Like most politicians who agree to sit down for interviews with the animated news anchors on Comedy Central’s Tooning Out the News, New York City Mayor Eric Adams probably thought it would all be fun and games. Then the fictional host of “Big News,” James Smartwood, started grilling him on his administration’s aggressive police tactics.
One week after he successfully prank-called Herschel Walker, Smartwood sat down “face to face” with Adams for a wide-ranging conversation on a variety of topics. At one point, he convinced the mayor to escalate his feud with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott by getting him to cold-read a bunch of insults off of a card, including the line, “Greg Abbott is so unlikeable, Heidi Cruz wants to marry him.”
But things took a more contentious turn in the exclusive clip below when the anchor brought up Adams’ controversial efforts to reduce crime in the city.
“On the campaign trail, when you weren’t talking about your number one issue, what you put in your morning smoothie, you were talking about crime,” Smartwood said, citing a report that misdemeanor arrests in New York City have jumped 25 percent in the first six months of Adams’ administration.
“These are small crimes like subway fare evasion and sleeping on a park bench,” Smartwood continued. “But these arrests do let concerned New Yorkers know: Mayor Adams will not tolerate being poor in this city. Can you promise that by the end of your term, every New Yorker will be rich or in jail?”
Seemingly caught off guard, Adams let out a laugh before answering, “Every New Yorker will feel safe,” and defending the “quality of life” arrests as a way to prevent a slippery slope toward more serious crimes.
From there, Smartwood brought up the incident this past June when six policeofficers were caught on camera dragging a saxophonist out of a subway station for busking. “You called the NYPD’s response ‘proper policing,’” he told Adams. “Are you concerned the NYPD does not have enough funding when you only have six cops in your Saxophone Strike Force?”
When Adams again defended himself by calling “quality of life” a “number one issue people complain about,” Smartwood replied, “Well, do you need additional resources to protect the city from the other instruments out there? Someone could be playing the trumpet, trombone, piano, what else is there? We talked about saxophone. That was the big one. That’s the one where the guy got roughed up pretty bad.”
For more, listen to Tooning Out the News creator R.J. Fried on The Last Laugh podcast.
