Eric Adams and Curtis Sliwa Spar in First N.Y.C. Mayoral Debate

Mr. Adams criticized Mr. Sliwa for admitting to faking crimes for publicity as the leader of the Guardian Angels — and for not following the rules of the debate, calling Mr. Sliwa’s confrontational and often random debate style “buffoonery.”

Beyond trading barbs, there were some substantial policy differences between the candidates ahead of the general election on Nov. 2.

Here are five takeaways from the debate:

A disagreement over a vaccine mandate for city workers

Mr. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, said he supports Mr. de Blasio’s new vaccine mandate for public workers that was announced on Wednesday.

But Mr. Adams said he would have worked more closely with labor leaders to figure out a way to reach an agreement together.

“I believe the mayor’s action today was correct,” Mr. Adams said. “I would have handled it differently.”

Mr. Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels and a former radio host, said he opposed the mandate and worried that it could lead to the loss of some police officers.

“I disagree with Eric,” Mr. Sliwa said. “I feel that we don’t have enough police officers as it is.”

Attacks over past lies and a Brooklyn apartment

Mr. Adams repeatedly sought to depict Mr. Sliwa as a liar and criticized him for interrupting and not following the debate rules.

“Can he please adhere to the rules?” Mr. Adams asked one of the moderators.

Mr. Sliwa said that he had apologized for making up crimes during the 1980s to try to attract more attention.

“I made mistakes,” he said. “I was immature at the age of 25 and did things I should not have done. I know my opponent, Eric Adams, similarly has done things that he’s apologized for.”

Mr. Sliwa sought to rattle Mr. Adams and was mostly unsuccessful. When questioned by one of the moderators, Mr. Adams refused to say how many nights he had slept at the Brooklyn apartment where he claims to have lived during the last six months.

Mr. Adams, who has faced questions over his residency, said he sometimes works at Brooklyn Borough Hall until 4 or 5 a.m.

“I don’t jot down the number of days I’m there, but that’s where I lay my head,” Mr. Adams said of his apartment.

The men disagreed on another hot topic — the planned removal of the Jefferson statue from City Council chambers. Mr. Adams wants it gone; Mr. Sliwa said it should stay.

Different visions for schools

The candidates offered opposing plans for the city’s schools. Mr. Adams wants to set a vaccine mandate for public school students — a departure from Mr. de Blasio.

Mr. Adams said that schools already require vaccines for diseases like measles and that a mandate would help protect students from the coronavirus. For families who decide to keep children at home, Mr. Adams said he was “open to a remote option.”

Mr. Sliwa, who noted that he has three sons in public schools, said he opposes a vaccine mandate for students because it could cause some students to stay home. “We need them in school learning,” Mr. Sliwa said.

Both candidates have concerns over Mr. de Blasio’s decision to end the gifted and talented program for elementary school children and said they want to expand the program.

Mr. Adams said that the city should re-examine the admissions exam for the program while increasing opportunities for so-called “accelerated learning” to every ZIP code in the city.

“I made it clear that we need to look at that exam,” he said. “I don’t believe a 4-year-old taking the exam should determine the rest of their school experience. That is unacceptable.”

Mr. Sliwa reiterated his support for bringing the gifted program to all schools, noting that his son was one of thousands of students who took the test and “lost out.”

Sliwa ties Adams to de Blasio and rich New Yorkers

To hear Mr. Sliwa tell it, Mr. Adams is spending his time hanging out with high rollers, and also Mr. de Blasio.

“I am the people’s choice,” Mr. Sliwa said. “Eric Adams is with the elites in the suites, the TikTok girls, trying to sort of live up to the Kardashians.”

Mr. Adams does in fact seem to enjoy New York City’s nightlife. Just days after he won the primary, he was spotted at Rao’s in East Harlem, one of the city’s most exclusive restaurants, dining with a Republican billionaire.

In September, Mr. Adams reportedly spent two nights in a row at Zero Bond, a private club in SoHo. And he has spent much of the post-primary season raising money from the donor class, including from several billionaires. He also took an undisclosed vacation to Monaco, which is known for its high-end casinos and idle rich.

“Who goes to Monaco?” Mr. Sliwa asked in disbelief.

Mr. Sliwa also sought to tie Mr. Adams to Mr. de Blasio, whose approval rating dropped after his failed presidential run. Mr. de Blasio is, in fact, an ally of Mr. Adams after quietly supporting him during the primary.

“How about we do something novel and stop trusting these politicians like Eric Adams and de Blasio?” Mr. Sliwa said.

Adams wants to close Rikers; Sliwa says he would move there

The next mayor will take office with the city’s jail system in crisis.

The Rikers Island jail complex has descended into violent chaos, with many correction officers refusing to show up to work. Fourteen detainees have died in city custody so far this year.

Mr. Adams reiterated his support for Mr. de Blasio’s plan to close the jails on Rikers Island and replace them with smaller jails in different boroughs. But Mr. Adams also suggested uncertainty about the sites where those jails are supposed to go. Mr. Sliwa opposes the de Blasio plan outright.

But replacing Rikers is a long-term plan. More immediately, Mr. Adams said he would “stop the bottleneck” and get detainees to court so they can be freed or serve their time. He would also tell the officers who are not reporting to duty to return to work, where he would offer a safe environment. He did not specify how.

Mr. Sliwa suggested that he would take a hands-on approach as mayor. He said that on Jan. 2, he would move to the warden’s house on Rikers Island and personally supervise the jails and offer support to the correction officers working there. He said he would also hire 2,000 additional officers, relocate emotionally disturbed inmates to state facilities and break up the gangs inside the jail.

“I can say that, because I’ve been on Rikers Island,” said Mr. Sliwa, who claims to have been arrested more than 70 times.

In 1994, for example, the police arrested Mr. Sliwa after he prepared to paint over an art exhibition in a Brooklyn park that depicted assassinated police officers.

On stop-and-frisk, which at its peak involved the stops of hundreds of thousands of people who were often young Black and Latino men for weapons that rarely materialized, Mr. Sliwa, the Republican nominee, attempted to suggest that Mr. Adams would support the abuse of the practice.

“I would not do what one of his main supporters, Michael Bloomberg, did,” Mr. Sliwa said, “which was to have 700,000 predominately men of color be stopped and frisked with a quota system that was put on.”

Mr. Adams, a former police captain and the Democratic nominee, shot back that his record as an officer and politician showed he had “protected Black and brown and low-income New Yorkers” from police abuses.

“My son was a victim of stop-and-frisk in the city,” Mr. Adams replied. “I never call for aggressive police tactics, I call for appropriate police tactics.”

After last summer’s protests over the murder of George Floyd, public pressure to shrink police budgets and scale back the department’s reach has mounted. At the same time, the number of shootings and murders in the city rose last summer to their highest levels in at least a decade and have remained well above prepandemic levels ever since.

The department is also dealing with a crisis of public confidence. Documents released over the last year have shown how abusive officers almost always remain on the force, often receiving little to no punishment, even when instances of police brutality have been substantiated by department or city investigators.

In one clash, Mr. Sliwa criticized Mr. Adams for not interviewing Latino candidates to be the next police commissioner. Mr. Adams, who has said he would select a woman of color for the role, replied that Mr. Sliwa did not know who he had interviewed and told him to focus on his own plans.

Mr. Adams attempted to strike a balance he used throughout the primary season, detailing a measured approach to policing overall, while emphasizing public safety as a core campaign issue. He has said he believes in responsibly trimming fat from the Police Department’s budget.

“I’ve been clear on this message for the last 35 years,” Mr. Adams said. “I have not changed at all.”

But Mr. Sliwa, who has also emphasized a commitment to public safety, criticized his opponent’s position on the budget, and said he not only believes the funding should be kept intact, but that it should grow. And he attacked Mr. Adams’s previous remarks that he would carry a gun as mayor.

“I’m in the inner-city all the time, I don’t wear a bulletproof vest, I don’t carry a gun. I never have,” Mr. Sliwa said. “I’ll tell you, if you’re going to reach young men who are using guns in violent actions, you cannot say, ‘Do as I say but not as I do.’”

In the debate, though, the candidates clashed over their approaches when asked to name three things they would do to prevent more flooding deaths. Mr. Adams focused on better warning systems and clearer plans for measures to take during major cloudbursts.

“We’re going to institute a clear response plan,” he said. “We learn from terrorism, you don’t wait ‘til the day when a plane attacks.”

Mr. Sliwa called for more sea walls to be built, noting that one planned in Staten Island remained unbuilt nine years after Hurricane Sandy’s coastal flooding devastated the area. “People have no faith in politicians like Eric Adams or Bill de Blasio or others,” he said.

Mr. Adams — who unlike Mr. Sliwa has made sure to frame the flooding problem as part of the larger dangers of climate change — noted correctly that the recent flooding was from downpours, not storm surges from the sea.

“It had nothing to do with sea walls,” he said, declaring that applying antiquated methods to a modern problem won’t work: “This must be intervention and prevention.” (Mr. Adams does not oppose sea walls, but he sees them as one of many tools that must be applied differently according to the needs and ecology of each area.)

While Mr. Sliwa offers a four-point policy plan that does not mention the changing climate, Mr. Adams has a plan that promises to address climate challenges, including extreme heat, sea rise and intense storms, in every neighborhood. He vows to speed the implementation of plans begun by the Bloomberg and de Blasio administrations, like expanding green roofs and wetlands restoration.

Mr. Adams has also talked about addressing the city’s contribution to climate change by reducing fossil fuel burning and phasing out gas-fired power plants, though he has not specified a timeline. Nor has he said whether he will make it a priority to implement and expand a city law requiring large buildings to reduce emissions of planet-warming gases. Real-estate groups, which backed his campaign, are seeking to limit the law and maximize loopholes.

Mr. Adams said, as he has in the past, that he takes responsibility for omissions on his tax returns, and then blamed his accountant, who he said was homeless.

“He went through real trauma,” Mr. Adams said of his accountant. “And I’m not a hypocrite, I wanted to still give him the support that he needed.”

Mr. Adams also insisted, again, that his primary residence is in Brooklyn.

Mr. Adams owns a multi-unit townhouse in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn in which he says he keeps an apartment. In one of the more bizarre moments of the mayoral primary, he gave a media tour of that apartment, with reporters observing non-vegan food items apparently belonging to Mr. Adams’s son. (Mr. Adams has been a vegan for years.)

But Mr. Adams also co-owns a co-op in Fort Lee, N.J., with his partner, and he has said that he moved into Brooklyn Borough Hall for a time after the pandemic arrived. During the primary, Politico New York reported that Mr. Adams used conflicting addresses in public records and that he was still spending nights at Borough Hall.

He has had to refile his tax returns in part because of irregularities concerning his residency, the news outlet The City reported. The outlet also reported that the city is seeking to inspect his Brooklyn residence following an allegation of an illegal apartment conversion on the property. His campaign has said he intended to rectify those issues, though the complaint remains active.

Mr. Sliwa recently led a journey from Manhattan to Fort Lee “to find out where Eric Adams really lives.”

The high-stakes test, which is typically administered in January, has helped create a cottage industry of test preparation for young children in New York City.

The city’s advisory school board rejected the contract for that exam earlier this year, leaving Mr. de Blasio, who has sharply criticized the test, without a clear admissions system.

Both Mr. Adams and Mr. Sliwa have said they would keep the gifted program in place, but they have not provided details on whether they will continue administering the test, overhaul it or replace it with some other form of screening.

During the debate on Wednesday, Mr. Adams said that the city should re-examine the admissions exam, while making sure to expand opportunities for “accelerated learners, make sure it is in every district in our city and every ZIP code.”

“I made it clear that we need to look at that exam,” he said. “I don’t believe a four-year-old taking the exam should determine the rest of their school experience. That is unacceptable.”

Mr. Sliwa also reiterated his support for expanding the gifted program to all schools, noting that his son was one of thousands of students who took the test and “lost out.”

“We seem to be taking it out on Asian families and Southeast Asian families because they’re doing so well,” Mr. Sliwa said. “We need to expand gifted and talented so it is in all schools, even if only three or two children qualify.”

Mr. Sliwa will likely use the debate to highlight his central campaign themes, touching upon issues including public safety, animal welfare and confronting homelessness.

The debate presents a chance for Mr. Sliwa to surprise viewers with a sober-minded demeanor that matches the mood of an anxious city. But he is more likely to aggressively challenge the Democratic nominee, Eric Adams, on a variety of subjects, including questions of his residency.

Mr. Sliwa can also be a brawler onstage, as seen in his first major debate in the Republican primary against Fernando Mateo, where the men traded insults and continued to yell at each other, including while muted.

But even some political strategists were barely aware that the debate was occurring, suggesting that Mr. Sliwa will be able to do little to move the dial much with the general public.

Still, it has been months since Mr. Adams found himself at the center of a debate-stage clash, and many Democrats believe he would be wise to stay above the fray no matter how much Curtis Sliwa, his Republican rival, seeks to provoke him.

Instead, the debate offers a chance for Mr. Adams to lay out his vision and emphasize unity before a city that last saw him in the midst of a crowded and contentious Democratic primary battle.

Mr. Adams is best known for his public safety plans, but the debate may also challenge him to offer details about how he would handle the many other problems New York City confronts.

More broadly, it will be a moment for Mr. Adams to show that he understands the mood of a city that is by turns optimistic about continued reopening, and deeply anxious about the lingering pandemic and its attendant health, educational and economic consequences.

Sally Goldenberg, the tireless City Hall bureau chief for Politico New York, got her first job in journalism in 2002, at New Jersey’s weekly Hillsborough Beacon, where she did the police blotter and covered school board meetings. Ms. Goldenberg recently broke the news that Mr. Adams — who had declined to say where he had gone on his post-primary European vacation — had vacationed in Monaco. She enjoys the Olympics and old-school R&B.

Melissa Russo, WNBC’s political and government affairs reporter, has covered four mayors and is known for her tough investigations of issues affecting children, which have focused on problems at the New York City Housing Authority and the Administration for Children’s Services. She likes photography and a capella music.

Allan Villafaña, an anchor for Telemundo 47, was born in Puerto Rico, studied journalism at Ohio State University and spent time in Miami, where he worked as an anchor for Mega TV. An animal lover, he recently brought two dogs — Petunia Marie and Yoyo Jesus — to the blessing of the animals at Our Lady of Good Counsel Church in New Jersey on the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi.

But Mr. Sliwa has been a celebrity in New York City for decades.

He became famous in the 1980s for leading the Guardian Angels, a civilian crime-fighting group. He became a conservative radio host known for saying outrageous things. He survived a shooting that left him with five bullet wounds and testified at a federal trial against John A. Gotti, the Gambino crime family scion.

He got involved in politics, and led the Reform Party of New York State; in 2018, the last statewide election, the Reform Party drew the fewest votes for governor among 10 parties on the ballot. He became a Republican last year and decided to run for mayor, winning a bitter primary in June against his longtime friend Fernando Mateo, a restaurateur.

Mr. Sliwa has focused on a law-and-order message, and he has criticized former President Donald J. Trump and said that he did not vote for Mr. Trump in 2016 or 2020.

He acknowledges that there have been few parallels to his campaign.

“Who at the age of 67 is running around wearing a red beret and a red satin jacket and going out there like a crime fighter and a superhero from our days reading comic books?” Mr. Sliwa told The New York Times over the summer. “That’s a bit eccentric.”

If elected, Mr. Adams would be only the city’s second Black mayor.

After the June primary election, Mr. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president and a centrist, proclaimed that he was “the face of the new Democratic Party,” and vowed to “show America how to run a city.”

He has since worked to significantly expand his base, courting the city’s business community, holding several fund-raisers and consulting with former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his team about how to govern.

Mr. Adams’s primary campaign focused on crime. Although the issue remains a significant focus for him, he has also begun to lay out some of his other ideas, calling for neighborhoods such as SoHo in Manhattan to be rezoned to create more affordable housing; pledging to build hundreds of miles of new bike lanes; and promising to keep and expand the city’s gifted and talented program in public schools after Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that he was phasing it out.

But for at least one hour, Mr. Adams will be forced to devote some attention to his Republican opponent, Curtis Sliwa, as they go head-to-head on Wednesday at 7 p.m. in the first of two official debates among the two leading candidates for mayor of New York City.

The one-hour debate will be aired on WNBC-TV Channel 4 and also on Telemundo, Channel 47, in Spanish.

NYC Life TV will offer a simulcast on Channel 25.1.

The debate will also be livestreamed on NBCNewYork.com, Telemundo47.com and Politico New York.

A team of reporters from The New York Times will provide live commentary and analysis for the debate, which will be moderated by four journalists: David Ushery, a news anchor for WNBC-TV in New York; Sally Goldenberg, the City Hall bureau chief for Politico New York; Melissa Russo, WNBC’s political and government affairs reporter; and Allan Villafaña, an anchor for Telemundo 47.

His Republican opponent, Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels subway patrol group, has struggled to gain momentum as a candidate, and is expected to use the debates to attack Mr. Adams, who has largely ignored him on the campaign trail.

The candidates have already traded barbs in recent weeks ahead of the Nov. 2 election. Mr. Adams called Mr. Sliwa racist and said that he was making the campaign a circus. Mr. Sliwa has criticized Mr. Adams’s campaign against a whistle-blower police officer in the 1990s and has raised questions over where Mr. Adams lives.

Both candidates have focused on a law-and-order message. But Mr. Adams, a former police captain, has treated the election almost as an afterthought, proclaiming himself as the future of the national Democratic Party and holding meetings on his likely transition to the mayoralty.