Covering Crime, Public Safety and the Cops

[MUSIC]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. On yesterday's show, we had NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell to talk about subway safety, the killing of Officer Jonathan Diller last month, the killing by police last month of a man named Win Rozario who had called 911 seeking help in a mental health crisis, and more. Chief Chell had been most in the news recently for aggressive social media posts against Daily News columnist Harry Siegel posting snarky Barb's like, "The problem is that besides your flawed reporting, is the fact that now we are calling you and your latte friends out on their garbage." That was a quote, and the NYPD Twitter feed labeled the columnist deceitful Siegel.

That came in response to a column by Harry two weeks ago called Subway Cop Bosses Talk Themselves Into Cuffs. Now Harry says the police are trying naked intimidation, his words, against him and other journalists with their fiery social media campaign. We'll talk now with Harry Siegel, and like yesterday, mostly about subway and other public safety issues themselves, but also some about their war of words. Harry Siegel is a Daily News columnist, co-host of the podcast FAQ NYC, and an editor at the news organization, The City. Hi, Harry, welcome back to WNYC.

Harry Siegel: Hi, Brian, always good to be with you.

Brian Lehrer: Let's go back to the beginning of this cycle, your article Subway Cop Bosses Talk Themselves Into Cuffs. That was about people who appear seriously mentally ill in the subway system and what the police do or don't do about them.

Harry Siegel: Yes, and people were behaving very erratically. The transit chief had just done a television appearance where he said there's nothing to be done about that, remarkably, and the Deputy Commissioner for Operations. I wrote that that seemed nuts to me. I've been writing variants of that for two years. For various reasons, the NYPD bosses' accounts of why and the mayor's has changed several times. They decided this was the time to start a fight with me and get into name-calling from official channels and that sort of stuff.

Notably, Brian, and I do think this was an intimidation campaign, not to me in particular, I don't have much to be intimidated about, but at other journalists who think about writing about these things, about [inaudible 00:02:40] this administration who have hopes for and talk to me and other journalist, or then. The mayor, and Chell when he was on with you yesterday, sounded a lot like the last two years of Harry Siegel columns, among other things, and saying, "We need to do more." That the officers who are coming down and doing this overtime often don't know how to address conditions. Are reluctant to approach people who seem erratic or query in need of some sort of help or intervention.

Chell said, in addition to name calling, this is a two-way street. Then I'm a gadfly, which, if the horse is moving here, I think that's great. You can hear from your callers yesterday and over the years, there are all these different concerns about the subways and police and all these parts, but a lot of it is just that people want to feel reasonably safe, if they're traveling with kids, just by themselves, during the day or at night, and that's not so much about the nightmarish things that will happen in a gigantic city over time.

Although those resonate, it's often about the scary daily things that you feel you have to navigate, and to me, about people who are query in despair, who the city has abandoned. The question about whether there's any upstream solution to getting those people help, and then not having them take up a very outsized presence in the city's underground in the circulatory system.

Brian Lehrer: I want to play a clip from Chief Chell's appearance here yesterday, not about your back and forth with each other and social media or anything, but about this issue. As you know in your follow-up column, and as you just referred to, the mayor actually appeared to agree with you that the cops in the subways are too passive. Our reporter Liz Kim asked about this at last week's mayoral news conference. I played the clip of the mayor in response to her question and followed up with Chief Chell. This starts with a clip of Mayor Adams last Tuesday.

Mayor Adams: I saw that yesterday that if the person had no shoes on or they was sitting down, clearly, they needed help, the officers were not willing to engage. We need to sit down with Deputy Mayor Williams-Isom and her team and Brian and others. We need to figure out how do we tweak that more, because I would like to see the officers get more engaged just in that initial contact.

Brian Lehrer: It sounds like the mayor is acknowledging the premise of Liz's question and Harry Siegel's column. Do you hear it that way? Are you taking any steps yet to correct what the mayor described there should be done?

John Chell: Right. There are some cops that I think we may send out that come to transit for a day to help out over some of those a thousand cops that maybe aren't used to doing that kind of work. We have to get them more engaged, and we're looking at that, but the Transit Subway Safety Task Force, we call them, that's their job. They do a lot of removals with the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, they do with some private organizations. Like I said earlier, there's room for improvement, and there's room to always take a look at what we're doing and how can we do it better? If there's anything broken, how do we fix it? Can we do something better? Who's responsible for it? We are currently looking at it, as we speak, to address the mentally ill, to get them help, and to make ridership feel safe.

Brian Lehrer: NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell from yesterday's show. Daily News columnist Harry Siegel, my guest. Harry, did you feel validated by that clip of the mayor?

Harry Siegel: I would not say validated. I really don't like how much "I" there is in this conversation, because the mayor and the people in his administration, the public officials, who he and his police department have appointed to positions of significant authority keep talking about me. There's been a lot of name-calling there. When Adams came into office, and he promised this complicated straddle, this really ambitious one, to restore public safety and confidence and fair and decent policing that wasn't unnecessarily punishing people. I put it there and I said, "I really hope he was up to this. It's a lot."

I think it's been a couple of years where he's gotten very far away from that. Now, he had his baptism and his recommitment to his city and his faith, the previous week at Rikers. The way he sounded there, the way John Chell sounded on your program, the way Adams sounded at a Community Town Hall, I was listening to last night, seems responsive, and engaged, and serious, and aligned with what an overwhelming majority of New Yorkers say in polling at least, that they want. That is heartening to hear, however, coming after days of name-calling and weirdness and two years of not hitting that standard, I just want to see if that rhetoric translates into action.

One side of that, by the way, would be Chell and other New York Police Department high officials, coming on your show, which is a real and central part of the New York conversation regularly. Not where they're doing some weird press tour for a week-and-a-half around one of my columns, and having that conversation so that people hear it. As I said, I thought he sounded very reasonable, he could for the most part, and then can hold them to that standard.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, your calls and texts. Welcome for Daily News columnist Harry Siegel on subway safety, the tone of the NYPD social media accounts regarding him, or anything related. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. In that original column, you criticized a comment by one NYPD leader that there's a lot of good going on in the subway when it comes to public safety. Another NYPD leader who said, "It's not a crime to be mentally ill. What are we supposed to do if they're not committing a crime?" Why did those two comments warrant mentions and a little slap by you in a column?

Harry Siegel: There is good going on that whatever people in national media discourse may be hearing, New York is not a hellhole, but New Yorkers when they're talking to themselves, they feel about as safe on the trains during the day as they did at night just a few years ago. That's a really big slip. The mayor as part of this reboot revival did this gigantic public safety presser because crime on the subways is down. It's actually marginally down for the year, I believe. Less than 1% because there was a huge increase in January and they've been working on that since, but they didn't do a briefing in January or in February.

The police used to do these every month, usually without the mayor there and take questions from informed reporters. Now they do a big dog and pony show when the numbers barely allow and with shifting baselines for down from when to just say down. This comment, there's a lot of good came just before that big announcement, but it bothered me for that reason. As to the there's nothing we can do if somebody isn't immediately committing a crime, there are serious advocates and people.

Callers to your show, I've spoken to them or dealing with the severe mental illness in their own families who want help and struggle to get it. There's questions about consent, and people who aren't able to [inaudible 00:10:20] mental illness and their ability to give or receive it. I think most people want to have some form of intervention to help people and to remove them from the circulatory system when there's somebody whose pants are down, who are wearing one medical shoe, and the foot you can see in it is swollen or are raving erratically or twitching at themselves, and the idea that there is no place for police intervention in any of that.

It's not that the police should be the only agency or even the main agency involved, but there's nothing for us to do. It's just seemed absurd, and it seemed to speak to the gap between this administration's narrative, Brian, and New Yorkers perceptions. I'm not questioning their numbers, but I am saying that they're constantly trying to shape narrative around these numbers in ways that just don't seem honest. As another caller said, it seems like the curtains don't match the drapes.

Brian Lehrer: When you were on the show, though, last, which was just a few weeks ago, March 19th, you said, "I take the trains every day and at all hours, and I feel generally pretty safe." You were touting a new pilot, subway-based mental health outreach program from the state that you like. Is it wrong to say there's a lot of good going on in the subway? I know you just addressed this to some degree, but when it comes to public safety or that the idea that it's so dangerous to be down there even during the day is a misperception that is exaggerated in people's minds rather than reality?

Harry Siegel: It's really hard for me to say it. My experience is subjective and incomplete like everyone else's. Brian, what I can say is that pilot program, which seems really appealing and promising to me, is happening with a state police agency, not the NYPD, which didn't seem like it really wanted anything to do with that. This involves police being there, backing up clinicians who are interacting with people who seem severely mentally ill or very erratic, not to build up long-term relationships or to clear wines at the end in the middle of the night, but to [unintelligible 00:12:41] determinations if somebody needs some evaluation, medical evaluation, including if they don't want to have one.

Again, the NYPD is not, to my knowledge and from how it was announced, involved in this program at all, which struck me as fairly a very conspicuous omission. Especially from an administration that is usually talking about finding upstream solutions and bringing people like Deputy Mayor Isom Williams and Brian Staden who mayor Adams mentioned in, and then figuring out an appropriate police role there. When police officials on their own are saying, "There's nothing for us to do," that seems wildly out of line with what New Yorkers think. It seems to me that the mayor and his police weeders are now acknowledging very belatedly that disconnect.

Brian Lehrer: With daily news columnists, co-host of the podcast, FAQ NYC, and an editor at the news organization, The City, Harry Siegel, on the issues underlying the back and forth between him and leaders of the NYPD in the last 10 days to two weeks. Now, let me play a clip as we get to the issue of the tone and substance of Chief Chell and others at the NYPD tweeting about you and that column. Chell tweeted, "The problem is that besides your flawed reporting is the fact that now we're calling you and your latte friends out on their garbage." The NYPD Twitter feed labeled you 'deceitful Siegel'. I asked Chief Chell yesterday if the tone of those tweets is in line with their motto of courtesy, professionalism, and respect, and he said this.

John Chell: We are not a punching bag. We try to say professional, but we have a platform also, and this is no longer a one-way street. I think what people are upset about is they're upset that we're pushing back and protecting our agency and protecting our cops. Our public information deputy commissioner stands by his analogy. Sometimes with certain people, you have to talk like that. We'd rather not. We'd rather keep it professional, but it's funny, I think on a show we did last week, our mayor was criticized maybe a year ago for not learning to speak, and now he's learning it speak and then we get criticized that way. Which way do we do this? We want to keep it professional, but we do have a strong platform and we're going to push back with things that we don't like.

Brian Lehrer: Harry, your reaction?

Harry Siegel: Respect is earned and credibility. The NYPD spent years on that building up courtesy, professionalism, and respect is [unintelligible 00:15:24]. If he wants to say now, it's courtesy, professionalism, and respect, except when we think someone needs to hear from us in a different voice. That's their decision to make, but these are public officials. It's my job as a columnist to report on them.

Name-calling isn't going to change that, and I don't think it reflects well on them. I point out, Brian, that when Chell was on, he was using that sort of officious and neutral tone. That has a lot of value if you hold it. If you have that and then you say, "My deputy commissioner of public information was right to call this guy a name because we know what a wire and a third baggie is," then you're doing something else. New Yorkers can judge that for themselves.

If I was giving these guys press advice, pass, stop talking about me. It's not doing you any favors. You can't hold that voice and then say, "And that's why we had to give the individual this nasty nickname." It's one or the other, and you're a professional and above the fray or you're not. Lastly, Brian, he said, "We had to stand up to defend our cops." Chief Chell knows perfectly well, and he is good at using language to evade some of these things. Like when he said the district attorney had exonerated him about something you asked for. In fact, the district attorney chose not to press charges and a jury of his peers found he was responsible for that act in someone's wrongful death.

Brian Lehrer: In a civil trial. Ina a civil lawsuit.

Harry Siegel: Yes. In a civil suit, that is the only legal finding in the case you asked about. I'm not trying to picket him, but this is the same chief of patrol who called out the wrong judge and the wrong district attorney while talking about someone who was let out on bail, who said some of the migrants at the periphery of the fight in Times Square with police officers had fled because they were given bail, which was simply incorrect.

These are significant mistakes. For all of us, respect, trust and public confidence is-- Your name is your name is something you earn. It's not something that's given. It's a little upsetting to hear him go back to demanding that at the same time that I'm generally pleased. Speaking of this two-way street, another insult, he said, "You're a gad flag." He suggested I wasn't a real New Yorker, whatever that means.

My part of the two-way street is to ask them to do better. I'm seeing at least the rhetoric of some of that, which I appreciate. Frankly, it's to call out the very troubling records of some of these top-appointed officials and this police administration. These are Adam's people. These are Adam's cops, if you will. I'm talking about the bosses here. I've done that, and I've done that steadily, and I don't think they've appreciated.

When Chell said I took a cheap shot. I mentioned in that column that the deputy commissioner had been the driver for the chief of department who prior to getting that role, was found to have abused his authority in an incident in which he covered up an affair he was having, these are findings, with a woman he was allegedly beating up at the time. When police responded to a 911 call, he told them to go away. He now is the chief of department. He's appealing another abusive authority finding involving voiding the arrest of an ex-cop who chased kids with his gun out, who maybe had broken a light outside of his office.

Brian, we're all busy. We're leading our own lives in New York and not following all this stuff closely. When I noticed five or six of these things piling up with the set of characters involved and write about this, and say, this is the challenge between Adam's rhetoric and the people he is bringing in to implement it. It's a trust challenge. It's a public confidence one. I think they really resent that. I do not think that's attacking cops. I think it is expressing real concerns about this administration. If they want to respond by name-calling, that's a choice they're going to make. If they respond by getting some of this right and showing they are up to the task in hand, I'll be thrilled. I live here.

Brian Lehrer: One more clip of Chief Chell from yesterday's show, you'll hear that he objected to the timing of your original column.

John Chell: If you want to criticize upper management about our policies and things that you don't like that are wrong, by all means, we're fair game. We're fair game. When you talk about substance of an article, I have yet to hear an answer about how the substance of transit crime had anything to do with the cheap shot against our Chief of Department. That's where part one issue I take with the article. Number two, you come out with an article that hit the computer, if you will, at five o'clock a few hours after the burial of Detective Diller and then it comes out on Easter Sunday. Then you say something [unintelligible 00:20:46] cops aren't in line with what's going on in transit. Yes, we're going to take exception to that.

Brian Lehrer: What about the timing issue there?

Harry Siegel: I just addressed and they've been throwing a lot of things at a lot of different walls and changing what walls and what things day to day, the "cheap shot". As to the timing issue, I'd like to break that into a couple of parts. It's notable that the deceitful Siegel put out a column on Easter Sunday. I read a column for The Daily News that goes up every Sunday and goes online usually on Saturday evenings. As to the timing with detective Diller's funeral and his murder, which is just a profound tragedy. Chief Chell was challenging a woman who did a debate on another station with Adams where he did not come off well, challenged her to debate him at the funeral.

I chose not to mention the funeral at all because I did not want to cross those wires and because I understand that there's a difference between things that are sacred and profound and things that are political. Chell and the way he has framed it, Kaz Daughtry, one of the Deputy Commissioners I've mentioned, who said he wasn't going to get into the details of what happened with detective Diller and then got into those intimate powerful details, while saying I, I, I. Just saying how much it hurt him to come home and I had to read this by Harry Siegel bashing cops.

This wasn't bashing cops, and they know that. I think that these are cynical and dishonest attacks. I could be wrong. They've spoken to my intent. I don't entirely know this, but I will say that in a week of this with the mayor talking about it, commissioners talking about it, chiefs talking about it, and me hearing from an awful lot of New Yorkers, including current and former cops and other people in law enforcement, the only people who connected those two things. Again, I did not write about detective Diller at all, and don't think it would have been appropriate to in that setting are these bosses.

Brian Lehrer: Listener texts, "A very unstable guy came at me two years ago on the train ranting about murder and rape. Long story short, the cops refused to intervene because they said it was a free speech issue. I'm a woman in my 60s. Really? I even then went to the precinct and they were equally unresponsive," writes that listener. Mike in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Mike.

Mike: Hi. My father was a New York City cop on the Upper West Side, in the days when it was pretty tough. I understand their point of view, but recently, I had this terrible experience with a guy, clearly mentally disabled guy or something. It's such a disgusting display on his part, I won't even describe it. I called the police and they came. I said to them, "That's the guy right there." They said, "Yes, we talked to him and he said he's okay." I said, "Yes, but I described to you what he did. You're just going to let him walk on the streets?" They said, "There's nothing we can do." I said, "Did he break the law?" They said, "Technically."

I do understand from things I learned from my father and other friends of mine on the police department that they are in this grey zone where they feel like if they lock these guys up, or they bring these guys somewhere, they're just going to be back on the street in no time. It's almost like the police have learned this learned helplessness thing, where the culture is don't even bother because nothing's going to come of it. To Mr. Siegel's point earlier, someone just needs to say, here's the plan, because right now cops feel like if they lock these guys up, nothing is going to happen. They're going to be back on the streets in no time.

Mayor Adams came in saying he was going to fix this issue, but I don't hear anybody saying, here's the plan. I do think there are a lot of police officers who don't live in New York City. There used to be a law that you have to be a city resident to be a firefighter or a police officer. My experience is a lot of these guys who are second and third-generation cops, they come from other areas on the suburbs, and they come into the city, and they don't understand the culture. Whereas my father was a city kid and he could interact with the people in neighborhoods in a different way.

I just think there's this huge disconnect. It's a real us and them, and there just needs to be a huge cultural change in the entire department of, number one, understanding how people who live in the suburbs can interact with people who live in the city because they are coming from different mindsets. Number two, for Mayor Adams to say we have a concrete plan. Finally, Brian, I think I heard on your show that under the Pataki administration there was a huge defunding of mental health services that they said were going to get pushed down to the local level.

Brian Lehrer: That's true,

Mike: Then that funding was never restored on the local level. On one hand, I'm very frustrated with the NYPD because they don't respond like the last woman's description. They don't respond to things that average New Yorkers seem like are things that they should be responding to. On the other hand, there is a huge gap in public policy on the state level, and then down to the city level of so what do we do with these people who are incredibly disabled and who are disrupting other people's lives? Thank you for listening to all of that. It's a complicated issue, but I really thought Mayor Adams was going to come in and say, "Now we have a plan and here's the money we need from Albany to do it. Let's just be concrete about this."

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for a thoughtful call, Mike. Thank you very much. Harry.

Harry Siegel: Thank you, Mike. That covered a lot. There's this other gap between the mayor who has these views that are in line with what most New Yorkers want. Most New Yorkers want more cops on the trains. They say they really like metal detectors. They really like homeless encampment sweeps. I don't. I understand that that's an unpopular opinion, and that's something Adams has leaned into. Adams who won in a Democratic primary, he was a Democrat. He left. He became Republican. He's a Democrat again and was trying to govern in that structure, alternates between my police are doing everything they possibly can.

You can hear from the caller, from the note you read that disconnect. Here are the problems with Albany, with the City Council, with the WEF, broadly speaking. I don't think he's wrong about that. I think because of how our political system works, and how almost all elections are decided and will turn out primaries at the district level, that there's a disconnect between our lawmakers and what most New Yorkers want. It's something he's fighting against. He wasn't talking about that's the problem and that's why I can't fix this when he was running. He tries to separate this out now. Our police are doing everything they can. Arrests are at a near-high level.

Crime in the subways is down again, like 0.3% so far this year compared to last, way up before the pandemic, let alone if you factor in the ridership. It can't be one or the other. I do think there's a rhetorical learned helplessness that has started with this mayor and has infected these police that is extremely dispiriting. I could hear Chell when he was on with you, I've heard Adams in the last week and change try to move past that, and to actually hold themselves to some account for Adams's promises. He really is the person here. He's a former cop. This is very much his department. This is his signature promise.

It's a big one, and it's not easy. There isn't the mental health infrastructure there needs to be. It's not fair to ask cops to do something on the front end when there's no back end. When from their perspective, anyone they might do anything with is just going to be back and maybe they're going to end up in a viral video. It's really difficult, but this isn't impossible. It's a relatively small group of the most deeply disturbed people who urgently need health and have an outsized impact on the psyche of the broader city. I think something can and should be done. I'm hopeful that this mayor can do it.

If I end up as a weirdo footnote in that because of a dumb name-calling fight, I don't have much interest in, cool. I'm mostly just interested in whether or not something can be accomplished here or if this last hope of the centrists is going to just discredit what is left of that ideology and political perspective and it's building show and prove that it can live up to the stuff it talks about.

Brian Lehrer: Maybe you want to come on with Chief Chell one day and have a beer summit, as they call it, and have the serious conversation, if he would do it, about how to move forward constructively. I guess as the last thing, they would say about their tone. So many people are pointed on social media these days in their tone. Your column was pointed in its tone in its way. Is it so bad if they engage columnist themselves in their own defense? We've got 30 seconds left.

Harry Siegel: It's their credit and goodwill and their trust with the public. If that's what they think the play is and in this election year, that's their choice to make, but it seems foolish to me.

Brian Lehrer: Harry Siegel, Daily News columnist, editor at the news organization, The City, and co-host of the podcast FAQ NYC. Harry, thanks as always for coming on.

Harry Siegel: Thank you, Brian.

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.