Chapo Trap House - Bonus: Virgil Interviews Tiffany Cabán

Episode Date: June 20, 2019

From Mike's Diner in Astoria Queens, Virgil talks to public defender and candidate for Queens District Attorney Tiffany Cabán. There are no jokes. To support Cabán's campaign, go to: http://bit.ly/cabangotv https://www.cabanforqueens.com/

Hey, everyone, it's Virgil, and I am sitting here with Tiffany Kaban, candidate for district attorney of Queens. As you all know, this is a New York-based podcast where we talk about New York issues only. So, Tiffany, when I hear... I've been following your campaign for a few months, and when I hear about a new candidate that sounds exciting and very, very left, what I'll do is I'll talk to people who might know them or be involved with their campaign or organizing around them. And maybe we'll talk about their policies, talk about their issues, talk about their competence as a candidate.

But the real question that I always come down to is, is this person the real deal? And I was going to start out by asking you if you are the real deal, but I think the events of the past few days have kind of shown that you might be the real deal. Last night you were endorsed by the New York Times. Yes. And my producer tells me that you were just endorsed by Elizabeth Warren, too. And Bernie Sanders. And Bernie Sanders.

Both wings of the Democratic Party. It's been a good couple of days. Yeah. So if you still want to answer the question, if you're the real deal, be my guest. I mean, I think our campaign, our platform, this movement is the real deal. So for our audience, who are you? I am Tiffany Kawan. I am just a born and bred Queens resident.

I grew up in South Richmond Hill, Queens. My parents grew up in the Woodside Housing Project, so NYCHA housing. And I'm a public defender. That is who I am. When I say, hey, I'm a queer woman, I am a Latina, I'm a public defender. That is so tied to my identity. But also at this point, I'm also a candidate running for district attorney. And in a moment in time where I get to truly and honestly say that it is a continuation of the work that I have always done because of the way that we are redefining the role of what a prosecutor is and does. I'm really interested in your background as a public defender. And, you know, going back to it, you go to law school and that's very, very expensive usually. Oh, yeah. People, even if they go in there with these lofty ideals, will find themselves with six-figure debt and think,

well, maybe I'll just do a little corporate law or a little bit of evil for a bit. Why did you go into being a public defender? First of all, I went to law school. I mean, that's what I wanted to do. There's no other kind of law that piqued my interest, that moved me. And, you know, again, what brought me to the work was just the way that I grew up in a lower income community, you know, working class family and being in communities that were over-policed, over-criminalized, resource starved. It's actually interesting because when you go, first of all, the debt is real right now. I don't even have a law degree and I know. Right now I am on an unpaid leave of absence from work

and don't have health insurance and I'm struggling to continue to make my student loan payments. But what's really interesting is that when you go into law school saying that you want to be a public defender everybody tries to convince you that actually know what you want to do is be the prosecutor because that's where all the power lies but it's not true

it's kind of bullshit in some ways you know what I love about being a public defender is if I'm working on a case it's my case right I could go to my colleagues I could go to my supervisor I could go all the way up to the executive director and say, hey, I would love the benefit of your experience, your knowledge. And at the end of that conversation, it's always the same. It's like, but Tiffany, you know your case best. And so I'm going to support you in

what you do and help you navigate that. And it's kind of the opposite when you get to the DA's office. Like the district attorney has a ton of power, no doubt about it. But the line district attorneys are really handcuffed in a lot of ways and have to get like a supervisor's supervisor to sign off on the smallest decisions. So you have the person with the most amount of information on a case being able to make the least amount of impact in terms of decision making. least amount of impact in terms of decision making. I find that public defenders are some of the most fascinating people to follow online when they talk about their jobs in granular detail because it is equal parts eye-opening and infuriating. And I do think there is value to demystifying the whole legal process to your average person,

which has a vision of it from TV procedurals and law and order and stuff like that. Which is terrible. They make the public defenders look horrible. I'm sure, yeah. They're like, you're sitting with the detective and the client's right next to you. They give the confession and then finally your defense attorney's like, no, no, no, this stops now.

It's like that never happens. I don't know if there is a procedural about a public defender or portraying them as heroic for getting their clients off. So tell me this. What is an average day as a public defender in New York City? Oh, gosh. Well, when I first started seven years ago, our caseloads were higher. So at any given time, I had over 100 cases in my caseload. you know, over a hundred cases in my caseload. Um, but more recently because of case caps that,

that have passed, you know, anywhere from 60, 80 clients in court, literally every day, like you, you cherish those office days. Um, so the hours are long. So maybe you have an office day, uh, two, three times a month, but you're in court every day running from, from courtroom to courtroom, getting your steps in, um, you know, doing all kinds of different things on cases, maybe dispositions, maybe, you know, different hearings. Maybe you're getting sent out to trial, which is also you never know when that's going to happen. It's like this roller coaster of adrenaline and emotions. And then you're doing things like dealing with clients and managing relationships with

their families, going out to Rikers Island or other detention centers. We investigate our own cases, too. We go out into the field and we, you know, we talk to witnesses and it is an incredibly dynamic job to do. But it's also incredibly emotionally draining. And it's it's good work, but it's hard work. You're overworked and overpaid as a public defender. Overworked and underpaid. Underpaid. Sorry. For sure. Yeah, let's let's don't mess that one up. And, you know, it just seems to me that, you know, we have this principle of equality under the law that everyone is entitled to, you know, competent legal representation. But, you know, it's obvious to everyone that if you're a wealthy defendant with a private attorney, you're, you are at minimum matched with the DA's office. And if you're indigent and you have an overworked, underpaid public defender, you know, you're fighting with a hand tied behind your back. Chances are you're also you know, you can't pay a thousand dollar bail and you're you have to fight while you're incarcerated.

And what's really the worst thing about it is that public defenders are some of the most talented, dedicated attorneys you could ever come across. I mean, there are so many private attorneys out there that really do their clients a disservice, and you couldn't do any better than your public defender. But then at the same time, you're taking some of the best attorneys that we have and just stacking the deck against them by, again, overworking them, having too many cases, withholding evidence. It's tough. How do you achieve as DA a fair playing field or a quality representation? Yeah. Well, one thing is to shift the focus in terms of what we're prosecuting, right? If we are prosecuting less in some areas, it's going to have

an effect on the caseloads of public defenders. So when we talk about decriminalizing poverty, mental health issues, substance use disorder, and getting a lot of the cases, because we punt public health issues to our justice system, right? Like Rikers Island, largest mental health provider in our city. But if you get some of those cases out of the system, and then you start prosecuting bad actors that are really destabilizing entire communities, which also helps with reducing low-level and nonviolent and also violent crime, those folks are not going to have public defenders. So I talk about the fact that as a public defender, I represent folks that are prosecuted for their substance use disorder rather than prosecuting doctors who over-prescribe opioids, prosecuted for their substance use disorder rather than prosecuting doctors who overprescribe opioids,

prosecuted for their homelessness rather than prosecuting bad landlords who unlawfully evict, predatory lenders who steal homes, employers who steal wages. Well, those folks, they're not going to be eligible for public defenders, right? But they are certainly worthy of the attention and the resources of our district attorneys and really, again, getting the most out of your resources in terms of public safety and public health outcomes. So you want to pull up the root, basically. Absolutely. We need to get to root causes of crime. And in so many ways, stability equals public safety. And then also recognizing that this is not about good people and bad people

and just locking up the bad people. It's just about people and we should be investing on the front end and giving people the opportunities to heal, to break unhealthy dynamics and patterns and have access to the things that they need not to just survive, but thrive. I often say that coming from the communities that I do, serving the communities that I have, too often when we ask for help and we need help, we don't get anything, and then the government sends cops. Whereas in other areas, you get access to all kinds of stabilizing resources and supports, and that makes all the difference in the world. So there's no contradiction for you wanting to go from public defender

to the other side of the equation is prosecuting. This is a continuation. Absolutely, because we're talking, and we're seeing it around the country, we're seeing defense attorneys getting elected into these roles, recognizing that our justice system should not be one where the goal is to punish for the sake of punishing. Certainly what we have done is, you know, incarcerated our black and brown, our low-income, our immigrant communities, and saying, well, actually the goal is just to reduce recidivism. The goal is to keep people rooted in their communities with access to services and supports.

The goal is to apply the law fairly across racial and class lines. Those are the things that public defenders fight to do every single day. Speaking of One Such DA, you were endorsed by Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, who has, I think, worked to expand the window of what's possible, of how you can reform a department. But, you know, he still faced a lot of pushback. He still has had to struggle to enact, you know, decent reforms, opposition from the police, from his own prosecutors. Day one, you know, what would you do to reform this system, which

has gone in the opposite, total opposite direction for decades? Yeah. Well, I think one thing that I'll point out is that, you know, D.A. Larry Krasner was the trailblazer, right? Like one of the first. And so his challenges were pretty unique. And those challenges continue to, you know, to be present. But we're also at this point in sort

of like this third cycle of these progressive decarceral prosecutors. I'm also really proud to be endorsed by Suffolk County DA out in Boston, Rachel Rollins. She's doing incredible work. You look at what Wesley Bellows is doing in St. Louis and then you see the folks that just won in Virginia. You see Chessa Boudin running in San Francisco. And there is power in this coalition building. You know, there are more of us now. And with that, you know, it sort of paves the way and makes it a little bit easier. But at the same time, what we're doing too, and what I feel like we've done in this race is we've pulled the community in so that this is really more than anything else, a mandate from

our community saying that these are the changes that we demand. And so it's not just me coming into the office, pushing back against folks that, that maybe are resistant to change, but the community is coming alongside and saying, no, we're, we're fighting for these changes and we demand them. So on day one, it is about changing culture. It is about changing metrics of success. And then also like, let's be real, right? Let's be practical in the sense that it's not going to be, we're going to fire everybody on day one. Of course. Yeah. I mean, you're going to institute this kind of change. You need a system that works. And so being very clear about what the policies are, what is expected of folks,

bringing in support to add to additional training and saying, if you are with us, we're going to help you get to where you need to be so that we have some credible buy-ins. And then also we're bringing in folks to fill in spaces where values align and can really help with that culture shift. So you have a collective theory of power, collective theory of change in doing this. So how does that look in the community? How does that engagement work? I'm going to even take it a step further in saying that part of this is about divesting power from the office and investing power in our communities. Because bringing in our communities, again, when we talk about public safety and public health outcomes, you get the best returns. When you engage communities in community-driven solutions, crime goes down in ways that, you know, our police departments don't accomplish, in ways that our DA's offices don't.

You take cure violence, for example. When you go into communities that are struggling with gun violence, you go in, you say, how can we help you deal with this? How can we help you get credible messengers in place? And gun violence goes down by upwards of 30 to 40 percent, again, in ways that the police don't accomplish. And sometimes, you know, police come in and they up the ante and increase the risk of violence. So, you know, it's, again, about bringing in communities and allowing them to do the things that they do best. That's interesting that you say that, reducing the power of the DA's office, because, God, the power of an individual DA is it's like a medieval duke, right? Just this immense ability to decide who gets charged and for what. And as much as they

try to say that they're, you know, oh, you know, we're neutral. You know, I'm just like an umpire here. A lot of that is just politically driven, isn't it? Oh, I mean, certainly, yes. And I love that you make the umpire analogy because I actually make one all the time when we talk about what prosecutors are doing in terms of the power that they're wielding. So if I could give it to you, because I'm a big baseball fan. Oh, okay. You know, when we talk about the power, it's not just about, you know, the, what are you going to charge? What sentences are you going to ask for? And all those kinds of things. But one of the big things in our DA's offices that DA's self-police on is our Brady rule, right? And that's not covered by our discovery statute our evidence laws it is something that

says hey if you have this information that could in any like any possibility be used by the defense you have to turn it over and it's been really um manipulated and torn to shreds and it's information that the defense doesn't have any reason to know about so again they're really self-policing uh and they treat it you know I say there are three kinds of umpires in baseball. Baseball. There's one that says, you know, there are balls and there are strikes. And I call them like they are. There are balls and there are strikes. And I call them like I see them. And then there's the umpire that says there are balls and there are strikes. And they're nothing until I call them. And that's what our DAs are doing.

Right. And making those kinds of determinations. And, you know, those are the, those gamesmanship type practices. These are the things that we need to be moving away from. From the beginning of your campaign, you took a bold position on the decriminalization of drugs, decriminalization of sex work. What led you to those two positions? It's the same thing that has led me to every position that we have taken, talking to the communities that are most directly impacted and saying, well, what is going to stabilize lives? What's going to save lives? If it's going

to save lives, it's worth doing. When we decriminalize substance use, you are creating an environment where, you know, and embracing harm reduction, right? Whether it's safe injection sites, whether it's all kinds of other things, you decrease overdose deaths by over 30%. It saves lives. It's worth doing. And then when we talk about sex work, understanding that this is an economic issue, it is a human rights issue, this is survival work for lots of folks, understanding that the most marginalized in our communities

are often doing this kind of work, whether it was our trans Latina communities, whether it's our migrant workers, and just kind of reckoning with the fact that they have experienced extreme discrimination in areas of housing, of healthcare, access to job opportunities. This is how they put food on their table. And also, it's the best way to combat true trafficking. Because then you're bringing it out of the shadows, right? You're making it so that sex workers can go and get help when they need it. And there was the death a couple years back during a police raid. Yang Song. Yes, yes. I'm actually very, very proud to be supported by

Red Canary Song, an organization that fights for the rights of migrant workers and massage parlor workers. And that's a perfect example of why we must decriminalize and that half measures do not work. Because that's what gets incentivized when you say, I'm not going to prosecute sex workers, but I'm going to prosecute customers. You incentivize the over-policing and the harassment of sex workers. Do you think that these actions from the DA would have an effect on the policing? Because there's a saying that's like,

you can beat the rap, but you can't avoid the ride. So, I mean... Is that how it goes? So, one thing is that certainly, at the very least, we get to stop harm earlier in the process as early as we can. So certainly the police can make an arrest and bring a case, but we can say, hey, we're not prosecuting it. But what we're seeing though around the country is that the DAs, when they keep the data,

when they share what their charging priorities are, it has had an effect in the kinds of arrests that get made. So there's an opportunity to communicate. These are the arrests that we really support, that we want you to bring to us. And you see less arrests in some of those other areas. So, you know, going to kind of a big picture question, when I think about the problems that indigent defendants face, you know, getting this there in the criminal justice system, that's only one part of that. There's lack of housing, lack of health care, lack of employment. Do you have a holistic view of what should be done?

A socialist view even. So this is again about doing everything we can to stabilize lives, right? So when people know where they're going to lay their head down at night, when they have access to healthcare, job and education opportunities, it's the best way to keep our community safe. And we should be investing more resources, more of our budget into stabilizing services, into investing in community-based organizations that are already doing the work but are starved for resources. And then also in Queens in particular, the DA's office here is sitting on a hundred million dollars worth of federal asset forfeiture money. That's money that was stolen from our communities in a big bank fraud.

And my commitment is to put it right back into our communities. But not to say that I get to decide, but in a form of participatory budgeting so that our communities can come to the table and kind of point out where they need the most support to get the best outcomes. When you started this campaign, you were not a name by any means in big city politics. No, I was not. And you're up against these better known opponents. But now going into Election Day, you know, you've received all these endorsements, a lot of volunteers, a lot of money and things like that.

And you look pretty formidable. I mean, it's still up in the air, but it's it's you're you're definitely a challenger here. You're definitely a contestant. I mean, it's still up in the air, but it's it's you're you're definitely a challenger here. You're definitely a contestant. What would you say to people in other parts of this country who also see this pressing urgent need for criminal justice reform and want to to use the electoral process to change that and think, you know, I can't do it. I'm just a public defender. I will say, one, you can do it, and there is so much support out there that is ready to help you get there. I mean, again, as a 31-year-old queer Latina from a working-class family, a career public defender,

I never in a million years thought that this was where we would be. In fact, even when I decided to run in this race, which, you know, four women sitting at a table saying, we're going to, we're going to do this. We're going to try to change the system. It was more about changing the conversation, pushing people left, centering the experiences of my clients, um, our communities. And it's, it's obviously built from that, but that was, that was the win for us. And now we're like, no, no, no, no, no. We are going to win this. have we have changed the conversation we've shaped it uh and this you know these races are so incredibly important and it's definitely doable and when you do it in a manner that um one is uncompromising and you you do it from your heart and you really believe in what you're doing and and most

importantly that you do it in a manner that brings the community in, that centers their experiences, that amplifies their voices and concerns. That's, you know, that's a path to success, I think. And so I encourage more people to do this because we need it. We need it badly. Any last remarks? Well, we only have six days till the election. So my last remarks have to be, please, please, please, in New York and beyond, before June 25th, check out our website on cabanforqueens.com. Sign up to Door Knock, to Phone Bank, to Text Bank, because that is how we

win this. So thank you. I appreciate y'all. The link is, let's see, bit.ly forward slash caban, C-A-B-A-N-G-O-T-V. Tiffany Caban, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you.