 So thank you. Thank you very much. It's good to be here. And we have been moving around to all of our city agencies and talking with the staff and meeting the people who make the city work. And for a long time, they've had great ideas. They had great ways of make government function. And, you know, it's unfortunate that, you know, as chief executives, sometimes we just don't listen. And that is not how we're going to operate. We had a call this morning with all of our commissioners and other first and second line leaders and just really motivating people that we must be bold on how we solve the problems that we are facing. And I'm just happy to be here with Dr. Graham and his team that's behind us as this office plays such a major role in the functioning of our city. You know, from the days of being a police officer, having to call the Emmys office to what they did around 9-11, fires, helping to investigate crimes and also to use their technology to make our city safe. And so it's great to be here at the office of the chief medical examiner. And this is the best lab on the planet, bar none. There's no even, it's not a discussion. The discussion is who's two and three. Number one, everyone knows we have the best lab on the planet. And today that lab is becoming even better. And that's mean the men and women of the office of the chief medical examiner, they just know how to get stuff done and they do it consistently in a very smooth way. And because they do it so well, we don't even realize the important roles that they're playing. They're on the front line giving answers to families and our city during crucial times when things happen. And if you just look at this number, the lab analyzed nearly 50,000 pieces of crime scene evidence every year. In 2021, the lab processed close to over 2,687 gun cases, a 59% increase compared to 2020. This is a central part of our apparatus and fighting against gun violence. And sometimes we miss this piece, but without this piece, we can't take guns off our streets and deal with people who are dangerous to our city. And so today we're adding another tool to our arsenal, the OCME DNA Guns Crimes Unit. This would be the first ever and you know, we need to keep scores because I keep saying over and over again the word first ever, first ever, first ever. This is the first ever unit, gun crime team, that is going to be putting in place this apparatus. The $2.5 million unit will hire, train 24 forensic scientists dedicated to testing and analyzing of evidence from gun crimes throughout the five borough. First time ever a unit of this capacity that as a public DNA crime laboratory, the first time in a nation, you're seeing something of this magnitude. We saw it upstairs, state of the art, the unit will accelerate evidence testing from 60 days to 30 days. It's going to cut it in half so that we can prosecute case faster and get dangerous people off our streets. The DNA Gun Crimes Unit is hiring and so we're asking people, if you want to be the modern day CSI, please come on board. We receive responses after PSA. We want more people to see this amazing career and amazing energy in this building. There's a high level of energy that people here enjoy what they're doing. They know they are making a difference in the lives of New Yorkers and help us. We want folks to come in and join us and help us lead the way to deal with gun violence because if we don't collect that evidence, we don't make it a connection to the person who used that gun and makes it difficult to solve the crime. And so come be a part of this team. This is another arm of our enforcement. This is how we strengthen public safety and how we fight gun violence. We are saying to those committed to gun crimes, science is coming for you and we're going to use this science to get you off our street. And we see it every day. We saw it last night. Councilman Powers and I responding to the upper east side of just a horrible shooting. We know that there are too many guns on our streets. The partnership we did yesterday with our Attorney General and others, the Sheriff Department to go after those guns, standing with the U.S. Senator Gillibrand to talk about those who are trafficking guns. We are damning every river that needs to be dammed and the lack of having the right technology was a river that was allowing guns to flow into the sea of violence. Today we are damning that river and making sure that we have the flow of technology to get dangerous people off our streets. This is something that's impacting our country, all over the country. We're seeing the sickening reality of the overproliferation of guns and the obsession of using guns in our country. And as mayor and as a former police officer, I am dedicated to stopping this madness. And we're going to do everything in our powers to make sure that we accomplish this task. And one of our most important partners is right here in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. And with that, I would like to introduce Dr. Graham and just tell him thank you for you and your team for the job they're doing. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor Adams, very much. We're delighted to welcome you to the Office of Chief Medical Examiner or the OCME today, along with our distinguished guests. And we're so grateful to you for your support of our agency. OCME is, as the Mayor said, home to the largest and most advanced public DNA crime laboratory in North America. We have a very proud history of science serving justice. And today, we're taking another step in that critical mission with the launch of our new DNA Gun Crimes Unit. Our current turnaround time for gun crimes cases is already better and faster than most labs in the country. With this new dedicated unit, exclusively dealing with gun crimes, the first of its kind in the country, we will achieve a 30-day turnaround time for gun crimes cases and be the fastest of any large municipal laboratory in the nation. Accelerated results will help the criminal justice system resolve cases as quickly as possible. These proceedings can result in the exoneration of someone who's innocent or the conviction of someone who's guilty. Faster turnaround times also speed answers for victims, families, and our communities, which are affected by the gun violence epidemic. Our DNA Gun Crimes Unit is setting a new standard, and that standard is meeting the urgency of this moment. The OCME stands uniquely at the crossroads of public health and public safety. Every day, our professionals speak with families, struggling with the grief and pain of a death that is caused by gun violence. Parents, siblings, and children who also worry about losing other loved ones to the ongoing cycle of trauma. Today, we at the OCME are doing our part as doctors, as forensic scientists, with independence and impartiality to help our city end the sickness of gun violence. New Yorkers cannot wait another moment, and neither will we. Thank you very much. And I want to bring on Councilman Powers to say a few words. Councilman. Thank you. First of all, I'm so glad to have the whole staff here, and I want to say thank you to everyone. Give them a big round of applause. They deserve it. You know, I walked by this bill. I will have lived right down the block, and I walked by this building, sort of recessed back here every single day, and I think so many other New Yorkers do too, and don't recognize or realize how important the work is that's going on in this building and in this whole area to really serve our city. But now it's getting even better. And as we, the Mayor mentioned, he and I and others were up at the shooting last night on the border of my district on the Upper East Side, where another senseless tragedy took in person's life. And in the wake of that last night and today, all I've heard from constituents and New Yorkers is what is next? What is coming next? And the Mayor, I know yesterday spent his entire day and now today talking about steps that the city is going to take. We obviously are also asking Albany to take steps to respond to the Supreme Court case from last week. But we have to use every single tool at our disposal right now to make sure and every city agency has to be involved in the fight to reduce the senseless gun violence in the city to get guns off the street and to catch the people that are responsible for that. So this is an announcement that I hope does not fly under the radar. I hope New Yorkers recognize what this means. It means we will have the better tools that we need to catch those individuals like the one last night and to put them away and to give them off our streets because New Yorkers deserve that. And we deserve to have a city government that responds to that. So I'm just very deeply thank for the Mayor for staying on course here to continue to go after those who are bringing guns onto the streets and hurting New Yorkers. I want to thank the entire agency here because you guys are, I think, often the unsung heroes of this city. You don't always get recognized for all the work you're doing but you make our city safer, you make it better, and you bring a lot of justice to families here in New York City. So thank you. Thank you to the Mayor. Thank you for everything you guys are doing for our city. And I also want to thank our Deputy Mayor of Public Safety, Phil Banks during the time that we were talking about the labs, the coordination of bringing all of our entities together. His wisdom and knowledge just really helped us see where do we, where must we fill in the gaps. And that's the coordination that we're doing and we're going to continue to roll out how we're coordinating. You saw the coordination with the sheriff's department yesterday and ghost guns. You're going to continue to see the full complement of our law enforcement apparatus under his leadership as we professionalize and tear down those barriers that have prevented us in the past of solving these complicated crimes. And so we open it to any questions on top? How are you? Well, two things. Number one, we want to use DNA and science to solve crimes, to take dangerous people off the street. We want to do that. But we want to do it in strict compliance with the laws that are put in place. We're not going to violate any laws and any rules, but we want to use science as much as possible. That's a nice little sign. You know, we want to, so the, our legal team is continuing to look at whatever rulings come down. We're going to comply to Corporation Counsel Judge Ash is going to comply, Judge Heinz-Raddick is going to comply with whatever rulings that come down. So we are in compliance. We are in full compliance with whatever rule has come down. Dr. Graham, you want to add anything to that? I think that the elimination databases are useful. We have an elimination database for, it is a requirement for all of our laboratory scientists to address the contamination issues that you are alluding to. And that's a standard practice in forensic science laboratories. I don't know the extent to which that's increased over the course of the past year, but I think as a general practice, any individuals involved in the handling of forensic evidence that certainly would be used potentially for DNA testing, it would be advisable to have them in an elimination database. The percentage of gun cases where DNA is useful, and where is that DNA? We receive evidence in a couple of forms in gun crimes cases. One, swabs that are taken from guns that are found, and the areas of the guns that are swabbed. This is sampling that's performed by the NYPD. We, the OCME, do not obtain those samples. Those samples are submitted to us, but there are areas of higher yield of DNA on the guns. Swabs are taken and submitted to us. Other types of evidence are also submitted in gun crimes cases. And generally speaking, if DNA is there, we are in about 60 to 70 percent of the cases able to recover that DNA, develop a profile, and then go on to either perform a match or an exclusion. So we're actively recruiting. We are going to be hiring 24 criminalists as forensic scientists who are part of this new gun crimes unit. We have already reviewed well over or over 300 resumes. We've identified already 10 of the 24 criminalists that are going to be hired, and we're moving very swiftly to hire the remaining criminalists hopefully by this fall to have the unit fully up and on board, ready to train, and then within a year be able to complete training and have the unit fully functional and achieve that turnaround target of 30 days in gun crime cases. Our forensic biology laboratory at the OCME is our largest forensic laboratory. We operate five forensic laboratories in our office, the forensic biology laboratory being the largest. And with that, the lab has roughly 150 or so criminalists. Well, it was very important immediately after the ruling we communicated with the governor. She pulled together a group of mayors across the state and in anticipation of the ruling of our chief counsel and the court counsel were starting a process of what are we looking for in anticipation of the ruling. So we're still analyzing the ruling because we want to get it right, but we need the governor to be the quarterback here. If we don't do it within the ruling, we're going to open ourselves up to having something overturned and we don't want to do that. We want to understand clearly what's within our powers, particularly around sensitive locations around allowing private locations or businesses to state if they don't want someone carrying a gun in or not. So we're looking at how do we sort of restrict the damage that the Supreme Court has carried out. How are you doing? Those are vegan meals? You know, so it's clear that we, it's clear that make a wish. That's how your wish happens. You know that you did that as a little girl, right? So it's clear that we have to coordinate how we do this. And so the governor, we were in communication with the governor's office, her legal team, and we have created what we believe are the best things to do. And now we have to execute the plan. This will be part of the routine processing of gun crime evidence in our lab. This is simply an addition of a unit that is doing exclusively gun crimes work rather than doing different types of DNA evidence processing. It will be a team devoted exclusively to gun crimes that will be the sole focus of their work. There were, the gun crimes were being processed as other types of DNA evidence is processed. Our criminalists are trained across a variety of types of evidence that come into our lab from sexual assaults to property crimes to gun crimes. They're broadly trained and they, as an individual criminalist, would work on a variety of types of cases, whereas now this unit is going to focus exclusively with a set of criminalists on gun crimes. The creation of this devoted unit in response to the gun violence that's ongoing now or was it already underway, years underway? No, during the transition, Deputy Mayor Banks was looking at all of the units that's attached to public safety and we discovered that many of the cases that were bottlenecked in the court system had to do with DNA testing. And we started to pursuit of doing a flowchart of where is the testing slow. And we discovered this, you know, Dr. Graham, the team here gave us some feedback. That's why I say it's important to talk to people who are on the ground and we immediately say, let's allocate the money because we cannot allow these cases to remain open because some of the gun cases, the DAs won't move forward without the DNA testing. And so we're allowing these dangerous people to stay on the street. And so our goal was to say, let's get this testing done. I would say that it's not necessarily harder than any other kind of case. There are challenges with guns as there are with other types of evidence with respect to the amount of DNA that may be deposited on a gun by any individual, the quality of that DNA, the presence of a mixture of DNA. So the same challenges that are faced in a variety of types of DNA cases, we also face in gun crimes. So I wouldn't say that there's anything particularly more challenging about gun crimes. Those are all factors that create challenges. The degradation of the DNA due to weather, due to heat, due to contamination with blood or other sources of potential contamination. Those are all challenges that the lab has to face in developing profiles for comparisons. That's a great question. I was speaking with the chancellor yesterday and he stated that if it laps, it just would create a lot of madness. And so I am hoping the governor signs the bill today and there appears to be indicators that she's going to do so. I know they're looking to address some of the other issues up there. So we're looking forward to getting it signed. There's a host of things that are still taking place. The gun legislation, the gun bill, so just some of the other pieces that Albany is trying to finish up. We have to really examine exactly if there was a failure. Anytime we have cases like this, we're in a constant state of analyzing how could we do something better. And so I don't know if I support what the dad is saying around that. We are looking to see was there something we could have done better and let's continue to evolve. Pivot is shift to produce a better product and we're looking at that. When you say why did it take so long, it's always important. You never want to prematurely present a case without all the evidence. If you do that and a person is found not guilty, then you open the door that you won't be able to go after them again because of the double jeopardy. And so it's crucial that when you bring these cases to the DA, when they bring it to trial that we have all the evidence. And I rather we methodically carried out so that we can get the conviction that we want and not just trying to just have a good sound bite that we made in the rest. It must be done correctly. We strongly believe it was not a random shooting that the victim was targeted. And the police department is still conducting an ongoing investigation. And we're going to catch this person that's responsible for this action. And the exact location of the child, we don't want to put out right now. But we are in communication with family members. And not at this time is still is still extremely active. The detectives are focused on it. And as I stated, we will bring this person to justice. You're hoping that she signs mayoral control, but have you spoken to her about what she's going to do on the class size bill? And are you hoping that she won't sign that? I have been communicating with the leaders there. You know, we like the idea of class sizes. We just have to do it correctly that we don't impact our ability to ensure that those students in those schools that are in need receive the support that they deserve. Now, class sizes have already dropped contractually for the U of T of the contract calls for 30 something students per class went down to 21.5 per class because we're hemorrhaging parents. And you know, my biggest fear is that we get to a point where the federal government is going to have to reallocate our funding to our schools because of the drop in students. We have a hemorrhaging of families that are leaving the city leaving the school system. And I had a conversation this morning with some of the congressional delegation to talk about, we have to start gearing up to look at if we're going to lose federal funding because of what we are facing in the hemorrhaging of students. Standing up, why did the governor have to sign it? I mean, it's been weeks. Right. And I don't know. I think that she was looking over other items that were pressing. I think there's sort of this gun issues to us through everyone into a refocus. So I'm not sure. I feel confident that it's going to be signed before the the sunsetting. If she doesn't use the word Matt, is there some sort of plan B that kicks in the mayor control lapses? But what actually happened? Yeah, no, we, we, we definitely have a plan B this, you know, the school system. We have months before the school system is backing up in that operation. And so we're definitely going to be prepared. Plan A, plan B, we're going to be prepared, prepared to educate students coming the year of my understanding of that. If it lapses sort of a lack of clarity, if we go back to school boards, there's a lack of clarity around that. But I feel confident that we're going to sign it before it's sunset. They already voted on it. They passed it. We're excited about the fact that we still have it. And we feel that we're going to be able to come to a governor signing it today. A question about neighborhood safety teams. I'm not sure if you saw photos that arose yesterday. A couple of officers at the Burl Broadway subway station who were dressed in vests indicating they were delivery workers for Amazon and FedEx. And then we're stopping passengers. Is that the vision you had for neighborhood safety teams? Not just plain clothes, but dressed to deceive, essentially? I don't think you are deceiving bad guys that commit crimes. Because bad guys that commit crime, they deceive us every day. If our neighborhood safety team received very strict direction, I don't know the photos that you're talking about. And if they were conducting certain operation where they wanted to catch someone off guard that was committing the crime, then I say hooray to them. We need to be creative as bad guys are creative. We have to get guns off the streets, have to stop the violence, and I'm all straight ahead in doing so. But I'll look at those photos. I don't know exactly what photos you were talking about, but I'll look at them. But the goal of the neighborhood safety team is to overall deal with crime in general, but specifically zero in on the people that are catching guns. We removed 3,300 guns off the street. The neighborhood safety team was part of that apparatus to remove those guns. Those ladies and gentlemen are doing a great job, and I say thank you. That's a dangerous job. Going after guns is a dangerous job, and they volunteered to be in that unit. And so they had my full support. Thank you.