Despite being nearly 40 points behind his Democratic opponent in the polls, the Republican candidate for New York City mayor, Joe Lhota, is campaigning hard to reach as many New Yorkers as possible before Election Day.
In debates and commercials, Lhota has come out swinging at opponent Bill de Blasio. In one recent ad, Lhota depicts a city besieged by crime if de Blasio is elected. For its use of images from a 1991 race riot in Brooklyn, many have called the ad “race baiting” and “divisive” but the Lhota campaign has defended its message and the aggressive campaign against de Blasio.
TheGrio sat down with Lhota days before the final mayoral debate to discuss the controversial ad, his vision for the city and how he thinks stop-and-frisk can be applied fairly.
theGrio: Describe your vision for New York City?
Joe Lhota: I want to make sure that we reform our public school system, which is in severe need of reform. We also have a city that’s becoming unaffordable and that has to be addressed. I also want a safer city. Finally, I believe it’s important for the mayor to create an environment where the private sector can create more jobs to diversify our economy.
Also See: theGrio’s Q&A with Democratic candidate for NYC mayor Bill de Blasio
The only way that I know, and most economists know, to make a difference in income inequality is to have an expanding economy, a growing economy that allows people who are unemployed to become employed, for those who are underemployed to get better paying jobs.
That requires New York City to be a magnet. And there are two types of magnets. There are magnets that attract and there are magnets that repel. I want New York City to be a magnet that attracts businesses here. And it’s very important we use our tax policies to do it.
Public schools – the mayor is responsible for making sure that 1.1 million kids get a proper education. We’re not doing a good enough job right now. We need to really reform our public school system. We need to get rid of a lot of what I believe is middle management within the department of education and get as much more money into the classroom.
Let’s talk about public schools. Where do you think the city is failing?
I don’t think what we have now is a money problem. We have a spending problem when it comes to education. What I mean by that is, we’re not spending it in the classroom the way we should. We’re not spending it with the teachers, getting them the professional development and training they need to be excellent teachers. I want them all to be excellent teachers.
I’ve been on the board of City University of New York for years now. We intersect with high school graduates who want to go to any one of our seven community colleges. Last year was the worst in the 12 years I’ve been on the board. Graduates of New York City high schools, 81 percent of them were deemed incapable of doing college-level work based on their entrance exam. That’s a shocking number to me.
And so, at the university level, we set aside about $35 to $36 million in remedial education for reading, writing, and arithmetic. To have 81 percent… think about that, the kids who want to go to college to lift themselves up. And the school system failed them. So, CUNY is spending money to do the job that the public school should have done. We really have to change our public schools because we have to give our kids a chance to be successful. I want these kids to be able to get the jobs that are created here in New York.
There has been historically, as you know, a disconnect between black New Yorkers and law enforcement. How would you work to build a better relationship between the two?
It has to get better. It’s not in the shape it should be.
Mayor Bloomberg has stopped having town hall meetings. That has to change. The city is divided into community boards. The mayor would pick one community board area a month, rotating from the different boroughs. He’d find the largest auditorium in that community, bring all the deputy mayors and all the commissioners from six o’clock till nine o’clock at night. No tickets. The entire community was invited to come for an opportunity to ask the mayor or the commissioners any question they want. The most important part of that, when I was there, was listening, because you heard what was really going on in the communities.
The next mayor needs to do that a lot more. I think the police commissioner needs to have separate town hall meetings and also attend the mayor’s meetings. We need to enhance the communication between the community and NYPD. It’s very, very important. We need commanding officers who understand what the community needs and the community to understand what the commanding officer needs.
Also See: Federal appeals court blocks ruling on NY police stop-frisk policy
Please lay out what effective and constitutionally sound policing would look like under your administration?
Stopping someone based on racial profiling – because [of] the color of their skin or the fact that their pants are hanging down too low – that’s a violation of someone’s civil rights. It’s a violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution; illegal search and seizure. That cop not only should be disciplined, but should be separated from service. No if, ands or buts about it. I’m going to get in trouble with the police union for saying that but I don’t care. Anybody who does that is wrong and should not wear a badge.
That being said, cops need to be trained and retrained and then retrained again. And the community needs to know what that training is. I understand that the community feels that stop-and-frisk has been abusive. Ray Kelly has actually dropped the number of stops by 40 percent and it should never get back to where it was or how it was being used. No one should be stopped for anything other than suspicious activity.
Isn’t there something wrong with the policy, however, when you see nearly 90 percent of stops not resulting in an arrest?
Remember, let’s go back to the court. Go back and read Terry v. Ohio. The Supreme Court fully understands that a stop doesn’t always end up in arrest because suspicious activity in and of itself is not a crime. The court, however, gave police officers the right to stop someone based on suspicious activity. If that suspicion turns out to not be correct, that person doesn’t get arrested.
I’ll give you an example that the courts use: If somebody is walking down the street and they try to open up a car door and it doesn’t open. They go to the next car and try to open the door. They go to the next one…Cop should stop that person right on the spot. That’s suspicious activity. Why are they going to three separate cars to open it? They’ll talk, they’ll question and possibly, based on the questioning, they will get tossed or frisked. And that person, if they don’t have a firearm on them, if they come up with some cockamamie story about why they were doing it, they won’t be arrested. It goes back to the community understanding how cops are trained, what they can do and why.
On the topic of public safety, I have to ask about the recent ad. It has come under fire, with people calling it “race baiting” and “divisive.” Did you worry about it being perceived as either?
Neither. Neither, neither. It’s not race baiting because I worked real long and hard to make sure that the scenes did not include African-Americans. There’s only one and it was a businessman in a suit, and a leather jacket and a pair of shoes sitting on the subway with earphones in his ear. So, I purposely did that.
It’s unbelievable to me that people look at these pictures and assume that they’re racial when they’re not. And it bothers me that people see criminal activity and think it’s race baiting. Anybody who believes that what happened in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s in New York, only happened because of racial issues, the facts don’t bear that out. And that’s what concerns me; that people absolutely believe that crime back then only resided in one community.
Also See: NYC mayoral race now has its ‘Willie Horton ad’
I’ve been going back and forth because I believe Bill de Blasio’s policies or lack of policies will throw us back to a period of time. I was in front of the 67 Precinct this morning in Brooklyn where there’s been a 166-percent increase in shootings in the last month. Rape is up significantly. We’ve seen robberies increase 70 percent in one month.
Bill has not put forward one proposal, not one proposal that would talk about how he would deal with getting crime lower than it is now. I don’t like the status quo. I think the status quo is unacceptable. The crime levels are still too high and we’ve got to get them down. We’ve got to get guns off the street. We’ve got to make every street in New York safe.
Finally, who are the former New York mayors you admire most and what would you borrow from them?
Fiorello LaGuardia, going back to the ’30s and early ’40s, was an outgoing mayor. He spent an enormous amount of time communicating with the communities and did a very, very good job of it. He went so far as to go on the weekends on WNYC radio and read the cartoons on the Sunday papers to all the kids in the city of New York. He was known as The Little Flower but he was an unbelievable, outgoing personality.
I thought Ed Koch had a great mix of being funny and stern all at the same time. Rudy Giuliani had a focus that I’ve never seen in a mayor before or after. He came in because of crime-related issues and he really focused on crime, but he brought in other people like me to deal with financial issues, because that was not his forte. Those are mayors that I admire.
Follow Donovan X. Ramsey at @iDXR.