily News columnist. We're taking your reports from around the city in different neighborhoods. Gwen in East Harlem, you're on WNYC. Hello, Gwen.

Gwen: Hi, good morning. I've lived in East Harlem for 37 years or maybe a little longer. I moved in in the '80s when things were pretty tough up here regarding drugs. However, recently, I had been working on 88th Street and 3rd Avenue at a cosmetic store and it was the most uncomfortable feeling. We had people that came in. I would be standing on the selling floor and somebody would come in and just look at me with a bag.

They would put their arm up and just take all the perfumes and creams. We're talking about $500 creams and perfumes and just put them in their bag. Now, the first couple of times this happened, I did run after the guy. I even got a picture of him, but the fearlessness of people doing this is just unbelievable. What we, later on, started doing is we just started locking the door in between customers.

This is on 3rd Avenue in New York City. After that, I noticed and I'd see in storefronts and I would tell the people that own these stores, "You're not allowed to put pictures up of suspects that you think have stolen from you. It's against the law. You can't do that here in the United States." That's what store owners are doing. The other thing I wanted to speak about, I was telling the woman on the phone that I was in traffic court the other day fighting a ticket.

The judge said to me, "Well, you are two minutes late on this. If we let you pass on this, what would that say? What kind of trend would that set?" I said, "Are you kidding me?" I said, "There are motorcycles. There are scooters. There is everyone in the world going on sidewalks. They're going down the streets the wrong way. They are hitting people. They are stealing from people who are on the sidewalks."

I was in an accident a couple of months ago where a guy passed me on the right. He zoomed behind me in a motorcycle as fast as he could. He got in front of me, but the car in front of me hit him. When he hit him, he threw him into a parked car. These are very, very dangerous things. When you hear people like judges tell you, "Listen, we're going to fine you for whatever, for breathing the wrong way in a car in the city of New York." Whatever a motorcycle driver wants to do or whatever a kid on a scooter wants to do, there is simply no enforcement and that's really frustrating.

I just wanted to say. The Upper East Side has turned into the wild, wild west. Just one last thing, Brian. I don't really remember him. 86th Street and 2nd Avenue, there was a stabbing of a man in the neck because he asked for something at the desk and didn't like the response he got. He stabbed the security guard. Last thing is, I said to my store, which is owned by Macy's, that Macy's should be putting security guards and all of these smaller stores. They can afford to. Employees who get trapped in here have nowhere to run. If somebody comes in, there's no back door. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Gwen, thank you for all of that. We're going to do a separate segment one day soon on the motorized scooters and the motorcycles and the chaos that they're causing and the serious injuries that some of them are causing. We're going to deal with that as a separate. You hear what she's describing about the conditions in her store and how people who work in stores on the Upper East Side are feeling if we can take Gwen as representative of more than herself. Harry, this is, I guess, the grand larceny stat with that going up in New York City. What do you think when you listen to Gwen?

Harry Siegel: I think grand larcenies continue to be significantly under-reported, even with insurance. As these numbers are going up, I'm very confident that these are not fundamentally crimes of poverty and they have not increased as much as they have in conjunction with a rise in poverty. Some of this does track, but not all of it, with the pandemic.

I do think you get into speaking of judges and the rules are the rules, really layered questions, and hot-potato buck-passing game of who has discretion and how they're using it, where we have lawmakers who are mostly elected in primaries and thus, in New York, tend to go farther to the left passing really significant reforms, district attorneys like Alvin Bragg in Manhattan, who, by the way, was at the center of that field in the primary, certainly not the left or the far-left of it, who come into office actually pledging to use their discretion as to which crimes they're actually going to prosecute and how to say, "I'm not going to target a wide series of crimes."

Then people finding spaces and loopholes in here to pick up these sorts of goods interestingly. Forgive me, this is probably outside of the scope of our focus today. The rise of marketplaces like Amazon and eBay have played a significant role here. There was a guy who was arrested earlier this year with his own warehouse full of stolen goods from pharmacies and elsewhere, all which were getting resold on those marketplaces as it's allowed for stolen goods and counterfeit goods and knockoffs to proliferate in a way that that's very hard for local authorities to enforce.

That plays some role and people just scooping up bags because they know there's a resale market they can put those into. This is Adams' challenge as the executive, as the person who runs the police department, who does not pass these laws, does not prosecute people who break them and are arrested for doing so, is finding a way to restore a broad sense that there are some ordering norms and consequences.

Crucially, unlike, say, Rudy Giuliani, a Republican, Mike Bloomberg, who was part of every party but very wealthy and insulated from normal politics as such to do this while being held accountable for fairness. We mentioned Rikers briefly before. Rikers was a moral disaster under each of those mayors. They didn't care. It was very hard to hold them to account.

This became a bigger political story under de Blasio and remains one under Adams because they're Democrats, because they are stressing fairness. Consequently, it is easier to hold them to account for some of these problems. The challenge for Adams is to find a way to fairly enforce the laws that does not criminalize poverty, childish mistakes, small errors, and people living lives with real marginal desperation baked in and just making criminals of them while also maintaining safety. It's not easy.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, so let's talk about Rikers and this idea that we don't want to go back to that trademark phrase that you referred to before the bad old days in terms of crime, but we also don't want to go back to the bad old days in terms of mass incarceration, which has come way down in the city. In some ways, de Blasio probably didn't get enough credit for that as some of the reformers were constantly criticizing him.

Incarceration at Rikers came way, way down on de Blasio's watch. Now, arrests are up. I don't have the exact stats. Maybe you do, Harry, but I think thousands more people are in jail at Rikers than a few years ago. Any case, it's enough more so that the mayor said last week about the plan to close Rikers by 2027, they may not be able to do it because it's based on the jail population remaining at those pre-pandemic lows. Listen.

Mayor Eric Adams: We have to have a plan B because those who have created a plan A that I inherited obviously didn't think about a plan B. [chuckles] Look at the incarceration numbers and one has to ask, "What was the plan B?" What was the plan B that stated if we don't drop down the prison population the way they thought we were, what do we do? No one answered that question.

Brian Lehrer: Does even the fact that Adams is having to raise this put the lie to the idea that nobody's going to jail for small things, or even big things as the critics of bail reform have been saying?

Harry Siegel: I don't want to give Adams too much credit here, who's reinstated solitary under a different name, confinement, which is inhumane, and who does not seem to have a serious plan of his own for what to do with the jails. That said, his critique that the plan to close the jails, which de Blasio did not embrace but was dragged along on by council speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, the former chief judge of the state, Jonathan Lippman, and others, was posited on the idea that we could continually reduce the jail population.

While there is, I think, increasingly, a myth that the jails are filled with people who, say, stole a backpack like Kalief Browder, that really isn't the case at this point. The population went below 4,000 for the first time and was on track to work with disclosure plan during the pandemic when the health emergency was used as an excuse to do an experiment with who could be safely released.

That experiment, by the way, worked brilliantly. It showed you could release more than 1,500 people without having any measurable impact on public safety. Those are people who mostly had not been convicted of a crime yet or were serving very short sentences of under a year who didn't need to be locked up, at least as a public safety matter. That was really impressive.

That said, the idea that we can continually go down, I do think that the reformers and the abolitionists are actually drawing down credit from the harsher policies of the Giulianis and the Bloombergs that helped allow for this and that there is some stasis below which, not generally people who may flee, who may commit more crimes, who may end up on the cover of The Post because they did a terrible thing after they've been released following a prior terrible thing, becomes very problematic.

Adams' vague answer is, "Yes, maybe we'll still do this Rikers plan. Maybe we'll talk with Kathy Hochul and send some of these people in our jail to prisons," which is insane idea a whole number of ways, not least because they're that much farther from the New York courts presumably if that happens. His critique, this plan was baked into having these numbers work.

There was no reason to assume that the numbers would work and that all trends would just continue forever, which is basically a science-fiction premise is serious. Of course, that step one, it's on him now, especially because he has consistently rejected the idea of bringing in a federal receiver to run Rikers. The fundamental problem at Rikers in many ways is that there's an extremely powerful union there with very strong workplace protections that is fighting tooth and nail to keep those.

All Adams is hoping is to have few enough deaths, which is certainly not at yet. There have been 13 so far this year, which is horrific to get this off the front pages and quiet so that you can more quietly deal with these issues and this union, which he is closely connected to and to their law firm and its leadership, and doesn't want to see any of these changes. The last thing here, by the way, is setting up new jails.

The idea that the Rikers is some magically wicked place, Rikers is terrible. It was a garbage dump before it was a jail. It's not a healthy or good environment. It's cut off from the city. It's difficult to get to from the rest of the city. It's on an island. It's difficult to get to. All that said, the idea that we're going to fix these broader problems just by creating new jails is, on the face of it, ridiculous.

Brian Lehrer: Well, that's for another show. Certainly, there's a complicated conversation that I think they've been having about trying to create both smaller and better jails as well as the push toward less incarceration as part of that too. Two things before we go. One, we have a few tweets like this. I'll read from one posted by listener Courtney, "How trustworthy are these stats? I've heard NYPD can cook the books in the way they count and categorize crimes."

That critique could run both ways. You can't really falsify murders, so I think we can trust the precipitous decline in murders this summer to be true. I think some people wonder whether the NYPD is cooking the books to make crime look worse than it is so it gets more public support. One way or the other, how reliable are these numbers?

Harry Siegel: There are so many weak but real outside authorities who oversee parts of the NYPD. Its numbers are, in a lot of ways, its currency, its stock and trade, its credibility. There are certainly precinct commanders and people looking to make their own careers who have incentives to do so, but there are other people who have strong incentives to catch onto that.

I am sure there are games at the margins. There are no signs. I think with these diverging numbers and all these other categories going up and murder going down, there are no signs that there's a widespread problem with the books being cooked. Certainly, the city and WNYC and other places that look closely at these numbers are going to be all over that if we are seeing indicators in that direction.

Brian Lehrer: Are we not talking enough about what, other than policing, to do for some of the drug users who are not just drug users, but also aggressive in ways that people experience as threatening that you've referred to and callers have referred to? Here's a tweet from a listener who says, "The lack of compassion and respect from callers and Harry Siegel toward drug users, people experiencing homelessness in our community members during this Brian Lehrer segment is truly horrifying." What do you say to that?

Harry Siegel: You judge a society fundamentally by how it treats us most vulnerable. That includes the jail population. That is on Eric Adams, who does not want a receiver who says, "I'll deal with this." That's on all of us in terms of how we deal with troubled and hurt people in the course of our daily lives. I do not think policing is the only or the sole answer there, particularly with troubled people who have really disruptive, additional behaviors that policing is part of the answer there. It's dishonest to pretend otherwise. I think supportive housing is absolutely essential and is also very expensive.

The challenge is to find a way to address these long-term issues, the mental health issues we've had since deinstitutionalization, waves of addiction, and with more and more powerful opioids circulating decently and humanely in the short run to buy time for these critical, longer-term, and generational solutions. I'm sure I've been crass in short-handing one part to talk about the other. I am positive that that crassness is what will translate into policy even in a supposedly very liberal, progressive place like New York City if there are no short-term answers there.

Brian Lehrer: Harry Siegel, creator and co-host of the podcast, FAQ NYC, Daily News columnist, editor at the nonprofit news organization, The City. Thank you very much for joining us.

Harry Siegel: Thank you so much for having me.

 

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