May 16, 2024 NYC Office of the Mayor
Angela Yee: What's up? It's Way Up with Angela Yee. I'm here. My guy Maino's here.
Jermaine “Maino” Coleman: New Maino.
Yee: Okay, and as promised, Mayor Eric Adams is back in the building.
Mayor Eric Adams: I feel like it's my birthday with Maino around, man.
Yee: You like a million bucks.
Coleman: Good to see you, man. It's been a minute.
Mayor Adams: Yes, and let me tell you, this brother is so authentic. There was an issue around drill rappers where the music wasn't the issue. It was the fighting online that was turning into loss of lives and Maino hit me and he says, Eric, listen, I want to bring drill rappers to City Hall and we met that night..
Coleman: That’s a fact, that's a fact.
Mayor Adams: He brought a whole crew of brothers that night, rolled up in there. The security was like, wait, what was going on? I said, “Y'all got to go fall back.”
Yee: They had you getting sturdy?
Coleman: No, I wanted them to have an opportunity to talk to the mayor. If we're going to have a conversation about drill rap, then it needed to be with real drill rap artists.
Yee: Right.
Coleman: So that we could hear both sides.
Yee: So that everybody could see what the other side is concerned.
Mayor Adams: Right, right.
Coleman: So that we understand what drill rap is, where it comes from, what the energy is, what the feeling, what the loss and the pain is. We set it up and we had a good meeting.
Mayor Adams: It was good, and you know what it was is that the media was making it appear as though that here it is, you have a mayor that listened to rap, is attacking drill rappers.
When Maino brought us, everybody in the room, they started to say, wait a minute, that's not what was reported. That is what is happening to us, man. People are like in the middle of our family conversation and we got to go do that.
Cats like you that has that street credibility and you sack a pickup, I can hit Eric anytime. I know that's a lot to drop on your shoulders, but we need brothers like you to say, “Let's get everybody in the room.”
Yee: Right now I'm with my guy Maino and we're talking to the mayor of New York City, Eric Adams.
What I would say, because you'll get criticism for being out and about, but I also on the flip side of that, I always tell people at least you can hit up the mayor, run into him, stop and talk to him. Even if he wants to say something crazy, he's still going to …
Coleman: There's an accessibility that we didn't have before.
Mayor Adams: Right. People don't realize what my goal is. I'm an urban man and I need people to know that you can be your authentic self. I'm trying to break these models.
Now, if I just broke those models and didn't produce, then people would say, well, you can't produce. No, I inherited a city that in Black unemployment was four times the level of white unemployment. Crime was soaring. No jobs want to come here. Independent financial experts did not want to invest in our city. Our children wasn't learning.
Two years later, more jobs we have now, brother, in the history of the city. Black unemployment has been cut in half, for the first time since 2019 is under 8 percent. We're outpacing the state in reading and writing with our children in school. Double digit decrease in homicides, shootings. The independent financial experts that look at cities and say, should you invest in them? They raise my standard, my bond ratings and say, this guy's managing the hell out of the city.
People bought the headlines. He hangs out all the time. He dresses too fancy. He can't manage his system. Not Eric Adams, David Dinkins. That's the same thing they said about David Dinkins.
Yee: Right. Our first black mayor.
Mayor Adams: Right. Read what they did to David and then now look at …
Coleman: It’s the same, to try to apply the same …
Mayor Adams: They want to make it seem like we can't manage complex cities. I'm managing the hell out of this city.
Yee: All right. Eric Adams is in the building. He's the mayor of New York City. We got a lot, a lot of questions.
Coleman: Yes, man, I can't wait to ask them about a few things.
Yee: Alright, we have more with Mayor Eric Adams when we come back, it’s Way Up.
[Music break.]
What's up? It's Way Up with Angela Yee. I’m Angela Yee, and Maino’s here.
Coleman: New Maino.
Yee: You know we're both from Brooklyn and Mayor Eric Adams used to be the Brooklyn Borough President. Now he's the mayor. Then as far as mental health awareness and mental health programming …
Mayor Adams: I’m glad you brought that up.
Yee: I know that's something big that right now we're talking about budgets for that and trying to figure out with some transparency what's happening with that. Because like we always say, we want to make sure that people don't end up going to jail that should be getting treatment. We want to do preventative things. That's always important.
Mayor Adams: Well said, well said. Here's the issue. This is what happened. A lot of people don't want to deal with. Advocates advocated to close psychiatric wards. This was years ago because of what happened in many psychiatric wards. The behavior was abusive, not proper care. People were left unkept.
They all advocated to close down the wards. People were sent out without the support system, so they went in the streets. Some people are dealing with severe mental health issues and they can't take care of themselves. Now you have them in the streets. Ambulance is called. We take them to the hospital, give them medication today. They go back to the streets until they do something like punch someone in the face.
Coleman: That is criminal.
Mayor Adams: Right. They must commit a crime. What do we do?
Coleman: We send them to jail.
Mayor Adams: We send them to Rikers. Brother, 54 percent of the people at Rikers Island have mental health issues. So, we close the psych wards. What do we do? We turn the psych ward into Rikers.
Coleman: That's right.
Mayor Adams: We should open a state of the art, quality psychiatric facility. One where you do meditation. Where you get people to eat right. Where you identify building community.
We could create a psychiatric ward that we don't have to go to the extreme. The extreme can be abusing people, then the other extreme is throwing them on the street and putting them in Rikers. Let's find that medium.
Yee: Let's invest in some health care professionals. That's what they do. We have facilities that are available that treat them like human beings that can actually help with that situation. You're not sending people back in the street.
Mayor Adams: Exactly. You know how many, how many people have loved ones and family members in their family that are going through severe mental health issues, and they will call up and there's no real place to give them the care.
Yee: Right. No one must have to call the cops for that because you get too scared. It's going to go left.
Coleman: Right. It should be a set of people like an agency that you can call.
Yee: They do have a lot of nonprofits that do that.
Coleman: Not just the cops. The cops are not trained to deal with mental health, right?
Mayor Adams: Well, they're trained, but believe it or not that uniform could trigger it off. People see the police and all of a sudden they could get agitated. That's why you want a civilian population to do this.
But you need the facility. Some people need long term care. It can't be something that you in for a day, get medicine and stabilize. No, you got to.
Coleman: You have nowhere where they can go.
Mayor Adams: Exactly.
Yee: All right. Now, when we come back, normally we would have the last word, but the mayor wants to have the last word, the mayor of New York City, Eric Adams.
We're going to let him do that because he has to clear some things up about migrants being excellent swimmers and being able to fix the lifeguard shortage. That is the headline. It's Way Up.
[Music break.]
What's up? It's Way Up with Angela Yee. I’m here, Maino’s here, and Mayor Eric Adams is here and he has the last word for you guys.
We got to clear this up. The swimming situation. Maino said he's a great swimmer. He's willing to be a lifeguard if necessary. I don't know how to swim, I’m from Brooklyn.
Coleman: Yes, we will get us some lessons, though.
Yee: I want to clarify that because that was a bigger statement that was at a press conference. It became a huge headline. People asking you this question, what did you mean when you said, they said it was racist. I want you now to give context.
Mayor Adams: First of all, I ignore all that noise in the sentence police. The bottom line is there's a body of people who sit out there every day. They're in the Eric haters cheering section. No matter what I say, they're going to try to blow it up.
Look, I have been making it clear over and over again that there are jobs that are open. If you look at the whole comment I made, I said we have people who are migrants and asylum seekers who are health care professionals, nurses. We need nurses. We have people who are food service workers. We need food service workers. We have a shortage of lifeguards. We have those who know how to swim.
When I go to my HERRCs, like when we hold people. Because I'm saying to myself, what job we ought to be out here. How many of you are swimmers? Hands go up. I need lifeguards. We have people who are capable of swimming and we don't even want to hire them because they can't work.
Now, people say, well, you talking about South Americans are automatically swimming. No fool. We got people from West Africa. What's wrong with you? They wanted to turn their little minds, turn it into, oh, you're talking about South America. No, get off the sidelines and stop playing the word police and get your ass down here and solve these problems.
So if I get caught up on everyone that say “We don't like the way Eric said this sentence,” I won't get any work done. I'm an authentic urban mayor and there's never going to be another mayor that's going to be afraid to be authentic again because they saw how successful I have been.
Yee: All right. That's a lot. I know you're going to be back.
Mayor Adams: Maino.
Yee: Because every day there's a new, I was saying up here before you got here, I would say Mayor Eric Adams is the most talked about mayor nationally. I would say…
Coleman: He outside. You going to see him on the news. You going to see him outside.
Yee: Last, people need to know his son is a rapper too.
Mayor Adams: Yes. J –, he goes under the name Jayoo, I asked him the other day. I said, “Listen, Jordan, you get older when you get married.” He said “After you.”
Yee: I feel you.
[Laughter.]
Coleman: I like that. Yeah.
Yee: Now you can say that you and Maino.
Coleman: That's for real, like yeah. We all here, we all try to figure it out.
Yee: And me, well We could do a reality show.
Mayor Adams: You still doing your podcast?
Coleman: I'm not doing that one no more. I'm doing this almost every day with her. I got another one that I'm working on. It's called Backtalk.
Mayor Adams: We did it, man.
[Crosstalk.]
Little henny, you know what I’m saying. We had a good time, though
Yee: My gosh. Again, thank you so much.
Mayor Adams: Good seeing you, all of you. Love you, love you.
Yee: Appreciate you.
You can watch the full interview on my YouTube channel Way Up With Yee. Of course, you guys, we will see y'all tomorrow.
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