you re somewhere just shy of a positivity rate of 19% how are things going there? who is most impacted? well, many people are being impacted. we ve, unfortunately, had records over the last few days. we ve had a couple of highs for florida. i m actually in a to covid hospital right now visiting a 40-year-old who s in icu, so it s impacting people that are my age, it s impacting children because more children are hospitalized than before, significantly more. and so, you know, this is a difficult time where we re now have to make sure that we re doing everything that we can and getting vaccinated. you know, 99% of the people that are vaccinated are not experiencing serious complications, and 90% of the people that are hospitalized are not vaccinated. so it s clearly a pandemic of the unvaccinated. griff: and, mr. mayor, are you seeing the debate over whether to get vaccinated, those that are hesitant, and the mask
rise. sadly, it may. jacqui: griff police are turning their backs on mayor lori light foot as the city struggles with a continuing wave of violence. joining us now is former police officer anthony napolitano. thank you so much for joining us. thanks for having me. jacqui: so i want to talk about officer ella french. he was shot and killed. she was shot and killed. the rank and file officers turned their back on the mayor when she showed up at the vigil. what has changed for you? well, that time when i stood with me brothers and sisters to support mayor lightfoot because the alternative was not even questionable who she was running against at the time. right now it s just my officers and city workers are looking around a saying we re not going to have a city that deals with crime and punishment the proper way, we back our police officers and make sure they re safe on the street, as a matter of mattl
our country, and she should have known that from the beginning. jacqui: so you re saying, if i m hearing you right, that she might not be, you know, anti-police funding herself but definitely bent to pressure from the progressive far left. absolutely. absolutely. the mayor has come out on record multiple times saying she didn t support the defund the police movement, but then when it came time to take away 635 positions from the police department in our last budget, she folded on that. and that was done in our department and in our city. and now we have another police accountability program that s defunding the police because it s paying for positions for civilians to once again have oversight on the police along with the 12 other oversight committees we have. you re forcing the police not to want to be the police anymore. jacqui: she unveiled the budget proposal on wednesday. it was surprisingly beefed up, quite the proposal from last year when she proposed cutting
toxic and divisive reporting and rhetoric needs to stop. but her critics say that she has pulled some divisive stunts of her own. at one point she said she was limiting interviews to journalists who were not people of color, putting, basically, white journalists at the back of the line, and people gave her some heat for that saying that wasn t really her position to do that as an elected official. as she sate has she set an example leading up to now where she s saying that divisive reporting needs to end, has she set that example? no. you know, she s done what we call in the city of chicago talking out of both sides of your head. telling people exactly what they want to hear, and when you re in front of a different crowd, you tell them something different. she called me and one of my colleagues racist because we stood against the chicago ordinance where it allowed, or
devastation is or will be, but the early reports are not good. and, obviously, people are extremely anxious here. griff: and as far as your haitian community goes there, are you going to have any sort of response to help them, perhaps to try and reach i know communication in situations like this becomes really very difficult. absolutely. i mean, we have, like you said, little haiti cultural center which was created in the city of miami, and it s probably one of the largest diaspora of haitian-americans are here in the united states. so we will be using that facility to connect with the haitian community and make sure that we re doing everything we can as a city to support them over there. griff: and lastly, mr. mayor, we re glad that a hurricane named fred is not hitting you, but you are going to get a lot of rain. what are you concerned about? we re usually prepared for hurricanes and for large hurricanes, so this, in a sense for us, being the first storm of