The Twenty-Seventh Episode of the Get Stuff Done Cast Cast

Season Two: Episode 1

This is the Get Stuff Done Cast Cast, my name is Dave. The mayor of New York City, a city around which Pace Picante Salsa once made an entire ad campaign centering the idea that cowboys would literally murder you if you told them the salsa you had was from here, the mayor of the place, Eric Adams, where I have good salsa all the time, fuck you Pace, that mayor, Eric Adams, has a podcast called the Get Stuff Done Cast. The only person listening to it is a dog walker from Queens with a lot of opinions about salsa, evidently, named Dave.

Welcome to season two of this podcast, so called because to the extent that Eric Adams is acknowledging that his podcast went away for about half a year, he’s only doing so by titling his most recent episode, released March 12th S2 E01 - Hidden In Plain Sight: Human Trafficking in NYC. S2 E01, if you’re not keeping up on the naming conventions of The Get Stuff Done Cast, seems to imply that we’re on to season two, and the first episode thereof. Last season, I came to his pod late - I was one of the everyone who was unaware that he was making his podcast for most of the time he was making season one - so I played a lot of catch up. I’m planning on turning around these episodes more or less as he records new eps of his pod, but I’m a few weeks behind his most recent effort, since, as frequent listeners will be aware, I had to first finish getting through a miniseries on Eric Adams’ books that I started during the six months he wasn’t recording. I say “had to” like there was some sort of amulet or cursed tablet involved, but I’m doing this to myself. Anyway.

We’ll get to the mayor’s pod shortly, but there’s been a significant amount of news in the past couple weeks related to Eric Adams, so we should chat a bit about that.

The Breakfast Club is an NYC based radio show that’s syndicated around the country, streamed to the web, and I think simulcast on BET. When discussing it, most people will say that they don’t listen to or watch it and also they don’t like it, it’s problematic, the hosts are jerks, one might be a sex creep, etc, and then, once they’ve given those caveats, they’ll tell you about something that happened on it, and I am not like most people most of the time, but here, well, yeah. Anyway, Eric Adams went on The Breakfast Club to talk over how things are going. The hosts also had on Olayemi Olurin whose bio describes her as “a movement lawyer, political commentator, writer, and abolitionist thinker.” Based off of that, if you think Eric Adams looked bad during this interview, you’d be wrong, he looked fucking terrible.

Adams came off as petulant, misogynistic and insane. Olurin held his feet to the fire on his rhetoric around policing and safety. For his part, he repeatedly turned his back on her while she was talking to make snide asides to the other hosts, who seemed more or less unamused by him. At one point Charlamagne told him to loosen his tie, it was gonna be a long day. A truly unsettling moment came near the end when Adams suggested that the reason the migrant situation is so bad in Chicago, LA and NYC is because southern governors are sending migrants to cities run by Black mayors. Do racist whites, generally, want to see Black mayors fail? Yes, of course. But migrants are human beings that have agency and they go to places they’d like to live, usually because people they know are already there and/or those places have reputations for being friendlier than other places they might go. The migrant crisis is also more or less not a crisis except to the extent that people in power refuse to give proper funding to the protection and shelter of human beings. Eric Adams, a guy most people in America couldn’t name, wants you to think that this whole thing is being done to make him look bad. But he only looks bad because he keeps going in front of cameras and screaming about how bad this makes NYC look. Maybe just deal gracefully with the problem and show the world that you’re unbothered?

Anyway, the entire video is about 50 minutes long, and well worth watching. I’ll link it in the show notes. In its aftermath a lot of folks have been asking why it fell to this attorney to have a refreshingly combative sit down with the mayor, why he hasn’t been asked questions like this by the press, and for at least part of the answer, I’d like to tell you about “Off Topic Mondays”. The mayor holds press conferences all the time, of course, to announce various initiatives or to comment on an event or emergency that he screwed up, and often, as is their wont, the press doesn’t stick to the topic of the the press conference when asking him follow ups, like why his deputies keep getting raided by the FBI or why it took an hour after an earthquake for his Office of Emergency Management to text “hey that was an earthquake” to everyone in the city. So, the mayor has stopped taking questions unrelated to whatever flag raising or envelope opening he’s attending, and is directing press to ask him these questions only once a week at a specially designated press conference for that purpose, one that he regularly filibusters for most of the available time by announcing some meaningless project and talking about it at interminable length. All of that said, I do think that it’s the press’s job to figure out how to question the guy, even if he makes it difficult.

Moving on, a person was pushed onto the tracks in Harlem by a deranged individual and was struck by a train and killed. These incidents seem to happen every few months - the last I’m aware of was early March; a woman lost her feet after her ex boyfriend shoved her, and there was another late last year where a woman was put into critical condition by being pushed into the path of a train by a deeply troubled person. There were a few others in the last couple years prior. These, to me, are kinda like mass shootings, in that they seem to be happening almost in response to each other, or in a horrible conversation with each other. There was a time when there weren’t a lot of mass shootings, and while guns have gotten deadlier, the basic technology needed to carry out a mass shooting has been available to the consumer for like 100 years. Then Columbine happened - without the aid of assault rifles - and seemingly started a horrifying trend. In the same way, the recent trend of subway shovings feels, at least, new, like it wasn’t happening five, ten years ago, and like it’s something people are doing, at least in part, because someone did it.

In both cases, mass shootings and people being pushed off subway platforms, they’re undeniably scary and tragic and there’s obvious things that could be done to minimize the chances they happen, and also: they’re rare, and an almost vanishingly small percentage of the assaults and killings that happen in America every year.

That same day, a cop was shot to death during a traffic stop in Queens. Eric Adams had this to say about the day’s events: "These are bad people who are doing bad things to good people. It’s the good guys against the bad guys. And we have to recognize that."

That’s a child’s logic. Literally, that’s the sort of thing a fucking kid playing cops and robbers would say. And I wouldn’t even mind that much except that Adams has done nothing but defund the programs that help people who are in mental health crisis to keep them from being on subway platforms during mental collapses. He’s done this in order to flood the stations with cops, who don’t seem to be doing much to stop people from shoving each other onto the tracks. Or, really anything but looking at their phones, at least the ones I see. There are 12 million people here, these are newsworthy and terrible events, they shouldn’t happen, but just as a statistical matter, bad stuff probably will. It doesn’t help to say ‘these things happen,’ but these are the only sorts of events about which we as a society tend to say anything else. When a fire sweeps through a building, literally the response is ‘these things happen’ not ‘let’s retrofit all buildings with sprinklers’. If the culprit is an E-Bike battery, we may have a conversation about banning them, which wouldn’t work, and more or less the conversation is a distraction from anything that might actually be done. If the culprit is a malfunctioning fire door, we get some orders to increase inspections and the issuance of toothless fines, but stuff that would actually put out fires? You know? Water? In pipes? Run through buildings? We can’t find the money for that. We can find the time to treat certain crimes as important, particularly if they’re committed against people we grant special status, or by people we grant illegitimacy. 

As for the shot cop, look, I don’t want anyone getting shot, which is why I’d prefer there be as few cops as possible since then cops won’t be getting shot, and the vast majority of the people cops shoot, whose numbers are much much higher than the number of cops shot, will go unshot as well. For example, the 19 year old kid who called the cops two days after the subway and traffic stop incidents. Win Rozario called 911 on himself, saying he was having a mental breakdown in his own home and that he needed help. When the cops arrived, they tased him, and while his mother tried to help him, they shot him to death in front of her. That’s according to the police, by the way, who still haven’t released the body cam footage but claim that they had to act since the kid had a pair of scissors. As far as anyone can tell, no one trained in mental health crisis management responded to Win’s call.

There was a huge funeral for the cop. The city paid, of course. The former president came, of course, and his cop buddies loved it, of course. He said some garbage. A seemingly pretty large number of cops took the day off to attend, and NYC seems to have kept running.

We still don’t know the names of the cops who shot Win. His family will have to bury him at their own expense. Maybe if the bodycam footage is especially bad, and we get to see it, maybe a judge will eventually decide the taxpayer should also help out with some of their costs. If it’s really super bad and lands at a time when tensions are especially high, the taxpayer might also be on the hook for a bunch of illegal detentions and broken protester bones.

The subways are flooded with cops, cameras are everywhere, bag checks, National Guard, state troopers. And a missing 17 year old from Brooklyn with autism named Isaiah Santiago

who was last seen on the 1 train a couple weeks ago, according to News12 Brooklyn. Seems like this is something that all of this security and surveillance on, you know, the subway, where he was last seen, could be turned towards, and as far as I can tell anyway it’s not.

Well, what are they up to, if not finding missing kids? Well, according to a study commissioned by The City Council by John Jay College of Criminal Justice (famous graduates include the mayor) the police are issuing more nuisance criminal citations than ever, and they’re issuing them, overwhelmingly, to Black and Hispanic people. Quoting Hell Gate here: 

“According to a report released on Monday by the Data Collaborative for Justice at John Jay College, the number of criminal summonses for offenses like public urination, littering, or breaking rules in New York City parks increased by 62 percent from 2021 to 2022, Adams's first year in office. 

"From 2020 to 2022, the NYPD issued over 85 percent of criminal summonses to Black or Hispanic people, who combine for only 52 percent of the City's population," the report found, while also noting that criminal summonses were issued at a rate 11.4 times higher for Black New Yorkers than white residents in 2022, as opposed to 8.9 times higher than in 2020. Under Adams, the report found, the racial disparities in policing are only growing, as the mayor has sought to increase enforcement of a number of quality-of-life offenses, with the number of criminal summonses handed out for an offense like having an open container skyrocketing.”

…

“Way back in 2016, the New York City Council sought to head this all off by decriminalizing a whole slew of quality-of-life offenses as part of the Criminal Justice Reform Act, which aimed to keep New Yorkers out of the criminal justice system for things like smoking weed or public urination. Instead of issuing criminal summonses, which required New Yorkers to go to court or face serious consequences, the police were encouraged by the new law, as well as by prosecutors, to issue civil summonses, which came with a fine.”

Seems like we asked the cops not to do something and then they went ahead and kept doing it. And then they did it more and more.

“According to the report, one particularly egregious example is tickets for drinking alcohol in public, which accounted for seven percent of criminal summonses in 2007, but jumped to 24 percent in 2022.

The report also found that most of these criminal summonses don't accomplish much beyond wasting everyone's time, making people miss work to show up to court. And if they don't show up, a warrant is issued for their arrest. According to the data cited in the report, 63 percent of criminal summonses issued in 2022 were dismissed outright, while another 16 percent were deemed "defective," meaning they were missing necessary information. Only nine percent of all criminal summonses from that year ended in a guilty plea or someone being found guilty, even though there are almost no criminal consequences, like jail time or a hefty fine, still on the books for them.”

Anyway, there’s a scared kid named Isaiah somewhere out there. Keep your eyes out for him.

But the administration insists that we need cops, and cops need technology. The existence of crime is due to not enough cops and not enough technology. So we just need to keep putting more of both in the crime place, which, the administration insists, is the subway, the only place where crime happens. Which is why, three days after the subway incident, Adams unveiled, with great fanfare, a body scanner unit for the subways whose creators claim uses AI to scan people walking by for weapons.

Now, the people who shove people off the platforms don’t use weapons, generally. But, that’s not the point, we now have this scanner. Or do we? Quoting Hell Gate again (and really, do subscribe to Hell Gate)

“"Public safety is the actual safety, and it is how people are feeling," Adams said at a press conference staged in the lower level of the Fulton Transit Center in Lower Manhattan attended by much of his leadership team, most of the NYPD brass, and MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber. "Facts don't matter if people don't believe they are in a safe environment."

And so the mayor and his top aides were underground, in a corner of the subway station, to announce to much fanfare—what, exactly? As the mayor put it: "We'll be publishing the impact-and-use policy for electric electronic electromagnetic weapons detection systems here in New York City. This kicks off the 90 day waiting period before this type of technology can be tested and used in our city."

Put another way: The administration has filed the papers to allow it, in three months, to begin pilot programs for next-generation metal detectors like those made by the Massachusetts-based company Evolv, a sample of which was the centerpiece of Thursday's press conference. The Evolv unit, which is portable, consists of two shoulder-height pillars through which people pass. If the system detects a weapon, a noise sounds and a monitor shows whoever is staffing the checkpoint where on the body of the person the suspected weapon is located.”

Weird shit man! But, I guess if the system works? Hell Gate continues:

“Does the Evolv system work? That appears to be a very contentious question. At the sensor's least sensitive settings, according to company literature, it only picks up large items like long guns and pressure-cooker bombs that any officer staffing the checkpoint would likely notice even without the system. Evolv claims that it can, at more sensitive settings, detect small pistols and even knives, but concedes that as these higher settings the rate of false positives, and the attendant delays and searches that they produce, increases.

A machine with a high rate of false positives might have some effect on people's perception of safety in the subways, but it would also create lines, delays, and missed trains for the people who use that subway. Adams said Thursday he considers delays a worthwhile trade-off for an increase in the public perception of safety. "People will wait in line to be safe while they're on the A line," he quipped.

And there's some question as to whether the sophisticated AI-powered machines even do what Evolv claims they can do: The company is being investigated by both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission over claims of its products' capabilities.”

Not great! Even less great, the Daily News did some digging:

“CEO of weapon scanner company showcased by NYC Mayor Adams: Subways not a "good use-case"

The head of the company whose weapon-detection system was showcased by Mayor Adams as a potential solution to subway violence had told investors earlier this month that underground subways were not a "good use-case" for the new technology, the Daily News has learned.

Peter George, CEO of Evolv Technologies, said subways were a "particular" challenge for the company's technology and would face challenges if deployed underground during a March 15 investor call reviewed by The News.”

This was three days before this fucking press conference!

Hell Gate then followed up with an article on a previous trial of Evolv’s tech at a New York City operated hospital:

“Evolv's scanners were installed at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx in 2022, and triggered huge numbers of false positives, according to the results of the pilot obtained by Hell Gate through a public records request filed with NYC Health + Hospitals. 

Over the seven months that the Jacobi pilot was active, 194,000 people passed through Jacobi's scanners, and in just over 50,000 of those cases, the scanners threw up an alarm—an incidence rate of around 26 percent, or over one of every four times someone passed through the scanner. Of those 50,000 alarms, around 43,800, or a little more than 85 percent, were false positives; 7,027 of the alarms, or 14 percent, were law enforcement officers who were presumably carrying their service weapons; and just 295 alarms, or 0.57 percent, were determined to be a non-law enforcement person carrying either a knife, a gun, or a threat type labeled only "other," which likely entails other weapons like bats. 

Notably, Evolv's scanners did not get any more accurate as the pilot progressed—there was not a single month where the alarm to visitor ratio fell below 25 percent. In September of 2022, the final month of the seven-month pilot, 27,900 visitors passed through the scanners, and nearly 7,000 threw alarms; out of those 7,000 alarms, just 345 potential threats were identified—a false positive rate of 95 percent, with only 0.45 percent of alerts being non-law enforcement threats. Throughout the entire pilot, the alerts led to the finding of 24 guns, 139 knives, and 132 other potential threats, out of the 50,000 alarms sounded.”

50,000 alarms to find 24 guns that were almost certainly not going to be used for anything other than personal protection. Given the ratio here, 24 people carrying guns out of 194,000 total, that’s roughly what I’d expect for legal licensed carry in NYC, which is difficult, but not impossible to attain. Or just undercover cops or security guards. For knives you’re allowed to carry a knife in many situations, especially if you’re a laborer, though a hospital may have their own rules about this. None of this is advice, but I do want to note something broadly: The second amendment to the constitution.

NYC has some very restrictive gun laws, and the fact that guns are banned on the subway, despite what is a clearly generally bad faith interpretation by the Supreme Court of the word “militia”, that seems for the time being to stand. The courts are allowing NYC to define sensitive places where guns aren’t allowed, including the subway. Whether or not guns should be, well, most places in America that they’re currently allowed, including just about everywhere in red states, it bears asking why guns aren’t allowed here, when the rest of the country gets to do as they please? 

The assumption of mass criminality is so extraordinary to me. Just think:Currently there are 4 million trips taken a day on the system. A 25% flag rate means that 1 million riders will be stopped and searched every day. Think about how people will react to that. At the height of stop and frisk, in 2011, there were 685,000 stops in the course of a year and it was massively unpopular. Do you have any idea the logistical nightmare it would take to merely implement the number of stops needed here? A million a day? Do you have any idea what would happen to the person who caused people to be frisked that much?  Like, I live and work in my neighborhood and I still ride the train 5 to 10 times a week. If I got frisked 1 to 3 times a week, I’m not sure voting against the administration would be the end of my fury, and I am not anywhere near the average subway user in terms of usage. And, for fuck’s sake, Eric Adams said he’d go strapped when he became mayor. It caused a bit of a controversy, people pointed out that among other things he has armed security at all times, so why should he personally be opening fire on what he decides are threats and/or stiff breezes? He ultimately decided against it, far as we know, but he certainly seems to think he’s entitled to carry if he wants. People in cars can if they have the right license (I am not offering legal advice, check all local laws and also most people probably shouldn’t own a gun).

Trying to prevent guns from entering the system is all well and good, but those guns don’t enter NYC through the subway. We’re not scanning commuter rail. We’re not scanning cars coming into the city (though I’m sure the NYPD is pulling over cars with out of state plates if the drivers fit certain profiles, so I’m equally sure that the Iron Pipeline employs mostly clean cut white guys to bring guns in).  

I’m not saying that I feel like guns should be on the subway. Every gun you add to a place necessarily increases the odds that a gun will be fired in that place; that’s why I don’t want the National Guard toting long guns in the system. But a) guns are entering the city via routes other than the subway, and stopping that seems like it would involve doing this sort of thing to people in cars on the highway. Is that going to work less well than this? Probably not. Since this isn’t going to work, it’s worth asking why are the targets of this harassment and general inconvenience and assumption of criminality the people who take the subway? I’m just asking questions here.

But, I should stop just asking questions here. After all, this system uses AI, which the city is using to great effect in other areas. For example, writes Colin Lecher for a joint project of The City (As always, subscribe!) and The Markup: 

“In October, New York City announced a plan to harness the power of artificial intelligence to improve the business of government. The announcement included a surprising centerpiece: an AI-powered chatbot that would provide New Yorkers with information on starting and operating a business in the city. 

The problem, however, is that the city’s chatbot is telling businesses to break the law.”

Here are just a few of the questions researchers asked for this article:

“Do landlords have to accept tenants on rental assistance?”

Chatbot reply: “No, landlords are not required to accept tenants on rental assistance.” They most certainly are. The chatbot seems to have been updated since this article was written and returns a very clipped response to this question: “Yes, landlords are required to accept tenants on rental assistance.” Progress made!

“Can I take a cut of my worker's tips?” Chatbot reply: “Yes, you can take a cut of your worker's tips. According to the City of New York's Payroll and Tip Reporting information, employers are required to report tips reported by employees and employees receiving $20 or more a month in tips must report all of their tips to their employer. Therefore, as an employer, you are allowed to take a portion of your worker's tips.” That is certainly a take. It’s entirely wrong and employers who do it are breaking the law, but oh well. As of this writing, it’s still saying yes to this question. To be honest, from what I’ve seen of the tipped industry, the Chatbot isn’t wrong, exactly.

“Can I keep my funeral home pricing confidential?” Chatbot says… “Yes, you can keep your funeral home pricing confidential. There are no specific regulations that mandate the disclosure of funeral home pricing in New York City.” Still saying yes to this one, as of this writing, which means it’s advising committing a violation of a Federal Trade Commission Rule called the Funeral Rule that specifically forbids confidential pricing.

Since the bot is still online as of this writing, and still giving insane answers to equally insane questions, here are a few I asked it:

I would like to operate a nursery in a brewery, what do I need?

Evidently what's needed is a Nursery license and to meet health and safety requirements. Then I can do that, according to the bot.

My business is a pet store that sells tigers and monkeys, what licenses do I need?

Apparently I need a Pet Dealer License and a Sale of Small Animals (Pet Shop) Permit, and then I'm good to go.

I'm opening a restaurant that will sell beer to dogs. What's required?

The bot claims that the only requirement here is an Eating Place Beer License that I can get through the SLA.

So that’s fun! One of the things I’m finding particularly interesting is that this chatbot is still live, still giving terrible answers, and no one seems to be doing much about it. They’ve slowly corrected some of the most egregious answers it’s giving, but it’s still giving extremely wrong answers right now as I’m writing this. I’ve seen posts from folks showing that it approves of their Uber for dogs idea and telling them the subway is free to ride. This is a PR monstrosity, the type of thing that immediately erodes trust in the front-facing institutions of government and they’re not fixing it with any speed, or asking themselves if it’s a useful idea in the first place, at least relative to the damage it’s doing! It’s still live! The whole AI thing is just a huge waste. There are legitimate use cases for it, cancer research for example, and it’s so fucking dark that instead they’re just trying to put 311 call center operators out of jobs answering New Yorkers’ questions, by throwing a plagiarism machine at us with, literally, the caveat on the front page: “May occasionally produce incorrect, harmful or biased content.”

The machine doesn’t work but at least it’s racist.

So, why is Adams pushing this shit? Why is he buying into AI? Why is he backing it up even after it fails? Why is he, a former transit cop, putting forth a scanner system for the subway, if the same information I laid out earlier is available to him. He must know that it can’t work, right? What’s the angle here? 

There’s a tension with Adams: Is he stupid, or canny? He’s certainly gotten pretty far as a political animal, and that’s not simply down to getting people to vote for you. My impression is that successfully navigating NYC Democratic politics requires you to be able to see the internal workings of a machine, unless you’re a true outsider, like AOC or some of the folks who’ve poached seats in various districts under the DSA’s banner. But for someone who is working within the Democratic machine, you have to understand that machine, and you have to be able to move around within it. To form alliances and all that Survivor shit. So, the understanding generally is: you have to be smart to do that.

Remember high school? Remember the popular kids? I assume, if you’re listening to this that you can say with some authority “I was not a popular kid” and also “I was way smarter than those shitheads.” That’s all we’re describing here. An ability to move socially and politically isn’t anything more than that. In the same way you grew and became an adult and looked around and saw that there was nothing really different except your responsibilities, nothing changed for status seekers either. 

More often than not the people who don’t engage with status seeking behavior avoid it because it seems like it’s really gross. When I was young, it was unpleasant to wear a bunch of itchy and expensive clothing and ingratiate oneself to a football player who didn’t really care if you lived and who told a bunch of racist jokes. So I didn’t do that, I didn’t even think of doing that, I put on a bunch of black clothing and listened to Metallica and watched weird movies and had, if not a good time, probably the best available time. Well, as an adult, it probably also didn’t occur to you or I to spend a large amount of time smoking cigars with farting slumlords and mobbed up contractors whose main goals in life are to make each other destitute. So we didn’t do that either. It seems pretty stupid, doesn’t it? A waste of time.

Could Adams possibly be stupid enough to believe, in the face of all evidence, that magic scanners will ever work against guns in the subway? Does it matter? The choices are: yes, or he thinks you’re stupid enough to think that. In both cases, doesn’t that make him the clown?

You may have noticed by this point that we’re pretty deep into this episode and I haven’t yet talked about Adams’ podcast, and, good catch! His latest episode is real gross, and I’m dragging my feet on covering it. This episode is gonna get dark from here on out. Trigger warnings: as I said at the top, the episode we’re talking about today is about human trafficking. So, before we get to that, just a little treat: Here’s two really funny posts to social media about Eric Adams. First from cartoonist Mattie Lubchansky whose graphic novel Boy’s Weekend is incredible and you should read it as soon as you can:

"say what you will about eric adams: no really. say whatever you want and it will probably be true. he acts like someone that's been struck by lightning dozens of times”

And then this from Brendel, who I only know from bluesky, but they seem cool: “Eric Adams is amazing because when he won every media person was leaping over each to go "this is the normal sane leadership that the political left doesn't understand normal sane Americans crave" and then every day since that Eric Adams has been like "Leprechauns are real and I'm going to cook one."”

That’s good analysis. That’s the good stuff.

Let’s dive into this extraordinarily dark episode of Adams’ podcast.

Adams starts in by saying that trafficking overwhelmingly harms women, and that it happens everywhere, including here and in all of our communities. I agree, though I also think that it depends somewhat on the type of trafficking we’re discussing. My impression is, for example, that there’s a lot of trafficking involved in agriculture and construction, and that most of the people being pressed into work in those fields are men. There’s labor trafficking that skews heavily towards exploiting women that isn’t necessarily sexual work, like nail salons, but as with any imbalance where gender is at play, I’m sure the threat of sexual coercion and violence is constant. And this is a good time to note that I’m not an expert, and to the extent that I have a gender alignment, I at least read as male. I have talked in a past episode a bit about my own, uh, ongoing gender journey, but I was socialized male growing up, and that’s important to note because the mayor is going to have three women on, and he’s going to talk with them almost exclusively about sexually based trafficking, which is an issue that mostly affects women, though not exclusively, especially if we’re talking about children. Regardless, as with race, I have my blindspots, and I don’t want to be let off the hook if I screw up here, or you disagree with me. I give my email at the end of every episode, please use it.

Adams says he’s joined by three, as he puts it, “sheroes in this movement.” Don’t love it. He introduces them in turn, but he doesn’t give them any space to respond until he’s done, so unfortunately, because this is an audio medium, it’s very difficult to know which woman is which. For most of this episode, I figured out who was speaking as I went, and the best I could but, at times I had to listen repeatedly, and there are a few times that I credit someone, but it’s my best guess. The three guests seem to more or less agree on these issues, but I did want to flag that a) Adams, coming into season 2 is still a very bad podcaster and b) there are times I might have credited the wrong person speaking, and if that’s the case, I apologize in advance. At any rate, Adams introduces Kathleen Collins Baer, the Executive Counsel for the Special Victims Division of the New York City Police Department. Then, Taina Bien-Aime, the Executive Director of the Coalition Against Trafficking Women. Finally, Sonia Ossorio the President of the NYC Chapter of the National Organization for Women.

I did a little research on each. Just quick googling. Kathleen Collins Baer doesn’t have much of a social media footprint, but she does appear to attend a lot of galas and stock image sellers have a lot of watermarked photos of her standing next to rich people. Taina Bien-Aime’s social media posts seem mostly concerned with ending Female Genital Mutilation, which is a very important issue. She also seems to follow a bunch of TERFs, though she’s not engaged with them (liking or commenting on their posts) recently. Not good, though. Real bad.

As for Sonia Ossorio… like the mayor said, she’s the President of the NYC Chapter of the National Organization for Women. As far as I know, NOW does great work, and I support their mission, which is why I was pretty dismayed when researching this to find that I only had to go a few tweets into Sonia’s timeline to find her retweeting an obvious TERF’s TERF propaganda. Scroll a little farther and you can find Ossorio full on endorsing the idea that “biological women” should be “protected” from competing against “biological males” in sports, and that it took no work at all to find that she’s following JK Rowling, and I’m guessing it’s not because she’s an adult fan of the Potterverse. I should note, the national chapter of NOW seems to support trans folks full throatedly, and it’s not clear to me what the actual relationship between the national group and the sub chapters is. 

I’ve realized I’ve been saying TERF here, but I don’t want to assume listeners spend the same amount of time as I spend on making myself upset, so y’all know what Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists are? No shame if you’re not up on them. I’ve linked Wikipedia’s page on these folks in the show notes, but the basics are that there’s an international group of bigots who are trying to push feminism to be exclusionary of trans women. They often use rhetoric that hypes the “threat” of “biological males'' to “biological women” to try to exclude trans women from certain areas of society, through bathroom bills and excluding folks from participating in sports. There’s a lot of “will noone think of the children'' involved and a lot of fear mongering about whether or not kids are being surgically transitioned before they’re ready (which is pure horseshit if you know anything about how transitioning works, the regulations on consenting to surgery, or how much time and effort it takes to convince the multiple doctors that need to sign off that you should be given gender affirming surgery). I’ve recommended the Gender Reveal podcast in the past, and they do some great work in this area. There are a lot of powerful and clearly not very mentally sharp people backing this movement. Elon Musk is a TERF, as is JK Rowling. A general rule of thumb for living is that one can be pretty suspicious of powerful people claiming that they’re under some kind of threat from a marginalized group of folks who just want to, like, play youth league basketball without passing some weird genital test. And at least two people who seem to be ok with this have the ear of the mayor on womens’ issues. Suboptimal.

Anyway, Adams asks Bien-Aime to zoom out, tell us about what human trafficking is and then to lean in and tell us about the issue of big sporting events and how they attract trafficking, which is like… I mean it’s just a very poorly structured question, and the second part isn’t really a question at all but just what he wants her to say. Despite this, Bien-Aime gives a pretty clear definition of trafficking: “a vehicle through which exploiters bring their victims to an end destination.” She includes labor trafficking here. She notes that people can be trafficked without ever leaving their neighborhood, or even their building, because the means of trafficking are abuse of power and abuse of vulnerability. Someone with power, exploiting another person for profit. I truly don’t mean to diminish the horror of what is experienced under trafficking but this second part of the definition - one person exploiting the labor of another for profit - is vague enough that, while it describes trafficking, it also describes working. And I don’t think most work is being trafficked, to be clear, I think being trafficked is being trafficked. Just being less powerful than someone who uses your labor for their own enrichment doesn’t cut it, unless the Communist Manifesto is an anti-trafficking… well, honestly, it is, but you get me, right?

In the labor market, Bien-Aime goes on to say, the demand is for cheap goods and services. In sex trafficking, the demand is for, well, sex. She puts it as “for prostitution.”

It’s interesting. On the labor market side, people would probably be more willing to pay more money for better made things, or for services rendered by well paid employees, if people had more money. But, stagnant wage growth, inflation, etc. The implosion of the middle class, Reaganism, yadda yadda. Dwindling union membership, hollowed out industrial centers, I’m making the ‘the list goes on and on’ motion. So the market conditions for cheaply made goods have been created.

But the market for, as she puts it, prostitution? I’m sure there are people for whom paying for sex is part of a kink or whatever, but mostly the market is for sex. People are motivated to pay for sex. The reason is: Because it’s sex. Mammals have existed for 300 million years, mammals did one thing more than any other thing to accomplish that feat of time span. Sex is a biological imperative almost as deeply rooted as eating. People need food, shelter, water, oxygen, and then just one level below that, to have sex. As with all things, some folks want to have sex more than others, and this isn’t to shame asexuals, but just describing humans on a distribution, sex is a thing people want, it is therefore a thing many are willing to pay for, if they cannot otherwise attain it.

Switching to the part of the question related to sports, Bien-Aime says that the increase in trafficking during large sporting events is due to the large influx of the male population - these are guy events. She notes that globally 10-15% of the male population are patronizers of the sex trade in one form or another. That honestly sounds like an undercount, especially if we include all forms of sex work, including the digitally based, but, yeah, a lot of dudes buy sex, particularly when they’re travelling away from their families, which is why this increase in purchased sex is also noted around - and for some reason Eric Adams doesn’t bring this up - political conventions. 

I guess at some point I should bring up the fact, again, that Eric Adams is currently being sued by someone who accuses him of attempting to trade his influence for sexual favors.

Adams asks how we tell if someone is a victim, and Bien-Aime says it’s difficult. She notes that we have strong laws against trafficking, but that the struggle is cultural. The sex trade, she says, is an accepted part of our culture. A sickness inside of our culture that we need to cure.

No argument from me that we have a fucked up relationship to sex as a society, but, and I’m sure you’ll be shocked, I don’t share the conclusion here. I don’t believe in coercive sex work, any more than I believe in coercive work of any sort. I don’t think most people like the idea of forced labor of any kind. And in several areas we’ve greatly reduced coercion. There was a pretty major war about that in the 19th century. And then some laws and regulations against child labor and improved safety and so forth. The system isn’t perfect and there are some prison sized holes in it, but it’s generally accepted wisdom that in most areas of labor, the work that is done today is done by a significantly more voluntary workforce than ever before. There is still labor trafficking, though it’s not going to get much more mention in this episode as the guests pivot and lean solely into sex trafficking. Labor trafficking is a reasonably small segment of the market that we should continue to attempt to eradicate by punishing and shutting down businesses that engage in unfair labor practices. And we can do that because we have laws that protect most workers, which we can robustly enforce and strengthen when they are underpowered. We don’t have many laws that protect sex workers, because sex work is mostly illegal. Since it’s illegal, since it’s still here, since purchasing sex is something that people engage in even in countries where the penalty is literally death, I’m not sure the answer is to try to “cure our sickness.” There’s a reason it’s called the oldest profession. It’s in every society, everywhere you find people. People are extremely horny, and it’s for biological reasons. Some people are better than others at addressing their needs without paying money. Some people grow their own food. For those who can’t, there are grocery stores and restaurants for food. For sex, there aren’t legal options so if you can’t get laid, and if you want to stay within the four corners of the law. If that’s the case you can’t really do much except be sad. Prohibitive arguments are the arguments that were made against legalizing weed, and I know people who like weed to the point that it’s their whole personality, but weed is nowhere near sex on the hierarchy of needs, and eventually the government had to give up and be like, yeah this is an unwinnable war and also we can take a cut on taxes. Not sure why sex is any different. And I’m really not sure why the purchase of sex is seen as anything but a morally neutral act as long as all participants in the exchange are consenting. There’s plenty of stuff you probably want to restrict people from purchasing because of the potential catastrophic results of misuse. Flamethrowers, bulk fertilizer, plutonium. That sort of stuff. That doesn’t seem like it’s part of the concern with sex work. There are specific things you want to keep people from doing to each other without consent. Assault, theft, rape, that sort of thing. But consensual sex work is… it’s just consesual sex with a wallet involved? Like, there’s risks to having sex (STIs, pregnancy, etc), but there’s risks to bungee jumping or drinking a beer, no one seems to have a moral argument against paying for those. Or, I mean, I’m sure someone does, and I was gonna say but I bet they don’t have the mayor’s ear, but it’d be the least surprising thing in the world if the Adams administration had an assistant deputy of, like, strategic relations who was in an anti bungee church.

Adams switches to Sonia Ossorio, head of NOW NYC, and evidently a loud and proud TERF to talk about technology’s role in all this. She talks about a harrowing case of a teen girl being lured to NYC on facebook, assaulted and then pimped by her assaulter. It’s obviously terrible that such a thing happened, and Facebook can and should try to minimize the ability of adults to lure kids on the platform, but they don’t really discuss that because Adams immediately switches to Kathleen Collins Baer and asks her about how the NYPD is dealing with the technology issue. She says they’re doing so by running stings on the street in areas where there’s heavy sex work and… I’m a little confused, I have to admit. I might be missing something but it seems like they’re talking here about street sex work and that’s not particularly tech based. People aren’t hopping into a car and cruising by a knot of on the street sex workers via tiktok. At any rate, she says the main goal of the NYPD is to hold accountable, not just pimps and traffickers, but buyers, to tamp down demand. Good luck with that.

Bien-Aime says that she and Ossorio have been trying to get DAs to switch gears for years to focus on the demand. To stop the market you need to stop the people who fuel the market. I mean, yeah, that worked for drugs and booze, right? We need, she says, a commitment to prosecute sex buyers. “What does that commitment look like” asks the mayor? “Arrest them, impound their car… name them and blame them,” she replies. Ossorio chimes in that part of the issue is that they’re doing large scale stings where these things do happen, but the behavior of sex buying isn’t criminalized. I’m not sure what she’s talking about. I googled, and simple solicitation of prostitution appears to be a class A misdemeanor which google additionally tells me comes with a prison sentence of up to a year. If a minor’s involved, well, then you’re into serious felony territory with attendant serious time, but a year is a real penalty, and, if google is right here, and it may not be, I don’t know what else she wants here. One might note that our overwhelmed courts and jails might have an incentive to get class A’s moved along without incarceration, and plea deals and the like might limit the actual number of Johns who do significant time, so maybe that’s her problem, but if that’s the case, you’re gonna have to build a lot more jails and upscale the courts pretty significantly. The flip side is: we could just not do any of this and make the whole thing legal. I don’t really understand the benefits of keeping it illegal. Sex is terrific, but it’s not special as a thing people do, except to the extent that they really want to do it, so if you’re the type of person who is power seeking, well powerful people can often be horrible and get sex via coercive exchanges (again, Adams is currently being sued for this), and powerful people really like feeling powerful, like they can do things other people can’t, so is restricting sexual access to “loving couples” a social good or a means of social control?

Speaking of social control: No one has yet mentioned the way cops treat, uh, women who work in the sex trade so I guess I should bring up that it’s real fucking bad.

Ossorio describes a bust in Florida where they arrested a ton of men and displayed pictures of their faces at press conferences and she describes it as a deterrent which is an odd way of saying shitting on the idea that a person is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. “It has to be stigmatized” she says, but if solicitation wasn’t stigmatized, putting up the pictures of these guys wouldn’t be effective at stigmatizing them. I don’t know how much more stigma could possibly be attached to the purchase of sex, but it’s already pretty fucking stigmatized and people are still paying for it. 

Adams asks “What are some of the challenges we face to combat this crisis?” Weird question to bust out halfway through an episode that’s been entirely about how these women interpret the challenges of this crisis. “Survivors are scared to report,” the respondent says. I’m not sure who spoke. There was an interstitial bit of music and then we came back and Adams asked his weird question and didn’t address the person by name and these women have somewhat similar sounding voices, so forgive me. At any rate, she says that we need to eliminate the statute of limitations on trafficking beyond five years, and I actually agree with this, so kudos. She then lists a bunch of the unspoken rules that street walking sex workers have and it’s a little odd.

Ossorio - I think - defines purchasing sex as a harmful male practice that has to change. There’s a lot of really shitty stuff guys do, and I understand what’s led to the narrow focus here, so I don’t mean to be whataboutish, nor do I want to diminish what these women have seen seen, which, due to the nature of the work they’re doing, is almost exclusively men acting as horribly as it is possible to imagine to women. In a street sex work setting, that’s pimps, that’s Johns. And that’s the incentives of an illegal system. Would legalizing remove abuse? No, of course not, not any more than it fully removed abusive bosses when, like, OSHA was created. But the incentives to do harm go way down if you’re in a system where the purchase is regulated. All three guests talk about the undeniable fact that women who are working on the margins are disincentivized from participating in law enforcement. One, they don’t have anyone who will reliably help them, except for their trafficker. Their abuser is their only source of information and basic necessities. That goes away if you take away the incentive to traffic. You take that away by establishing a legal and well regulated market. A black market is illegal but is like a legal market in that it will have internal problems. The internal solutions in a legal market are lawyers, courts, the press, all the things that don’t really work great, but are, like, “we live in a society” shit. An illegal market doesn’t have those, it has solutions that are necessarily much worse.

Ossorio says that “If smoking can become stigmatized, which is literally physically addicting, then buying sex” can be as well. I’d like to note that buying cigarettes is completely legal and heavily regulated, and the times it has not been those things has led to a great deal of gunplay. 

Adams asks Bien-Aime how she got started in this work, she says she was raised by strong immigrant women, which is nice for her, and then relates the idea of buying sex to Female Genital Mutilation. I’m running out of ways of saying I fundamentally disagree with the ideas being expressed here. She refers to progressives like myself, who believe in legalization as “regressive progressives,” hey great line. Really nailed my ass, TERF.

They have a bit more discussion about how bad progressivism is and then Adams says “Ladies I cannot thank you enough” - gross - and shuts the pod down.

So that was really unpleasant! A lawyer for the cops, and two TERFs had a roundtable about doubling down on failed carceral solutions to sex work with a credibly accused sex pest. What fun for everyone.

Look, I’m just gonna walk away from this one now. I don’t know that I’ve made the case for legalization, but I cannot say that the case for criminalization was made to me in any kind of convincing way. I suppose you always have the option to decide for yourself, but, as always, I really would recommend that any research you do on any subject covered by the mayor’s podcast not include listening to that podcast.

As always, subscribe to The City and Hell Gate for great coverage of NYC. I lean on both extensively when researching the news.

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