The Seventh Episode of The Get Stuff Done Cast Cast

This is the Get Stuff Done Cast Cast. I’m Dave.

The Mayor of New York City, a city whose influence on culture cannot be overstated, has a podcast. The only person listening to it is a dog walker in Queens named Dave.

If you’re new I’d recommend listening to the first episode of this podcast (you do not need to listen to the mayor’s podcast at all, it’s very bad, that’s why I’m listening to it for you), and then if you like that, listening to the rest of the series in order. Of course, that suggestion should be weighed against the fact that I’m doing this weird thing at all, so do whatever feels right for you. Today, I’m talking about the 7th episode of mayor Eric Adams’ podcast, the Get Stuff Done Cast, titled S1 E07 Trash Talk: Composting, Rats and Other Garbage Items with Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch, released April 19th, 2023.

The mayor jumps right in, introducing his guest, Jessica Tisch, the Sanitation Commissioner, who is always coming up with new, innovative ways to do things, despite, in the mayor’s telling, everyone constantly saying “what’s she going to do about garbage” which is true, it’s all me and my friends and associates talk about.

The mayor says he first encountered Tisch in the police department when she transformed the department’s relationship to technology.

The mayor doesn’t really expand on this, but Tisch was the Deputy Commissioner for Information Technology at the NYPD starting in 2014. This is a civilian role, but I assume it had a lot of say in the ways in which the NYPD uses tech, including the ways in which the NYPD monitors the civilian population of NYC.

Tisch was appointed the 41st Commissioner of DSNY on April 18th 2022. I noticed that that was quite a bit of time after Adams took the job of mayor, on January 1st 2022, and that seemed odd because sanitation is a really important city service, so I checked wikipedia’s list of commissioners. Like I said, she’s the 41st. Edward Grayson was the 40th, serving as acting Commissioner from September 18th 2020 to December 31st 2020 (acting, because, I assume, his boss, Kathryn Garcia, was one of the many people running for the job that Eric Adams ultimately got). He was then promoted from acting to full commissioner, which he held from Dec 31st 2020 to April 14th 2022. Adams took over as Mayor, as I said, on January 1st 2022. Grayson retired on April 14th 2022. This doesn’t appear to be a surprise or like he was forced out or under a cloud of scandal or anything. Tisch was made Commissioner on April 18th. Who was commissioner in the four days between the two? Wikipedia has an entry in the chart for that span of time, and a question mark is the only thing it shows.

I don’t mean to over-read this, it’s probably just a scheduling issue. April 15th was a Friday. They got it done first thing Monday. Everything’s hard to coordinate in the COVID era. The trash still got picked up. I just thought it was kinda funny that for four days a city that processes the amount of garbage that NYC produces seems to have had no one running the department responsible.

One other note: none of that comes up in the interview, I looked it up, as well as looking up Tisch’s biographical sketch. This is one of the first times the mayor doesn’t ask someone to tell their inspiring story, possibly because her father, the CEO of Lowes, went to Cornell and Wharton, (he holds the political beliefs you’d expect) and she went to Harvard for undergrad, MBA and JD, graduating in 2008, and going immediately to work for the NYPD. It’s not that any of this makes her bad (it makes her possibly suspect, in my opinion, but I’m someone who makes a podcast like this one) but it does make her life story, for lack of a nicer way to put this, dull.

The mayor asks Tisch why she wanted the job, and she wants to provide necessary services to the city, which is nice. I certainly have no argument with her that DSNY is one of the most vital services the city provides. One of the ways it was clear how bad the acute phase of the initial Covid wave was, and how bad the first round of Omicron was, were the heroic efforts DSNY made to keep doing trash pickup, and the rare times in both phases where, due to the sheer number of sick people in every department, including theirs, they could not.

I also agree with her that NYC has not really upgraded or improved trash collection, certainly in the 22 plus years I’ve lived here. For those of you who don’t reside in NYC, you may be shocked when you visit to just see piles of bagged trash put out on street in front of otherwise very attractive buildings on trash pickup day. It’s loony tunes, everyone hates that this is how it’s done, except for rats.

The mayor, a man who has been repeatedly fined for rats in his brownstone, asks his DSNY commissioner to tell us how she’s handling NYC’s rat problem. I will say that the mayor does genuinely seem to hate rats and to want to rid the city of them.

The first anti-rat measure Tisch mentions is changing the amount of time trash stays on the streets. Every day we put out 23 million tons of trash on our curbs. That stays out for 14-16 hours until Sanitation comes the next morning. They’ve changed this by mandating that, instead of being allowed to put out trash as early as 4pm, the earliest it can go out is at 8pm.

Yeah, so the thing here, and I’m not an expert but this seems like common sense. Rats are nocturnal. If you see a rat in New York City while the sun is out you know you’re seeing a true monster that has achieved the psychotic lack of fear that one can only earn through extreme acts of horror. Do not approach a daytime rat.

The vast majority of rats are eating trash when there aren’t a lot of people on the streets, overnight.

Now one thing they’ve done that may move the needle somewhat is expanding the collection hours, so the midnight shift is now picking up 30% of the trash in the city. Seems good!

The mayor says that Tisch is looking at a “real cosmic shift with containers” which if they actually start containerizing trash I’ll forgive his weird implication that putting trash inside of hard to get inside of things is somehow a mind-blowing act that rends the very fabric of spacetime.

But I will take a moment to be a little depressed here. The trash containerization plan has gone through a pilot, and is now moving forward and the goal is to have business trash containerized completely starting in March of next year, and by this time next fall, they want to have 95% of residential trash containerized as well.

This is good, it will improve the city, and I’m happy it’s happening but come the fuck on, this is the greatest city in the world. . These changes, if they happen, will put NYC where Barcelona was a decade ago, never mind Helsinki. The bar has, throughout my lifetime, been so thoroughly buried that we’re spiking the football because we’re not going to have to regularly pick our way through exploded bags of diaper juice all over the sidewalk in one of the most expensive places to live in the world. This country used to make things! Mostly racist things, it’s true. I don’t even know. It’s not like anywhere is good or any government is good, but we deserve better things. Improvement is improvement but don’t act like meeting a basic goal of civilized existence is a win.

That’s if it even happens. There’s all kinds of lawsuits to come, I’m sure.

So anyway there’s like 5 minutes of back-patting between the mayor and the head of DSNY that they discovered metal boxes.

There’s some talk of dog crap and litter, and the commissioner wants New Yorkers to tell each other not to litter when they see each other littering, a thing I will not be doing, come on, have you met New Yorkers? I don’t need that. Also, given what they’re about to talk about, you’d think they wouldn’t need me, because:

She says they’re going after illegal dumpers hard, and no they aren’t. Tisch says that when she was at NYPD she deployed the citywide camera program - an interesting way of saying dystopian panopticon that has yet to stop a single crime - and that they’re using those cameras to catch dumpers, and again no, they aren’t. They just aren’t.

People dump because it’s easier than throwing trash away, and the reason it’s easier to drive your contractor garbage to, like, a quiet warehouse area of Flatbush, or to put it next to an already overflowing sidewalk garbage can next to a housing project is that there’s not a lot of places to legally get rid of this shit. There’s a lot of focus on catching the bad actors, and in more or less failing to do so, the mayor and his head of sanitation happily tell us that they’ve made life worse for everyone by making sure there’s monitored cameras ready to catch you picking your wedgie or sobbing quietly about how everything feels difficult and upsetting when you think no one’s looking, but a) cameras don’t stop dumpers, they move some small percentage of dumpers after dumpers get a fine for dumping they already did and b) giving people places to put trash would simply solve a lot of the issue here.

I live in NYC and I’m not sure how things are elsewhere, but it would be really hard to overstate how much surveillance of the population living here has increased over the last 20 years. There are cameras everywhere. Clearly cameras don’t stop crime, if they did, the sheer volume of them would tell the tale.

The other day I watched as two guys on the street who were clearly furious at each other wordlessly filmed one another as one loaded his truck and the other watched him, clearly planning to report him for some sort of truck filling infraction. I guess the truck filler was filming because he wanted his own record. Don’t really have a takeaway, it just struck me as, like, only recently possible, and not really making anyone feel great.

But I think it’s worth talking a bit about how extensive the surveillance is in NYC. Wikipedia has a long and comprehensive list of the NYPD’s powers and technologies, and they’re just one of the groups that monitors the people of New York City.

A few of the tools in their kit:

The Domain Awareness System is literally the largest digital surveillance system in the entire world, it uses 18,000 CCTV cameras. A bunch of cameras placed around the city also function as license plate readers. There’s a machine learning algorithm in the mix called Patternizr to connect potential suspects to unsolved crimes. The murder clearance rate for the NYPD dropped from 71% in 2019 to 56% in 2021. Slight rebound to 64% in 22, but still, 36% of murders go unsolved in NYC, no matter how many z’s get tossed at the problem.

Post 2001 the department established the Demographics Unit, you can probably guess what they did, and exactly how many leads their unit tasked with monitoring American Muslim life yielded, but in case you’re someone who believes that 24 is a documentary, it was zero, they spied on brown people for a decade because they felt that being brown and being a criminal were co-morbid and they uncovered zero leads. The CIA embedded in the department and nothing useful came of it.

For cellphone surveillance, the NYPD employs Stingray phone trackers, which impersonate cellphone towers. They’re able to read any and all unencrypted data flowing over them, and presumably that data is just read by the operators, without a warrant.

The NYPD maintains a gang database, which by February 2019 contained 42,000 names. Guess what percentage of the people in it are white. No matter how low you went, you’re probably wrong, it’s 1.1%. People are not informed they’re in this database, the criteria for inclusion are extremely vague, and include wearing any of the following colors: black, gold, yellow, red, purple, green, blue, white, brown, khaki, gray, orange or lime green. Being in this database is often a determining factor in the severity of charges that a defendant can face.

The facial recognition system has had a dedicated unit since 2011 that uses a database that includes mug shots, juvenile arrest records and pistol permits.

They have a fleet of X-Ray vans, allegedly capable of displaying the contents of vehicles they pass by.

They have a database of the genetic information of roughly 80,000 individuals, about half of which were never convicted of a crime.

They have a fleet of drones and helicopters outfitted with high resolution cameras, thermal and 3D imaging.

The NYPD is not known to use Pegasus, the infamous spyware that was found to be on Jamal Khashoggi’s phone after the Saudi government had him murdered, which can be deployed on a cell phone by simply sending the target a text, one that the target does not need to interact with. While it’s impossible to prove a negative, so we’ll never know for sure that the NYPD doesn’t use this software, what is known is that they have had it demo-ed for them by the manufacturer.

So that’s just a bit of the ways in which the NYPD can look into the phones, lives, backyards, picnics, orgies, eating contests, and so forth of your average, law abiding New Yorkers, with what amounts to no oversight. It’s weird that we wound up here when we were talking about the Sanitation Department. But, do keep in mind Tisch was the Deputy Commissioner, Information Technology for the NYPD from 2014 to 2019. These are programs she maintained, grew, tweaked, and in some cases helped to get off the ground.

A fun game to play is one I call, “How badly would the ACLU have freaked out about this in 1998?” I’m closer to the grave, maybe, than a bunch of folks listening, but if the city had pitched the idea of opening up a network of cameras around the city, and then monitoring every individual who appeared on those cameras to catch the relatively rare times that someone dumped garbage by a highway overpass before the turn of the millennium there would have been a mass mobilization in the streets. Now it’s just something this weird lady who likes turning on your phone’s front facing camera without you knowing about it pitches in casual conversation with the mayor and they congratulate themselves on how well it’ll work.

So it’s also worth asking if these technologies work in both the sense of getting us closer to a society that is just, but also in the sense of actually stopping or catching bad actors. I mentioned, in a previous episode, Frank James, the man who shot up a subway car in April of 2022. He had bad knees, was wearing a bright green vest (gang colors!) was in his 60s, and dropped his credit card at the scene of the shooting. He was filmed on multiple cameras in the subway system itself, and I’m sure his image was captured repeatedly on other cameras in the roughly 30 hours before he was apprehended by the police, during which time he was on foot, wandering around the city. He was caught after he called the tip line and tried to turn himself in at a McDonalds, only to move on when the police took too long to respond.

Now that’s only one case, but it’s also one where the entire police department was mobilized to find this guy.

For about 2 weeks maybe six months ago, a group of teenagers ran around a small, confined area of my neighborhood that’s about 10 square blocks, doing hit and run robberies of people on the street. The M.O. was always the same. One kid would approach the victim and ask for directions and a couple others would jump out of a car, hit the victim from behind and take whatever was on them. What appeared to be a gun was displayed sometimes, or they’d claim to have one, but they never shot anyone, no one was badly injured. But it was scary. I happened to be on the street right after one of these and was like the second person to come up on one of the victims. He had a bump on his head and was badly shaken up, as anyone would be. Someone had already called the cops, it took the cops roughly 20 more minutes to arrive. The ambulance got there well beforehand.

About five more of these robberies happened, one every couple of days before they stopped and, again, these kids were operating out of the same vehicle every time. In a city with license plate readers and cameras everywhere. By the third or fourth time the local paper had printed a description of the car and the plate’s number. Again, the cluster of attacks was in a 10 square block area.

I am not aware that the cases were ever solved or that anyone was ever arrested.

Take what you want from all that. In the episode of Adams’ podcast that we’re theoretically discussing our guest says that curbside composting is here, and it’s great, I love that they do it. Good job, seriously, DSNY. They congratulate themselves, and I don’t mind a bit.

Where was the snow last year, asks the mayor? Well, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is we don’t have to buy road salt this year, we’ve got plenty. The bad news is - and here you’d be forgiven for thinking the Commissioner is going to raise the issue of climate change and the disturbing new ways it’s becoming extremely evident that we live in a warming world, but no - the bad news is they need to find places to store the salt they bought last year in case it ever snows again.

Speaking of salt, the state was considering a bill that would have impacted the city’s salt purchasing ability, constraining the city, which buys salt from Chile that comes on barges, to only use salt from… someplace that they don’t name, but it would have had to be trucked in. The mayor says this was a good-intention-ed bill designed to purchase locally but it wouldn’t have been feasible. I cannot possibly weigh the merits or demerits of using one salt provider against another but, aside from the trucking (which I’m not sure is an environmental issue when weighed against the costs of barges that have to travel from a South American country located on the Pacific Coast to a North American city located on the Atlantic Coast), they don’t mention any downsides, they just keep hammering how well-intention-ed the idea was, which is, in my experience, a tell that someone just doesn’t want to do a thing, not that the thing is actually a bad idea. Good intentions sometimes create bad policy, but good intentions generally don’t get marshaled to change existing policies that are themselves good-intention-ed.

This is an interview with a member of his administration, so the mayor isn’t going to allow it to end without having her spend a decent amount of time praising him. She is invited to do so and responds gamely, informing the mayor “you have allowed us to run the highest level of cleanliness service that this city has ever seen.” which seems almost Trumpian in the way it’s phrased and constructed, that’s just not a metric anyone uses to measure anything.

She adds that they’re “solving a bureaucratic mess around the way the city deals with bureaucracy”. This has to do with graffiti removal, a subject so boring I sorta lost the thread at this point. Mazel tov if you made painting over paint easier, I guess.

The mayor asks her about how they’re doing on highway beautification and the levels spike as the listener is treated to the sound of Robert Moses cackling from his grave. Good news, the highways are about to get much cleaner, ha ha fucking great. The way to beautify highways, which have no business being within city limits, is to fucking get rid of every single one of them, Jesus fucking Christ.

The mayor mentions that when they were going after encampments in the city a lot of them were next to highway and underpasses. The mayor says they cleaned up 5000 encampments which is somehow not an indictment of the fact that there were 5000 encampments of people who had nowhere to live so they were sleeping under highway exit ramps.

They’ve added a second cleanup shift in our parks. How nice.

I do want to note that all of this stuff costs money, and I’ve mentioned in the past that the mayor has told every city agency to cut their budgets 15% by April of 2024. This might impact the morale at DSNY but the mayor doesn’t raise it when he mentions, and Tisch agrees, that everyone working at sanitation is incredibly, almost psychotically happy now that the Adams administration is in charge. Is it possible for them to become too happy? Well, we’ll just have to find out.

Wrapping up here, what was the mayor up to between the release of the previous episode on April 6th, 2023 and this one, on April 19th? Here’s a few quick highlights, by no means comprehensive. To do this I lean heavily on the reporting of two fantastic New York City outlets, The City, and Hell Gate, both of which I support financially, and I encourage you to do so as well. Links to their websites are in the show notes.

Well, he continued to paint the city as a hellhole, state that migrants are responsible, and that none of that is his fault. It actually isn’t his fault, because migrants can’t be responsible for a thing that’s not true. Anyway, this time the person who is to blame for the city being overrun is apparently Joe Biden, who in Adams’ telling, abandoned the city of New York.

Adams talked about rats quite a bit on this episode and for some reason he failed to mention that a week before it came out he appointed a rat czar to take control of reducing NYC’s rat population. Good luck to Kathleen Corrradi on that front.

A parking garage in the Financial District collapsed, killing an employee who worked there. The garage had open violations with the Department of Buildings for having obviously cracked concrete. The FDNY sent one of the city’s Robot Dogs that the mayor is always bragging about, to the scene to investigate and it immediately fell over.

Search and rescue is, of course, a reasonable use case for a robot, as is bomb disposal, which is why the NYPD is getting in on the action. They bought a bunch of robots to do none of that, their robots are going to “patrol” the subway, and if you can hear the air quotes on patrol, those are there because these weird vibrator looking things are going to mostly roll around filming everything that happens without anyone’s consent while 5 human cops protect them from what would obviously happen to a robot that was put in the subway system if it didn’t have armed guards around it at all times. NYPD, always expanding the job of policing, now providing security to robots.

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