It's Brian Lehrer, and this is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios.

It's Friday, June 5th.

Time for our weekly Ask the Mayor's segment.

My questions and yours for Mayor Bill de Blasio. And good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Welcome back to WNYC.

Thank you very much, Brian. How are you doing today?

I'm doing all right. I think there is one dominant topic for you this week. And it seems from a lot of

reporting that the city has a problem of the protests against too much police violence being

met with too much police violence or heavy-handed police tactics. Do you accept the premise?

No, I accept the premise only in this way, that I think people are deeply hurt.

There's an anger, there's a pain over what's wrong in policing in America

and in New York City that we have to fix. There's a pain over the killing of George Floyd,

and there's a sense of injustice not being addressed, and we have to address it. We have to show

the deeper change.

But in terms of the way that the many, many thousands of people who have been out there protesting

have been addressed, look, there are specific instances I don't accept where there needs to be

discipline, but the vast majority of what I've

seen is peaceful protest that has been respected as always, and folks making their voices

heard for change. And police have shown a lot of restraint. You're always going to see,

unfortunately, because we're humans, you're going to see specific things that didn't work, and there has to be consequences, and then there has to be changes in an approach. But I've been out there so many times in the last week. Brian, just literally going right up to where the protests were to watch them. And I have seen overwhelmingly peaceful protest being respected by the NYPD.

You know, the protest is in many ways about police, obviously, it has been done peacefully.

There are so many examples, though, that have been reported of bad police behavior, that it

...