Quality of life in the City. Taking illegal bikes off the street.

0:00 Speaker 1 With us today is Chief John Shell of the New York Police Department, and we’re talking this Sunday morning, the quality of life. What the heck is going on? Chief Shell? New Yorkers, they want to stay in New York. They love New York. The buzzword is the quality of life.

0:22 Let’s talk about it this Sunday morning.

0:25 Speaker 2 So great to be with you, John. Quality of life. I’ve always said, kuale life is part of our perception piece how people feel. And the big the big issues we’ve deal with now and happened dealing for the last couple of years have been illegal mopeds, illegal ghost cause smoke shop has been a big issue for the last

0:45 couple of years, homeless and cammon. So I’ll go through each one quickly. When it comes to illegal mopeds, we’ve taken now as of this morning, a little shy of forty two thousand in the last three years. And these mopeds, besides being quality of life and being illegal on registered no insurance, they’re also causing us crime issues as it

1:05 relates to two of our cops getting shot a couple of weeks ago, to robberies, to person matches, and it’s no secret that mopezs are being driven by homegrown New Yorkers, if you will, and now by migrants who are a big portion of this. So we’re attacking the mope as the best we can. We’re making headway, but a lot

1:24 to do.

1:27 Speaker 1 Last week we had a meeting myself and my chief of staff, former FBI George Venizelos, and Judge Richard Weinberg, who was general consul to the former Speaker of Peter alone with mister Banks, your deputy mayor, and we brought up the quality of life and he feels that our discussion that we’re having now we have to get improved.

1:53 I mean we’re restricted. I guess we’re restricted a little bit on the bail reform Lewis, But there’s nothing in Orbanita restricts us from fixing the bicycles and not going the wrong way in the wrong one way streets and in hurting people and killing people.

2:11 Speaker 2 Well absolutely, And when you talk about bikes going the wrong way, their motive vehicles going the wrong way to high ready speed, we can see that reckless endangerment and reckless dangerment could be a misdemeanor or felony. But like I said, I’ve been saying recently, last time I checked, a misdemeanor is punishable up to three hundred and sixty

2:29 four days in jail. I guarantee you put someone in jail for a week or two for driving reckless a month, they won’t do that again. And those are that’s what it’s called consequences. We have to get better. We have the enforcement, But to your point, John, where are the consequences?

2:46 And this kind of segue is into what can a district attorney do? They’re suffering from staffing, bare reform as relates to the discovery is hurting their efforts. So it kind of all connects. But we as a police of we’re gonna keep plugging away at it, doing the best we can to keep me up for safety and improve

3:04 that quality of life.

3:05 Speaker 1 And we agree one hundred percent, because, uh, you can’t go across the street without fearing for your life. The other thing, uh uh so do you have a special hit squad for these bicycles going the wrong way and and going through red lights and et cetera.

3:26 Speaker 2 Absolutely, the bulk of reinforcement has been spearheaded by our community response. Seeing those cops. You’ve seeing the tan pants all the time, they really have done a good job taking them off the street. And like I said, less than a little shy of forty two thousand in two years is a really big number. And we try to

3:46 crush them once in a while to send the send those people a messages. We’re gonna, we’re gonna, we’re gonna crush your bikes that are legal. So get a big effort. And let me say it again, John, one thing being illegal and drive for recklessly. But what’s coming murderers, guns, police shooters, robbers. It’s really it’s really an issue for.

4:09 Speaker 1 Us, understood. Uh. The other quality of life issues is somebody to drugs through us. So many of the supermarkets part of some of them, I own. Uh, the problem with choplifters, the problem with locking everything up, you.

4:30 Speaker 2 Know, a terrible and that’s so you’re talking about retail theft, right, but that is also a quality of life discussion. Think about it. Remember years ago when you go down to the corner store. Mom would send you down to the store and you pick us some toothpaste and you walk in, you walk into the walmart and you grab tooth and

4:46 now it’s locked. People don’t want to see that. But the reason it’s locked. Is because again, repeat offenders who are committing crimes are not doing jail time. And this goes back to consequences, right. People don’t want to ask the clerk to unlock the lock to grab a tooth I think of Colgate toothpaste. They don’t want to see

5:11 people wrestling with the security guard overstealing property. If we it’s a small amount of people who are commenting a lot of retail thefts, you take them out of the mix. No more locks on a toothpaste.

5:23 Speaker 1 And the other item is but this is an item for a city in our state, is the smoke shops that sell marijuana. I think that is supposed to be like back eight or ten legal shops, but just sixteen hundred legal ones or something.

5:41 Speaker 2 So just you know, the governor or the state legendary passed a law for us. We’re now working with the sheriff. We’re going to use a number of twenty eight hundred smoke shops city Wy. Twenty eight hundred. In the last six weeks we’ve shut down. We’ve padlocked about twelve percent of those. We permanently shut down about one hundred and

6:07 fifty in five weeks. We’re having great success. I hate use the word great. I don’t use big words with the sheriff in this endeavor, and we hate these smoke shops.

6:17 Speaker 1 May maybe the mayor should sign an executive order and go after the landlords of these smoke shops. Maybe you’ll get better results too.

6:26 Speaker 2 Well, that’s built in so when we shut down a smoke shop and then landlord tries to open up a new business, it’s not going to be that easy for the landlord. That is a consequence of byproduct of selling someone who’s committing illegal crimes. Visa vie meloan matter Whanna Johnny, there’s mushrooms, there’s guns in those store, there’s other drugs

6:48 in those store. So this consequences to the landlord.

6:52 Speaker 1 Also, we got thirty seconds left. Anything else you want to tell the all New Yorkers on a Sunday morning.

7:00 Speaker 2 Look, the New York City Police Department is working very hard to continue to make the city the best in the world, and I can assure them we will do anything of power to improve the choir life, keep the coldinals off the street, and keep them safe.

7:18 Speaker 1 Chief John Shell, thank you for everything you do and all the work you’ve done to help New Yorkers and continue to speak out for New Yorkers, and we’ll catch up again.

7:28 Speaker 2 Real soon, my pleasure. Thanks you for the platform, John, Thank you