00:00deliver on this agenda that we've laid forward. Okay, speaking of people who are willing to push
00:04you, there's a bit of news that happened just as you were arriving. The NYPD commissioner,
00:10Jessica Tish, spoke at the Citizens Budget Commission breakfast this morning and apparently
00:15began by saying, and I'm quoting now, in my opinion, crime went up as a result of the drastic
00:21changes being made in our criminal justice laws in New York State, not as a result of the pandemic.
00:27So a lot of journalists here wanted to give you a chance to respond.
00:32I have a different opinion. My opinion is one that looks at the spike in crime across the country
00:41over the course of the pandemic and sees similar spikes regardless of what any of those one states
00:49pursued with regards to criminal legal reform. And I think we've even seen with Raise the Age
00:56that there are fewer arrests of younger New Yorkers than there were prior to the implementation of
01:02that legislation. However, there continue to be issues with that implementation. I think chief
01:06among them is that about two-thirds of the amount of money that was allotted still remains unspent
01:11in Albany. And that is money that was critical to ensuring that these reforms are not just ones that
01:17are changed in the legal code, but they're also felt and experienced in the investments that were
01:22intended to accompany them. Now, you were elected to the assembly for the first time at the height of
01:29the pandemic in 2020. What's your sense of kind of where society was and how that might have affected
01:36public safety?
01:41It was a deeply unsettling time for many people. So much of what we had come to... I apologize,
01:49I should have poured you water. I thought it would take too long.
01:56It was a time when so much of what New Yorkers had come to rely on as the facts of their life were
02:02thrown into debate. And we even saw this with the larger conversation about shutting down schools.
02:11It wasn't just that they were schools. It's also that they were, for many New Yorkers, the primary
02:17place where they interacted with city government, almost a site of social services. And I think that
02:22I heard briefly in some of the introductory remarks about an allusion to the sense of unease
02:31that people felt at that moment and continue to feel to some degree now. And when I ask New Yorkers
02:36where they feel that the most or their heightened anxiety, they often speak about the subway system.
02:43And much of that unease is not actually captured in any statistic. It's not captured in CompStat.
02:50And yet it is something that is present on the minds of New Yorkers. And I can just tell you
02:55myself, as someone who grew up in this city, not too many blocks from where we are right now,
03:01that I have a few speeds when I take the train. One is my headphones are in, the music is on. The
03:09other is the headphones are in and there's no music playing. And the other is I'm taking the
03:12headphones out of my ears. And all of this is in relation to what I am seeing there on that subway
03:17car. And I know that for many New Yorkers, it is the same. It is the possibility that what could be
03:22banal could turn into something else. Have you ever been a victim of crime or faced a sort of a near
03:28encounter, a frightening encounter? I have been held up at gunpoint. Okay. Once in my life. It was
03:33actually in Atlanta. Oh.
