Power 105.1 might house today’s top hip-hop tracks, but the Breakfast Club’s debate between movement lawyer Olayemi Olurin and Mayor Eric Adams sounded more akin to Kool Moe Dee vs. Busy Bee. In the now-viral interview, which went down last Friday, March 29, Olurin challenged Adams’s public safety rhetoric, which she deemed as fear-mongering. She backed her claims with statistics pulled from Brennan Center research and Floyd NYPD monitor reports.
While the interview officially ended with Adams claiming history would favorably remember him as “an authentic bald‑headed, earring‑wearing brother that did his thing as the mayor,” Olurin hoped listeners will take away other lessons.
“Whenever anybody thinks there’s a problem, they have this knee-jerk reaction to give more money to policing, no matter how many times they’ve done it before. Everybody feels that is somehow the commonsense plan A,” she said to the AmNews. “But for some reason, when you say [to] give money to those communities, that somehow becomes a slightly unrealistic dream. The safest communities are not the most policed; they’re the most resourced. What we need is resources and the same knee-jerk reaction you have to to invest in policing, [to] invest in people.
“There is never going to be an overnight solution [for crime]. That’s the problem people don’t want to contend with. We didn’t get to the situation that we’re in overnight and it’s not going to be fixed overnight.”
For Olurin, solutions look like investment and criminal justice reform. The NYPD boasts one of the city’s largest agency budgets, which she believes should not supersede education, healthcare, and mental health funding. She also advised federal receivership over Rikers Island, which would wrest control over the crumbling jail to a third party.
She also underscored, as she did in the interview, that Rikers Island is largely a pre-trial detention center. Which means roughly 90% of detainees are held for a crime that they have yet to be found guilty for.
Holding the conversation at the Breakfast Club also offered a unique opportunity for Olurin to engage with an audience outside of politics. The “World’s Most Dangerous Radio Show” reaches more than 90 affiliate radio stations throughout the country for an entertainment-centered audience.
“Not just that it was incredibly accessible,” said Olurin. “It’s more accessible than political news would normally be because it was on the Breakfast Club—because it was a Black platform and it was expressly the Black community that he intended to pander to.”
After the interview, NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell called Olurin “misinformed” in an X (formerly known as Twitter) post and said she “epitomizes everything that true NYers are against.” He followed up with another post asking for the attorney to show up to slain NYPD officer Jonathan Diller’s funeral, attached to a screenshot of her blocking him over the site. Olurin, who accused the department of attacking journalists over social media during the Breakfast Club interview, welcomed Chell’s rants.
“I said to Mayor Adams, it’s the NYPD on their Twitter [accounts] attacking journalists, and the NYPD can be seen openly attacking [me],” she said. “This isn’t like I was at a protest and I gave the speech and incited a riot—no, no, I was invited onto a nationally syndicated radio station to do an interview with the mayor. You’re not happy about how the mayor performed and so you’re attacking an attorney and media professional on Twitter…beyond my physical safety, I think this is good for New Yorkers to see because it says this is what they do to journalists and media and attorneys because they do their job. Imagine what they are doing to regular, everyday New Yorkers who critique them.”
A spokesperson for the mayor pointed to comments he made on the NYPD’s recent social media activity, namely against Harry Siegel’s column in the New York Daily News.
“If a columnist has a right to an opinion, a police officer shouldn’t have a right to his opinion?” said Adams during his media availability. “And here’s a real horrific part of it that really impacted me: That column was released at 5:00 p.m., I believe, on the day we buried an officer, …sometimes, I think folks forget, these are human beings.
“What you saw from Chell and Daughtry, you saw a human reaction. Just as you are protecting your reporters, they were protecting their cops.”
Tandy Lau is a Report for America corps member and writes about public safety for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep him writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.
She labeled Rikers Island as Pre Trial Detention these are folks arrested for crimes, warrants or going to court till they get sentenced as someone who has had family and friends who work at Rlkers they have first hand account that those convicts need to be lockdown