Candidates line up to take on the Mayor.

0:00 Speaker 1 What is this Sunday morning? Is Tom Allen an American newspaper, magazine, digital media. He does it all in media, and he’s been around New York with me. Bo. We’re together for at least forty years, one way or another, through magazines and through newspapers. Tom Allen, is this the worst you ever seen in New York?

0:22 Speaker 2 No, John, I grew up in New York in the nineteen sixties and seventies. New York was in a pretty bad shape then. If you remember the movie Death Wish back in the mid seventies, that was a pretty accurate depiction of what New York was like then. It wasn’t really until the early nineteen nineties, you know, during the

0:40 Giuliani administration and end of Dinkin’s administration, when things started getting better. I decided to raise my kids in New York in the nineties because New York was becoming a safe place again. I think he got bad a couple of years ago, about four or five years ago. I saw things declining under the Blasio, even before COVID happened.

0:59 But I think New York’s making a company.

1:02 Speaker 1 Well, I pray for it and uh and look New York deserves to survive, survived through so many crisises in the last forty years that at least we’ve been closer together for the last forty years. Uh, what do we have to do? I mean Eric Adams, Mayor Adams has his hands tied a little bit with some of the

1:24 laws in Albany. And I believe that. You know, Mike Janaris helps run the state Senate and and we have Carl Hasty runs the Assembly. Last week, Mike Janaris went to a right aid that was invaded in Astoria, that was in his district, that was invaded by migrants, and they put up on the roof, they put up a

1:54 flags of Puerto Rico, Panama, Palestine, and he says, we can live like this. Is there going to be a change in Webbening.

2:05 Speaker 2 I don’t know if there’s gonna be a change in Albany, but I think there is a broken cridinal justice system in New York and there has to be some changes coming out of the legislature to I think the pendulum swamp and wait too far in the other direction. But you know, I think, you know, the mayor came into

2:23 office a couple of years ago, and everybody had the hope that, as an ex cop who also was a critic of police overreach, that he would be able to find the right balance. I think the problem these days is that, as you said, his hands are tied, and there’s a lot of recidivius people who are going into

2:43 stores and robbing them over and over and over again, who are getting with with murder or at least theft, and it makes the city feel unsafe at times, and it makes the police department frustrated, and it makes everybody think New York is a hellish place.

3:00 Speaker 1 To be.

3:00 Speaker 2 I’m not saying that we should throw these people in jail, but there has to be some alternatives to just saying I’m loosening the streets again, to give them community service, you know, find them a huge amount of money for their crimes. Do something so people feel some pain when they break the law. You can’t just have the same person,

3:18 you know, in a revolving door going back on the street. There was a guy last week I read around the newspapers who sexually assaulted a woman. He was out and the next day he’s actually assaulted another woman. You can’t you.

3:31 Speaker 1 Can’t have Rockefeller laws. There used to be three strikes and you’re ound. I’ve said that politicians in New York and in Aubany, how many do you want? Five, ten, fifteen? Some people have been I’ve been, I have fifty strikes and they go free. The joke I tell is, people come in from New Jersey, commit a crime, they go

3:52 home for dinner. The people then people come in from New Jersey, commit a crime, get caught, and they still go home for dinner. Right, So the police commissioners, all the police commissioners have told me there’s about three thousand, three hundred repeat criminals that are either belong in a mental asylum or belonging in the prison. Why what else

4:17 can what else can we do? Do do politicians work for the eight million Americans that live in New York or do they work for the thirty three hundred criminals?

4:25 Speaker 2 Well, you hit it on the head when you said in a mental asylum. One of the big problems we have, John, is sixty percent of people that rikers have mental illness, and we’ve a broken healthcare system. And so you can’t have rikers and prisons in New York State and New York City be places to reform mentally ill The healthcare

4:46 system has to start doing that, and the criminal justice system should be a way to rehabilitate people who, you know, if they commit smaller crimes, you know, make them have alternatives to incarceration, Make them do you know, a lot of community work, make them pay huge fines, make them feel the pain, and rehabilitate them. Just run people away

5:07 in jail and lock of the key is not going to make you know, They’re just going to come out twenty to thirty years later a worse person. You look at some of the countries in Europe and around the world, they actually rehabilitate people who can make primes. Those people come out better people. We just say lock them up

5:24 in a hellish place and expect five years, ten years later that they come out as better people. And they come at as worse people.

5:30 Speaker 1 Maybe people were not meant to be along with the civilized people of the world. Have you ever considered that thirty three hundred, thirty three hundred out of eight million is not a big number?

5:42 Speaker 2 Listen, I’m not saying that there are some people who are impossible to rehabilitate, but there is. You know, our system is a broken system, starting with the criminal the mental health and healthcare system down to the criminal justice system, and all those things have to be repaired. And it’s going to take guts and alfany from the governor and

6:00 from the heads of the legislature all the way down to the mayor. Admit, you know, we’ve got you know, people walking on the streets who should be in psychiatric beds, and we and the and the previous governor.

6:13 Speaker 1 Meanwhile, meanwhile, how do you keep eight million New Yorkers happy and not moving out?

6:21 Speaker 2 You have to improve the quality of life in the streets. And again, I think this mayor has moved the needle in the right direction because I ride the subways of lots On and they’re not as bad as they were a year ago.

6:34 Speaker 1 But all the people that want to run from mayor, who are you supporting? Have you? Are you ready to support someone?

6:41 Speaker 2 So John, you know I’m a publisher and so I don’t publicly support anyone. I will tell you that I have always been a fan of Eric Adams, and I remain a fan. I think he’s definitely done some things that are are should be criticized. I think, you know, you’ve got people like Brad Langler running, You’ve got people

7:06 like Scott Stringer, who I like a lot. Andrew Cuomo is lurking in the wings. You know, people who can really manage complex systems and have done it before are the people you want run in the city. The reason why Mike Bloomberg was a great mayor was because he had managed a large company that he started from scratch,

7:24 just like you did, John, and you need people who know how to build things, how to manage complex situations, and how to hire great people and let them do their things. You know, the people that work in the Bloomberg Infustration Buy and Large were very, very talented people.

7:39 And Mike Bloomberg, if you remember, you know when you hired people, he’d say, don’t screw up, and then he would make them accountable.

7:46 Speaker 1 Tom Alan, tell everybody we haven’t told her. Give me all the publications you do in your main publication in New York. You used to do all the other small newspapers. What do you do now?

7:56 Speaker 2 So I run a company called City in State, which I sold about three and a half years ago to a Washington based company called Government Executive Media. City and State is the go to publication that everybody reads and government and around government. We put out three daily newsletters.

8:13 We put out a magazine forty eight weeks a year, and we do about fifty events a year. We expand it to Pennsylvania, we stand to Florida, and we’re hoping to be in other states around the country. And we are doing great journalism and non partners and journalism. John, I will tell you we’re not Democrats, We’re not Republican.

8:28 A coral la guardians and that’s.

8:31 Speaker 1 In tom out republican and that’s what I do with WABC. You know, it’s not about being a Republican, not about being a Democrat. It’s about being a New Yorker and caring about New York and not in caring about our country in the world. Thank you so much for coming on and we’ll catch up again real soon.

8:47 Speaker 2 Thank you, John, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.