Eric Adams on NYC’s mayoral race, public safety, economy and COVID plan

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• Judy Woodruff:

  Running America's largest city is no easy task. The next mayor of New York will confront an economy battered by the pandemic, as well as rising rates of gun violence and homicide that have made public safety the top issue for many voters.

  Last night, two weeks after polls closed in the city, Brooklyn Borough President and former police captain Eric Adams was declared the winner of the Democratic primary. The delay in calling the race came as the result of a new kind of voting, ranked choice.

  Mr. Adams' win makes him heavily favored to become the city's next mayor, facing Republican Curtis Sliwa in the general election.

  And Eric Adams joins me now.

  Congratulations.

• Eric Adams:

  Thank you so much for having me on today.

• Judy Woodruff:

  I do want to ask you about ranked choice voting. From a distance, it looked like a mess. Did it work, do you think?

• Eric Adams:

  Well, I believe we're still at the period of analyzing the impact of it and was it successful, did we do a good job in educating voters, were we prepared?

  This took place during a year when we were experiencing a pandemic, and it was dropped in the laps of the Board of Election in January. And so I think it's imperative for us to hold hearings and really look at this, because voting is important for our city and country.

• Judy Woodruff:

  Well, let me ask you.

  Your second- and third-place finishers were both women. Second place finisher, Kathryn Garcia, came in, what, just 1 percentage point behind you. What message does that send to you from the people of New York City?

• Eric Adams:

  That our system worked. It is so important.

  Let me tell you, you have a little over eight million New Yorkers, but you have 20 million opinions. And that is what's great about this system of government, where you have smooth transition of power, and it's not about just having a monolithic candidate or a monolithic city or country.

  Different opinions, different roadways to get to a destiny of where we want to raise healthy children and families, and I heard all those messages, and I was really excited that we had a close race.

• Judy Woodruff:

  Well, let me ask you, Eric Adams, about what we were saying is a major issue, as it turns out, crime, policing.

  New York, one of the cities hard-hit by violent crime over this past year, along with so many other big cities. Your governor, Andrew Cuomo, just yesterday, declared a new state of emergency around gun violence. What should the Democrats' message be on policing now?

• Eric Adams:

  And I commend the governor in doing so; $100 million will be allocated, and a series of things, not only in heavy-handed policing — or I should say, not in heavy-handed policing, but in looking at the feeders of violence and crime.

  And there's no secret that all across America, in particularly Black and brown communities, you're dealing with the same level of systemic poverty and violence that's coming from there.

  And so the goal for, I believe, the Democratic Party is the message that I have stated throughout this campaign. We can have the reform in justice and public safety.

• Judy Woodruff:

  How do you strike the right balance, though?

  Because, as you know, so many of your Democratic friends, Democrats across the spectrum in this country, including the Black and brown communities you just mentioned, are saying, defund the police, or at least put a lot — take a lot of the money from the police and put it into social services.

• Eric Adams:

  Well, we have to be honest with ourselves.

  We cannot march and state Black Lives Matter when a police officer murders Mr. Floyd, yet every day we're seeing countless numbers of shootings in Chicago's South Side, Throughout Brooklyn. We're seeing upticks in violence in Atlanta, all over California.

  And so we need to be consistent. If Black Lives Matter, if the lives of everyday people of color matter, then we need to look at every areas of the country where they're being impacted.

  But we can do it by, number one, prevention. For example, 30 percent of our prison population is presumed to be dyslexic. If we do dyslexia screening in all of our schools and give the services to families, we can prevent violence.

  But then we have to — be intervention. You can't have shooters in Times Square. That's going to impact our tourism. You can't have gang members taking over our streets and having people being slashed and shoved to the subway tracks. So we must have an intervention plan and a prevention plan.

  And we can do it to operate together.

• Judy Woodruff:

  So much to ask you about, Mr. Adams.

  One other issue certainly is COVID, New York City hit very hard in the beginning. Then it seemed to be under control. But now there's a small uptick in the number of cases of infection. The Delta variant is in the city. What is your plan for getting COVID under control?

• Eric Adams:

  Well, first of all, we need to use technology. I'm a big technology person.

  When I went into the police department, I was part of the team that created the first use of data to look at crime. We need to use it as the same with COVID. We should have had a real-time system to tell us how many vaccinations, vaccines were issued, what area, what zip code, where are we reaching herd immunity?

  Even in the testing in the beginning, we never used technology to, in real time, define how to fight COVID. COVID was always one step ahead of us. We can't continue to do that. And I'm going to really turn our city into a state-of-the-art, a real-time city, where we can analyze and address these issues more rapidly than we have.

• Judy Woodruff:

  The last thing I want to ask you about, just quickly, of course, is the economy.

  Your — the Big Apple took an enormous hit, with the pandemic, shutting down. Tourism came to a standstill. You now have an unemployment rate twice the national average. It was almost 11 percent in the month of may.

  Can New York ever fully come back?

• Eric Adams:

  Yes.

  And it's interesting. It's connected. Our economy is connected to public safety. Tourism is a major economic booster here in the city. No one is coming here if you shoot 3-year-olds at Times Square. Our transit system, people are afraid to be on the trains. We have to make sure our subway system is safe to get employees back into office space.

  And then we have to really look at what crime is doing to really discourage our high income earners; 65,000 people pay 51 percent of our income taxes, and they're leaving because they don't feel safe. And so, if we get crime under control, and then turn our city into a city where it is not too expensive, too bureaucratic and too difficult to do business, we will be ready to compete again.

  This is the Empire State, and we are going to start building empires again in New York.

• Judy Woodruff:

  Eric Adams, winner of the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City, congratulations. And thank you again.

• Eric Adams:

  Thank you very much. Take care.