 First and foremost, happy Hanukkah everyone. First, we want to thank the mayor for making time of his busy schedule to meet with the Queens Jewish community leadership. Everyone from the Queens Jewish community here is either a principal, a rabbi, runs a nonprofit, or a board member of a nonprofit. They're all truly community leaders, and we appreciate everyone making out their time to be here. We want to thank Shevach High School for opening up your doors to us and the entire community, particularly to Nakhamiah Haq and Yosef Levin for making this war, to arrange all the details and making this work as smoothly as possible. First, we're going to have two rabbis giving opening prayers, don't worry, one at a time. I have a little bit of a cheat sheet. Whenever you call me with a complicated issue, there's one person I call, and it's Manasha Shapiro, and he is, Qigar and Hills is very own Manash Shapiro. We are very grateful that his father is here, who is the brother of the shul right next door to Shevach, perhaps a rabbi, Mordechai Shapiro, to come up and say a few words. I'll sit in front of Dan. I want to thank everyone for coming today to the students of Shevach High School for hosting this very important community event. We all know that the story of Hanukkah is that of a small pitcher of oil which holds the potential for great miracles. The flickering flame we light each night of Hanukkah can illuminate and eliminate the darkness of hatred and fear. We are fortunate to have a mayor and a police commissioner who are committed to making our city safe for us, safe for our children, safe for our future, and who have devoted their entire careers in making the entire city safe. We have all seen firsthand our mayor's commitment to protecting the Jewish community from the threat of anti-Semitism, from his intervention breakfast in Brooklyn to interfaith meetings that he holds to just a few weeks ago when the coordinated effort of every branch of law enforcement stopped the potential dangerous event from occurring at one of our synagogues. We know that our mayor is leading from the front. In the immortal words of the soldiers that we are all familiar with, when the mayor gets up to do something, he says, acharai, follow me. We know that he will always be here for our community. Before I turn it over to the mayor, I want to call on my dear friend and neighbor, Rabbi Herschel Welch, to say a few words. It's an honor to greet the mayor today, Mayor Eric Adams, who extends his hands always in friendship to the Jewish community. We are very, very happy with the fact, obviously one of the major issues that the Jewish community confronts is the safety. And I just, before I speak about that, I do want to mention particularly in public thanks to Menasha Shapiro and Daniel Rosenthal for all the help that they have extended to our synagogue in the past many months and our dealings with the city government. We thank you greatly. And at a personal note, I want to welcome two of my granddaughters that are here in the audience in Shevah High School. Our concerns for safety are very, very foremost in the city. The mayor addresses head on the issue of crime, which has reached tremendous spikes and counteracting it and taking measures against it at first and foremost. And he's related in fact, the incident took place with his own child in the back of his car when someone shot into it years back and he's certainly very sensitive to the issue of public safety. I also applaud him for the bold initiative that he's undertaken, which has been ignored for a very long time of the problems of dealing with the mentally unstable and how it's reflected in the homeless community to undertake the things that are necessary for their care, to provide for their safety and thereby for the safety of the rest of the community. It's a very difficult and complex issue which many have chosen to ignore for many, many years and the mayor boldly undertakes to act in favor of the homeless, to assist them, to provide them with the needs that they have and to provide thereby the safety of the rest of the community. We'll particularly gather today on a focus on anti-Semitism and this is very, very troubling. We just had last week at the end of last week in Central Park, a Jewish person was attacked with anti-Semitic slurs, teenagers were chased in Flatbush with a taser gun, Hasidic Jews have the hats knocked off, the strimels knocked off in Williamsburg. According to the statistics put out by the police at the end of last week, the difference in anti-Semitic incidents between a year ago and that was 125%. So we appreciate the mayor's extending his hand in friendship and I welcome all the esteemed members, the police commissioner and all the esteemed members of the city government that have come today to focus on this problem and hopefully to persist and to resolve this particular problem that we have. And today is the day of Hanukkah, the first day of Hanukkah. Hanukkah is a day that we celebrate religious liberty. We were saved from tyranny and we were secured in our ability to teach our heritage, our Torah to our children, that's what the holiday represents. And we appreciate the mayor and his people coming here in fact to see what they could do to foster the safety, the security and the growth of the Jewish community and affect all the communities of the city of New York. And I thank them dearly. We look forward in fact to their success, what they've undertaken, we should see that it bears fruit and solves these major issues which affect the city of New York, I thank all of you. I also want to acknowledge someone who needs no introduction, Councilman Jim Gennaro is here. And as many of you are aware, because of redistricting we have a new state senator in Kugar and Hills, someone who I've had the pleasure of working with, I haven't finished yet guys, had the pleasure of working with him in the past in other parts of the district. He's a true mention friend of the community, Senator Leroy Comery is here. There was an article that came out a few weeks ago, a report that came out that said anti-Semitic incidences were up 125% in New York. And what wasn't that single article that bothered me was that I remember reading a similar headline the year before and the year before that and we can't allow that headline to continue or to become the new normal. I paraphrased this before, but the Auschwitz Museum, they said that the Holocaust didn't begin at the gates of Auschwitz. It happened first with stereotypes, then it happens with biases, then words start to be used in public spaces and then slowly acts of violence occur and eventually that seeps into our institutions and the norms of our government start to break down. Fortunately what we have here in New York, we have a government that is friendly to the Jewish community. We have a mayor who is no stranger to the Jewish community. He is from Brooklyn and he is someone who has stood up aggressively in support of the community and the fact that we are here on the first day of Hanukkah with the mayor of New York City, with the top brass of the NYPD to reassure us that we are welcome here and that we feel safe here. It's truly powerful and we should not take that for granted. So it is my pleasure to introduce Mayor Eric Adams. Thank you for your leadership and of just being one of the reasonable voices in Albany joined with my just good friend of many years, Senator Comrie and even reasonable voices in the city council with Jim that's there and my other colleagues that are here as well. And so we want to open the floor to you but I just want to plant just a seed of where we are. We started out this journey to really deal with the crisis that the city is facing. The commissioner inherited a demoralized police department. Officers did not have a clarity on what their assignments were. Every time they carried out their jobs, a headline would all of a sudden just add on to the uncertainty and the commissioner had a difficult task. She had to improve morale and at the same time go after what we thought was the biggest threat and that was the over-proliferation of guns and homicides and shootings in our community. Added to those crimes that are inflicted on people because of their race, their religion, their gender, their ethnicity, the hate crimes and you're right. The increase of 25%, those are not mere stats, those are real numbers and we take them seriously and the commissioner went in. She looked at the hate crime unit and she made some major changes there because we're not going to hide behind the numbers. We're not going to try to downgrade a hate crime. A hate crime is a hate crime and we think it's important to, if you're going to fix the problem, you have to properly identify the problem. And I think there are three pathways that we must do to fix this problem that we're facing of hate, of hate. You know, anti-Semitism is the leader of that hate but there's hate that has become pervasive throughout the entire city. Our AAPI community, the Spanish-speaking, our Muslim community, there's just an increase of hate that is really, I think is global based on a visit I had in Greece a week and a half ago with other mayors across the entire globe. Number one, there must be a real law enforcement response. I think it's a tragedy and it's the wrong message. When people commit hate crimes, I don't know anyone who has gone to jail for committing a hate crime. If you hate, you should be incarcerated but if you do a hate crime, you should do the time. There should be a no plea bargaining rule for people who commit hate crimes. Don't downgrade it to harassment. Don't downgrade it. It sends the wrong message. And I think our prosecutors should have a firm line that you commit a hate crime, that's the charge, you're gonna be charged with, you found convicted, you are going to spend time in jail for committing that crime. That was in the right message and I don't think we've done that. Number two, the historical relationship between the black Jewish community is a long standing relationship. Michael, you know that more than anyone, how long that relationship has been in place. The architects of that relationship many have transitioned. They no longer with us. And this generation, I know Michael, I know other leaders who are here, we know of that relationship. But where's the pipeline? Where's the relationship of our children? Who are the new Michael and Eric's of today? We have to be intentional about building out the pipeline. That pipeline means going to college campuses. That pipeline means reaching out and having communications with each other. Something we did in Brooklyn called Breaking Bread, Building Bonds, a hundred dinners across the city, 10 people at each dinner, and they did something revolutionary. They talked to each other. We live in a segregated city. When someone sees someone with a hijab, a keeper, someone sees someone with a dashiki, instead of leaning into saying, I want to learn about who you are, we shy away from that. We have to stop that. We have to create intentional ways of communicating each other. I call it the karate kid moment in the movie, the young man that he was learning how to wash a car. In fact, he was learning karate. We need to find intentional ways. If a school, a public school is near Senegal, they need to be part of their class trip to go visit that Senegal. If there's a mosque in the community, go visit that mosque. We should have days when children stand up and explain what it is to have a sukkah, what it is to have halal food, what it is to have different days. Why do we acknowledge our religious faith on certain days of the week? We need to lean into that more so we can become smarter and appreciate our diversity. Number three, which I think is the biggest. I am extremely alarmed at what is happening globally. And I think we are really downplaying it. Social media. Social media has been able to do something that has never been done before. Historically, if you had a person who had hate, they would sit in the corner of their room somewhere and they would spew out their hate. Social media is allowing this hate to manifest itself throughout communities. The young man that killed 10 African Americans in the supermarket in Buffalo, he was not radicalized by his parents. He was not radicalized by his schools or his friends. He was radicalized through social media. And social media is going to people who are in pain and telling them, this is who you are angry at. And so when we saw what happened with Kanye West and others, those are considered credible messengers and they're considered influencers. Social media is allowing influencers who have toxic messages to influence young people who are in pain, who are angry, who are upset, who are unemployed, they are now allowing them to be radicalized and identify particular groups to target. If we don't have a major initiative of going after social media, sitting down the platforms and demanding that they become socially responsible and utilizing the algorithms, they're using the algorithms to sell hate. We must compel them to utilize the algorithm to dismantle hate and stop the spreading of this hate throughout our city and our country. If we don't, we're going to see the hate that came out of Nazi Germany amplified beyond our imagination. Can you imagine if someone evil as Hitler had social media to get his message out globally and unchecked? I was at Auschwitz. I went to Krakow. I saw what happened in the camps. I know how devastating this time is. It started with words and led into action. So here's what we must do and we all must do. We have a problem. We need to devise a solution based on the problem and then we need to measure what we're doing every day to address the problem. So if the problem is anti-Semitism, if the problem is hate and the solution is enforcement, the solution is a building more communications and relationships, then we need to identify those goals. If the goal is we want 50,000 children by the end of the year to have sat in centers where they learn from each other, then every week we need to monitor to see are we keeping up with those goals. How many children got together each week until we reached a goal? If the goal is to prosecute those that hate crime and make sure they're doing time, then we need to monitor who's arrested for hate crime, what are they doing with the time and we need to communicate with our prosecutors and say this is what's demand. If the goal is building out organizations on college campuses, we need to be measuring how many college campuses that we hit each week. If the goal is stop in social media, we need to measure how successful each week we are and identifying those algorithms to make sure they're doing right. We're not gonna stumble into success. We can't be here next year and say hate crimes are up 200%. If we don't measure, we're not going to get it done. My mother said you gotta inspect what you expect or it's all suspect and right now all of this is suspect. This is our opportunity. We need to leave here today with a team of how we're going to attack this hate in our city. I think the message is New York City is a city of coexistence. There was a symbol that showed there from the star David to symbolize the Jewish community of fish to symbolize Christianity and the other stars that go with those symbols of coexistence. We need to put that on forefront of everything we do. We have to raise our message. This is a city where we coexist. And that's the message I want. I cannot think that Jewish community enough. It's no secret. It's no secret. When I ran, thank you, Rachel. When I ran for office, if it was Rockaway, if it was Borough Park with Joel, if it was Williamsburg with Moishendick, if it was here in Queens, no matter where I traveled to, my message was your message. I was the candidate for the Jewish community and I'm going to be the mayor for this community. Commissioner and I know we have an obligation and responsibility and we're going to live up to that. And so we open the floor to hear from you, some of your questions that I'm sure the commissioner is going to run through some of the things that she's doing. I don't think we could thank her enough. When you look at what we're trending and crime, both her team and a new team she's building here with Chief Madri and Chief John Shell, this is a team that is going to make sure our city is safe. Thank you for your money. Thank you, Assemblyman. We're also very fortunate to have with us the first female police commissioner of the city of New York, who is going to address, say a few words for us as well. Thank you so much, Mr. Mayor. And thank you, Assemblyman Rosenthal, for your constant support of the NYPD. We sincerely appreciate it. The mayor told me in the beginning of this year when I took this position that I had some mandates. And one of them, the chief one, was the public safety of this city. And to do that, I have to work with our communities. And I cannot tell you how much we value the support of our Jewish communities. No one should be afraid to walk in this city. No one should be victimized by hate in this city. And the NYPD is here to make sure that that does not happen. We will attack it every single way we possibly can. We do that with deployment. We do that with investigations, education and outreach. And we always talk about this shared responsibility for public safety, but this is what it looks like. This room of everybody taking their precious time to come sit and talk to us and ask your questions and have the top brass of the police department answer those questions to you directly. I'm fortunate right now to be joined by a number of our leaders. I have my first deputy commissioner, Reddy Caban. I have our new chief of department, Jeff Madry. Our new chief of patrol, John Schell. Our chief of Queen South, Kevin Williams. And our chief of hate crimes commander of hate crimes, Inspector Andrew Arias. And a number of other leaders in the back of the NYPD as well. This is a very holy time of the year as we all know when it's understandable that you approach it with caution and concern as do we. But again, we are here. We have our community affairs officers visiting our houses of worship. We have additional officers in vulnerable locations and communities across this city. And we will continue to provide in-depth and robust investigations to bring to justice anyone who commits a hate crime in this city. Those numbers that are up are unacceptable and concerning but those numbers represent people and families. And that is what we will address in this city. The fear that the mayor told me we had to make sure we attacked in this city that no one should be afraid in this city to be who they are. You're allowed to be free to worship and be who you are anywhere in the five boroughs of this city. So I will say though in Queens we actually have an 18% decrease in hate crimes and our arrests for hate crimes and anti-semitic crimes are actually up this year. But it's not enough. And we know we have to do more. I was actually touched by an article in the paper was actually written by the Council of Religious Leaders who was actually Rabbi Potasnik, Cardinal Dolan and A.R. Bernard and they wrote an article, a combined story about the light in the city and how when we all come together that light shines. And in this room there's a lot of light. And we here in the NYPD will make sure we are here for every single one of you and we will keep coming to these meetings to address any of your concerns and you will see us out there during the holiday season and we'll always be here for you. Thank you so much for your time and happy Hanukkah to everyone. We're gonna take questions in a moment but first I wanna acknowledge Inspector Richie Taylor who is the highest ranking Orthodox, Jewish Orthodox officer at the NYPD's history. He's also just a great guy. We have Fred Kreisman who's a commissioner of the Committee Affairs Unit for the Mayor's Office. Joel Eisdorfer who is the Senior Advisor to the Mayor who when you plan events he's the calmest person you could talk to always. And also many of you know we have our local commanding officer here, Inspector Chan who has become really a part of our community since he's taken over the 107th precinct and is extremely responsive and we really appreciate everything he does for us. For our first question, there's been no secret that's been a rise in anti-Semitism particularly in our college campuses throughout CUNY and particularly there's been some instances here locally at Queens College. So we have Rabbi Shul Wertheimer who is the rabbi of the Chabad on Queens College to ask a question. So as Assemblyman Rosenthal mentioned I'm Rabbi Shul Wertheimer. I'm the Chabad Rabbi at Queens College for the last 18 years. And we're looking forward to our menorah lighting on the Queens College campus tonight. And in the meantime, as is well known there was a student who was outside of Queens College even as recently as a couple of weeks ago yelling and harassing students with anti-Semitic and racial slurs. There have also been numerous other well-documented issues of anti-Semitism throughout the CUNY system. And I wanted to ask if you have a message for the Jewish students on campus today. What we're going to look at that case, the commissioner and the chief of staff briefed me on that earlier. And I think we need to be a little bit more aggressive with this individual. We have clear rules on freedom of speech but we also have clear rules on harassment and disorderly conduct. And oftentimes there's a reluctancy to make apprehensions on disorderly conduct because the case is always ruled against us in a court. I would rather let them rule against us. Lock him up every time he does it, let the court say if he needs to lead. I know what's in our powers. If he's using an amplified device that goes beyond just yelling and screaming. There's to use an amplified device without a sound permit, those are reasons to say you're breaking the law. And we should not have someone standing out with a megaphone, yelling anti-Semitic or any type of hate in our city. And we're gonna walk by and say, well the law protects them. No, they don't protect them when I'm the mayor. That's unacceptable, it can happen. We're stopping it from happening. Next someone who needs no introduction. You know someone's important when they have no titles but they're the one and only Shimmy Pellman. Actually I do have a title. I'm the Democratic District Leader. First of all. I'm sorry before you do that, Shimmy. And just on the college campuses, yesterday we were at, what's the young lady's name that we were with yesterday? Who? Lizzie? She was on Real Housewives? Yeah, she had a Hanukkah party that I crashed yesterday. And so but anyway, there was a gentleman that we met there that has a movement that specifically targets anti-Semitism on college campuses. I got his number, he's gonna team up with our team. We need to mobilize on every college campus of an organization, a group that's going to be against hate. We can't allow the numerical minority to be loud and have the overwhelming majority be silent. So our goal is to partner with him. He's in Florida. We wanna duplicate that here and have college campuses all organized because a lot of the hate that is coming it is really from college campuses. The loudest have hijacked what everyday students believe in. And so we wanna focus on college campuses to stop the pipeline of hate. Thank you very much, Mayor. And thank you for coming. I know you'll hear a lot during your campaign. I met with you many times and you're an amazing, amazing individual. But I also wanna thank Deputy Inspector Kwan from the 107th who takes very good care of this community. Kwan, you see, he's here someplace and I just wanna thank... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Kwan, Chang, sorry. My English is bad. I also wanna thank you for bringing this amazing array of individuals to join us. I know some of them. I know Isendorf. I know Menasha. I know Craceman. They are all receptive to many of the things that we do. Menasha Shapiro has been very helpful in one of the synagogues that just had a major fire in helping us get it back online. But also one of the things that we need to do is partner with other communities that are subjected to the same hate crimes. I've been involved with working with Grace Meng, Linda Lee, Sandra Ong, and other people with the Asian communities who having the same problem. We need to ensure that this city is safe and what you're doing by reaching out to us, by going to all the communities, is just an amazing example of how the city communicates. I'm glad that you are not in with the progressives who wanna defund, who wanna cut, who wanna make the city unsafe. I don't understand. They get as mugged as we do. So why are they doing that? But Mayor, thank you. And I know that Mr. Gennaro is fighting day and night against the progressive as you are. And I know that Lee Roy Comrie is gonna be going up to Albany with Daniel to try to convince them that some of the bail reforms don't work and some of them need to be allowed the judge to make a decision of who and when someone needs to be incarcerated. Again, thank you very much for coming. Daniel, as always, thank you very much. We are in Shevach High School, so we have a high school student, Adina Roars in the 11th grade, and she has a question for the mayor. Welcome to Shevach. Thank you for joining us here today. Just a few weeks ago, there was a shooting at a public school down the street. That has caused us to fear for our safety as we walk the streets. What assurances can you give us about measures taken to protect us? So I'm just gonna start that, but I'm gonna turn it over to the Chief of Department. You have to feel safe going to school. We have a number of deployments between our youth coordination officers that we're doing in those areas, but you should never be in fear to walk to and from school or to attend school, but I'm gonna turn it over to our Chief to give you some specifics. Okay, happy Hanukkah, everyone, and thank you for that question. I will tell you something. I have a daughter that goes to public high school, not too far from here, so I understand that question and that thought. In the department, we take this very seriously and looking at our crimes that are related to in and around schools is one of our priorities. So what we've been doing, we've been readjusting a lot of our school plans, making sure that our young people when they come out there seeing more officers, and we've also taken a strong look at the corridors that are most often used by the young people. A lot of the young people travel up Main Street. A lot of them catch the bus on Horace Harding, so we're making sure we have some extra patrols out there to be present and make sure our young people know that the officers there are there. We're gonna start making sure our officers start also going to the schools more. That's something I really wanna push, that our officers are going to the school, making those connections with the staff and some of the young people during their travels. When we do things like this, this is how we're gonna increase safety. Public safety is about people. Public safety is about people partnering together to accomplish a common mission, and that's what we're gonna be doing a lot more of. We were already doing it, but we're gonna step it up even more. We're putting a lot of new officers out into the street. Tomorrow, we reorganize some of our officers in the department, so you'll see a lot more of our young officers out on the street in your neighborhoods. So I hope that answers your question, and best of luck at everything when you do a young lady in school. Thank you. And what we saw, we do our morning meetings with the leadership of the office, and what we discovered on the previous administrations, we want to stop that precinct commanders and principals were not speaking to each other. In some cases, they never even met each other. It was unbelievable when you think about it. We're going to ensure that our precinct commanders and our principals communicate on a regular basis to check in with each other. We wanna make sure that the principal of this school is part of that conversation. This way, you can sort of learn about things beforehand. And David Greenfield, a former councilperson, we organized with him to make sure that we were able to get cameras in our yeshivas and in our private schools. It is our big belief that schools must be a safe place. If there's some ideas from some of the students here that you would like to share, we're open to hear it, because it's not always us dictating to you, you are living this experience, you should communicate with us. And part of our goal is to educate young people and families. What are some of the safe corridors? Sometimes we take different routes home, some of those routes are dangerous, but if we identify some real corridors, it allows us to maximize our manpower and our police personnel will know what are the corridors that our young people are using, like Main Street or Fulton Street. They're different areas where the bulk of our young people use to go to and from the place of employment. Lastly, safe haven spots in location. If there's locations along the route home, stores, supermarkets, drug stores, synagogues, churches, that a young person can know preemptively that if they feel unsafe in any way, they can stop in this location to get the help they need is so important. Sometimes there's a distance from the point of origin to school, but if we could have routes along the way that has identified safe havens, safe locations, safe zones, where people are already knowledgeable on how to get in contact with the local police, precinct personnel, that is just enhancing. So there's not one step to safety. It's an accumulation of police, community, and the individuals taking responsibility for their personal safety that we could ensure the safety that we need. Next question is to our local Queens community leader, Sarla Idels. Hi, everybody. Thank you so much for coming here today. Thank you, Hashem, for allowing us to live in a city where we can have the mayor of New York here, the police commissioner here, and all the other elected officials. Thank you so much, Hashem. We are living in very strange times here. We're not the only ones, but before I get into that part, thank you for everything that you're doing. Thank you for speaking up on our behalf, but for the entire city's behalf. Commissioner Sewell, you are a very strong woman, and I look up to strong people, specifically strong women. We want more people on the ground. We want more boots on the ground. I know you want that with us, and I appreciate that. We all here appreciate that. I'm not an elected official. I represent the community. I live here. I've lived here all my life. Queens is a cozy little community, and we're not feeling the coziness. We're scared. Our students are scared. Our elderly are scared. And everyone in between. And I know I read about you, and I'm watching you, and I see things that I like. I like what you're saying, and I want more of it. Please help us. So, to say thank you was inadequate for what you just said, but I have to do better, right, based on what you're telling me. And we have deployed a number of officers out into the field, but you're going to see more as the Chief just explained. He has actually retooled our field training unit to be able to surge more officers out onto the street. I think the best thing a person can see is an officer on the street, walking down the street, driving by in a car. That makes all the difference. And we all recognize that. I mean, we see it on the subways. We see people walking down the street. The moment you see that uniformed, it's like, okay, I'm going to be all right. Even if you're just asking for directions, but to see that person there makes a huge difference, and you're going to see a lot more of that because I do believe it makes a huge difference. This community wants to see officers. We want to see cars. We want to see them in our schools. We want to see them on our streets. We want them. If there's another community or other progressive officials who don't want officers, we'll take them. Give them to us. We want them. I will tell you, I am getting them out as fast as we can. After post-COVID, I'm graduating over 500 more officers at the end of this month, and I'm swearing in over 600 more in January. Thank you. Thank you. Miss Mayer Adams. Thank you, Sarah. Thank you, Sarah-La. Thank you. But it's important to take a question. As you just indicated, we've done a series of town halls, the commissioner and I, and we've criss-crossed this city. I don't know, maybe you know, because I didn't hear any. I don't know one community that stated they didn't want their police. Not one. And in fact, I heard just the opposite. I heard just, exactly. Exactly. So I don't know who, those who are saying get rid of police. I don't know who they represent. Because every community we attended and visited, they want their police. And so, you know, we will have a struggle taking police from a community and bringing it to another community because every community is clear. They want their police officers. And the commissioner, as she stated, she's increasing the classes. She identified a problem that was being, that took place in actual examinations. She went in, communicated with DCAS, the organization that's in charge of doing the tests. We were able to utilize our police academy to have more exams. So we are going to the source of the problem and fixing the problem so we can get more officers on patrol. And don't read the headlines that are telling you people don't want to become police officers. That is just not true. Young men and women in this city are eager to put on that uniform and be a member of the NYPD. We see it every day. And we're excited about it. And for the sake of diversity, as much as I think that the Queens Jewish community runs out of Kugar and Hills, there's a beautiful Jewish community in Farakoe. They came all the way from Farakoe. We have Baruch Rothman here. So first of all, I want to thank the mayor. Your wonderful assembly member over here, Dan, who's always been a friend to Farakoe. And of course, Madam Commissioner, all the top brass and Fred and Manasha and Joel and everybody. And I want to say, most of you know I work for Raba Yaakov Bender in Farakoe. Raba Yaakov Bender always says, when it comes to safety and security, we'll never hear about the tragedies that thankfully we prevented. And I dare say that have we not have a mayor such of yourself and a police commissioner and top brass, as all of you assembled here, that unfortunately the numbers wouldn't be up 125% today. They'd be up about 200%. So I want to thank you for all the efforts you have put in behind the scenes in front of the scenes and everything you've done since we met and even before we met for the community. But I also do want to echo that although this meeting is focused in Kew Garden Hills and I wouldn't want to take away from any of you, that we down in the 101 also welcome as many boots on the ground as possible. The 101 has always been there for the community. I've been dealing with them as long as I'm in Darche, which is about 15 years. And we were seeing under the last administration where officers didn't want to take reports and didn't want to do this and didn't want to do that and we are slowly seeing it fade away because of what's happening up here at the top and we appreciate that. Thank you very much. We want to be respectful of the mayor's time. So the mayor is going to leave now but the NYPD brass is going to stay behind to answer a few more questions. We want to thank the mayor again. It is unprecedented for us to be able to call an administration and say, we're not feeling comfortable. We're not feeling safe and their responses will bring you the mayor will bring you the top NYPD brass. You'll be able to ask questions really is unprecedented of an administration. We want to thank the mayor once again for being here. One more. Can't say no to Rabbi. We have one more question from Rabbi Shlomo Nisanal. Thank you. Thank you mayor. Thank you everybody for coming. I just on behalf of the Bukharian community I'd like to represent we are the new immigrants here face of Kew Garden Hills where I like to call us BH Bukharian American. I'm here with my colleagues from the community. First of all, I want to say thank you mayor for being there. We were there for your support when you were running together and we want to say that we feel very safe and there's many things that happened. I want to take the opportunity to say thank you to our chief Williams who came to my synagogue to have him stand there on a shovel to stay speak up and talk. And I was translating what he was saying but I did very little translation because when he spoke, he spoke from the heart. He said, you know what? I live here. This is personal for me. And to have him say those things was great. And another thing that happened with our chief of community affairs with Jay Clark when at the height of anti-Semitism before the previous administration we had eight precincts come to my synagogue and I told them what's under my yarmulke and we had kids from all backgrounds and everybody I told everyone that like today is the safest place in New York City is this Peshawah High School. And when we came in our synagogue we had so many police cars. Everyone thought like what's happening over there and I had to calm everyone down. I said, we were having an opportunity for the children to know about each other. Like you said, no one is born hating. Everyone is taught to hate. And how about getting together? And when there was a mosque, a Midrasad that opened next to a Yeshiva Khan of Queens, next to a Yeshiva they had their board meeting, Jamaica Muslim Center in our synagogue. And like people are coming to me. Rabbi, is everything okay? What are they doing here? Well, they're opening a school and I had the honor to be the first rabbi to speak in a Midrasad. You know what it is? To have a rabbi speak in a Muslim school and I went to Jamaica Muslim Center. That's called building bridges. So I wanna tell the mayor, we're here to partner. Tell us what to do. And I could speak on behalf of all my Bukharis because we come from a repressive country where the police were not known to be your friends and to have them come down and to have the chief speak and deputy inspector to have Kevin Chang and to our community affairs from Kevin to come down and every single officer to feel comfortable and just walkin' down. We serve 25,000 people a month and we serve everyone. And it's a great thing to have a miniature everybody from the governor when she was running to our current borough president, Donal Richards to come, that shows unity. So I think we should replicate that. And we're here with the girls here. My wife went to Sheva High School. This is very, very close home. And to speak, to talk about diversity and to have the kids, okay, let's come to Sheva High School. Let's go to the high schools. We partner up with all the schools, PS 164, 165, when the kids come and volunteer at a food pantry. And they see it and it makes a big difference. So I wanna say thank you very much and thank you for Fred. We know him for many years. And to have this opportunity to go more and more. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. And that's a good example. We need to duplicate what you are doing. And we're rolling out the breaking bread, building bonds. We went 1,000 dinners. Fred is in charge of making that happen so we should connect and duplicate what you're doing. Because the leaders of these communities, we must be part of changing that narrative and really showing how we are living together. And then we have to again, tackle social media. Okay, that's what our young people are looking at. We don't even realize how much they live on those forms. They live on these credible messages. They live on these influencers. That's a term that many of us didn't know about. But these influencers are influencing our children. They can influence them for good or they can influence them for bad. And so we want to partner with you on what you're doing and just continue to lift up what's great about this city. The team is going to remain here. If there are more questions that you want to answer. But again, I cannot thank this community enough. During the most difficult times of my campaign, I remember coming here, meeting this community and this community stood with me when people did not think it was possible. You said, Eric, you have the right message. We're going to mobilize our community to get that message out. And I don't know the exact numbers, but I believe I got 99.999% of the vote in this community. And you're going to see that you did the right thing. You made the right investment because our good governance is going to be the dividends that you deserve from it. Thank you very much. Thank you.