Crime and Qualifications at Issue in Heated N.Y.C. Mayoral Debate

The Democratic candidates for mayor of New York City forcefully attacked their opponents’ records and ethics in starkly personal terms on Wednesday night, tangling over how they would address growing concerns over rising violent crime and the city’s economic recovery.

In their first in-person debate of the campaign, the eight leading contenders battled over crime, justice and the power of the police, questions of education and charter schools and, in the debate’s most heated moments, the issue of who is qualified to lead the nation’s largest city.

The debate was the first opportunity for the candidates to confront each other face to face, and the setting and the timing — just 20 days before the June 22 Democratic primary — elevated the importance and the tension of the gathering.

One of the most heated exchanges unfolded between Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, and Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate — two contenders who have generally been considered the front-runners, though the race is tightening.

“Eric, we all know that you’ve been investigated for corruption everywhere you’ve gone,” Mr. Yang charged, accusing Mr. Adams of involvement in a “trifecta of corruption investigations.”

“Is that really what we want in the next mayor? he asked. “Did you think you were going to enter City Hall, and it’s going to be different? We all know it’s going to be exactly the same.”

Mr. Adams, who defended his integrity, noted Mr. Yang’s lack of past political experience in the city and remarked, “You do not vote in municipal elections at all. I just don’t know — how the hell do we have you become our mayor, with this record like this?”

The candidates laid out their ambitions on vital city issues, including how to account for educational losses during the pandemic and the need to boost small businesses.

The debate also touched on broader thematic questions: whether New York needed a political outsider with boldly ambitious ideas, or a leader with traditional experience in city government who might be more knowledgeable about how to tackle the staggering challenges that await the next mayor.

Mr. Yang, who spent months running as an above-the-fray front-runner who billed himself as a cheerleader for New York City, has demonstrated a growing willingness to lace into his opponents — especially Mr. Adams — in recent days. He is seeking to cast the race as a choice between a change candidate and sclerotic status quo contenders, as he competes against others who have the kind of significant city government experience he lacks.

The candidates took the stage at a moment of extraordinary uncertainty in the race, even as the contest nears its conclusion.

In recent weeks, Kathryn Garcia, the former sanitation commissioner, has demonstrated real traction in both sparse public polling and more concretely, in fund-raising numbers — potentially joining Mr. Yang and Mr. Adams as front-runners.

Those three candidates all have distinct bases, but they are in direct competition over some moderate white voters, and Mr. Yang and Mr. Adams have both criticized Ms. Garcia in recent weeks in a sign of her emerging strength — and a sharp departure from their previous friendly postures toward her.

But onstage, the fire was directed more often at Mr. Yang and Mr. Adams than at Ms. Garcia, who pitched herself as a steady and serious government expert. She stayed out of the fray during the debate, but also at times was out of the spotlight.

“We don’t need a politician right now,” Ms. Garcia said. “And perhaps from this stage, maybe you will agree with me.”

The first hour of the debate, co-hosted by WABC-TV, aired on broadcast television and may have been the biggest stage yet for the mayoral candidates, though the station pre-empted the second hour with a game show, “Press Your Luck,” forcing viewers to switch to another channel or an online stream.

After months of staid online forums, the debate on Wednesday took on the trappings of a prize fight, with fans of the candidates holding rallies outside the Upper West Side television studio, waving signs, blaring music and mixing with the contenders.

Inside, several of the candidates appeared eager for confrontation. In the tense exchanges between Mr. Yang and Mr. Adams, Mr. Yang suggested that Mr. Adams’s advice about confronting others over the use of illicit fireworks led to a woman’s death, and Mr. Adams said at another point that people of color are “wrongly accused often in this country” and called on Mr. Yang to apologize for his insinuations on corruption.

Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller who maintained a low profile in the first debate, issued bitter denunciations of several of his rivals. “As your consultants have told you time and time again, they admit you are an empty vessel,” Mr. Stringer said to Mr. Yang, peering over his podium to address the former presidential candidate directly. “I actually don’t think you are an empty vessel. I think you are a Republican who continues to focus on the issues that will not bring back the economy.”

Mr. Stringer, who is casting himself as a progressive with deep government experience, also ripped Maya Wiley, the former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, claiming she had been a “rubber stamp” for the Police Benevolent Association when she chaired the Civilian Complaint Review Board.

And he suggested that Mr. Adams and others believe “the only solution to preventing crime is going back to the Giuliani days with stop-and-frisk and a Republican agenda that put a lot of kids in our criminal justice system.”

Ms. Wiley, who defended her tenure, slammed Mr. Yang’s record leading Venture for America, the nonprofit he ran before running for president, over its record of job creation and how, records show, he failed to recruit many participants of color. And in one of the most revealing exchanges of the night, she and Mr. Adams had an extended back-and-forth over remarks he made about guns.

“Mr. Adams has said he’s carried a gun to church, he has asked off-duty officers to carry guns to church, he’s said he will carry a gun as mayor,” Ms. Wiley said. “Eric, isn’t this the wrong message to send our kids we’re telling not to pick up the guns?”

Mr. Adams stressed that he saw a distinction between off-duty officers carrying guns and the proliferation of illegal guns, describing an incident that occurred when he was a transit police officer, and he stopped an anti-Asian hate crime on a subway train.

“I was off-duty, I was able to stop those armed perpetrators from carrying out the actions while off-duty,” he said. “The state law states that a police officer can carry off-duty because he has to respond 24 hours a day to any crime that is taking place in this city.”

“We also had an off-duty officer shoot his friend and murder him carrying his gun,” Ms. Wiley shot back.

Ms. Wiley is working to assemble a coalition of both voters of color and white progressives, and she has increasingly billed herself as “the progressive candidate that can win this race,” as she seeks to emerge as the left-wing standard-bearer in the race. On Tuesday, she released a striking ad highlighting the police attacking peaceful protesters, betting that the attitudes around reining in police power that animated Democrats and others following the killing of George Floyd last year remain resonant.

Mr. Adams, a Black former police captain who pushed for change from within the system, has in some ways made a very different bet about the mood of the electorate regarding public safety. Amid a spike in shootings, jarring episodes of crime on the subway and a spate of hate crimes around the city, he has argued that public safety is the “prerequisite” to prosperity even as he also presses for policing reforms. He sees a need for more police in the subway system, while Ms. Wiley has said the focus should be on more mental health professionals.

“No one is coming to New York, in our multibillion dollar tourism industry, if you have 3-year-old children shot in Times Square,” Mr. Adams said. “No one is coming here, if you have people being pushed on the subway because of mental health illnesses. If we’re going to turn around our economy, we have to make this city a safe city.”

“We can’t do safety at the expense of justice,” Ms. Wiley said. In an implicit swipe at Mr. Adams’s positions, she added, “We cannot, and that means we can’t have stop-and-frisk back, or the anti-crime unit.”

For much of the race, the battle for the left has been crowded, as Mr. Stringer and Dianne Morales, a former nonprofit executive, sought to engage the most deeply progressive voters in the city along with Ms. Wiley.

Mr. Stringer is a well-funded candidate with significant labor support, but an accusation that he made unwanted sexual advances 20 years ago — which he denies — sapped his momentum and appears to have complicated his ability to grow beyond his Upper West Side base. Onstage, though, he was one of the most vigorous combatants.

Ms. Morales was a favorite of the activist left, but her campaign has been embroiled in inner turmoil to an extraordinary degree, with a bitter unionization battle spilling into public view.

Ms. Wiley’s challenge is to both unite and energize the most liberal voters in the party around her candidacy, and her ability to do so is not yet clear.

Shaun Donovan, the former federal housing secretary, and Raymond J. McGuire, a former Citi executive, both took the debate stage as well-funded candidates who have struggled to gain significant traction.

In different ways, both Mr. Donovan and Mr. McGuire sought to cast themselves as city government outsiders with serious executive experience who can fix the problems that have daunted others more closely tied to the current administration.

“Other candidates on this stage have had a chance, these last eight years, to make progress,” Mr. Donovan said. “I would leave New York in a new and better direction.”

Or as Mr. McGuire put it, borrowing from President Barack Obama, “I’m the change that you can vote for. I’m the change that you can believe in.”

Emma G. Fitzsimmons contributed reporting.