During a press briefing on Thursday, NYC Mayor Eric Adams (D-NY) was asked about communicating with New Yorkers who may perceive that subway crime is higher than what statistics show.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Mayor, I have two questions. The stats speak for themselves. I'm curious if you're going to put them in a nice envelope and send them to the U.S. D.O.T.
00:08based on what Secretary Duffy said yesterday. And also, what do you say to New Yorkers, and we've talked about this a lot, the perception versus the stats.
00:15What do you say to New Yorkers, and I want to be frank, I see a mentally ill homeless person almost every day on my commute in and out of the office or to get to your events.
00:25What do you say to those New Yorkers who say they just don't think this is working?
00:29Yeah, no, and listen, perception is reality. We get that. And this is a very complicated issue that we're facing.
00:39And I walk the stations a lot. Chief Gulotta alluded to that, you know, we spent some time down here.
00:44And the amount of time as our outreach workers share takes a long time to build that trust.
00:51And then we have frequent homeless individuals. The person, if you would take a moment to just see the person that you're seeing constantly, oftentimes the same person.
01:03And it gives the presence of that is everywhere when, in fact, it's that 3 percent.
01:09If you see that 3 percent every day when you enter the subway station, you swipe your MetroCard, you see them.
01:17You see that same person at 34th Street Station when you get off the train.
01:21You have there's a feeling that, OK, wait a minute, this is pervasive.
01:25No, this is a small number of people that they have been historically ignored.
01:30And so I understand New Yorkers are feeling that way. That's why we decided not to ignore it.
01:35And we have put in place something that's really money consuming, time consuming, and it takes a lot of patience.
01:43This outreach worker here, as he gave you, I think was a perfect story.
01:49Seeing someone's legs dangling over the platform, that could have easily been a person that would have been struck by a train.
01:55He used his training to go approach them. The police used their training to stay at a safe distance, to not aggravate the situation.
02:03That is what it takes to get this done. And so I understand New York is feeling that way.
02:09But trust me, we look at the numbers, it shows that what we are doing is actually working.
02:14Has your team begun engaging with Washington, sending them down this numbers yet?
02:18Yes. And, you know, we're going to invite folks to come down and walk the system with us to see what we're doing.
02:24It is so important to see on the ground what we are doing.
02:28And it really is a model of what we've done in the city around homelessness is a model that could be duplicated across the entire country.
02:36You look at other cities and you see encampments along highways. You see people living on the streets.
02:42You see people cooking on the street, using the streets as restroom facilities.
02:46You see a difference here than what you see there.
02:51The numbers that this team put together are dealing with the encampment crisis we inherited, dealing with the homeless issue, the mental health issues.
03:00This is really a model. And I'm going to bring and invite our federal lawmakers to come in and see what we're actually what we are doing.