The Daily Beast Podcast - Mayoral Candidate Maya Wiley: I Won’t Take Bullying from NYPD

Episode Date: March 7, 2021

It’s safe to say that the people of New York City are ready for a new mayor, and certainly one who isn’t Bill deBlasio. Sure, he gave the city universal pre-K but had some faux paus over the years, most recently in 2020, when he was accused of antisemitism for a tweet addressed to the Hasidic Jewish community over social distancing rules during COVID and also (this one was big) for not standing up to the NYPD for harassing citizens during the George Floyd riots this summer. One of the many candidates stepping up to take his place is Maya Wiley, an activist, professor and veteran of City Hall, who says she will handle things much differently if she becomes the next mayor of New York City. To start, she doesn’t think there should have ever been a curfew during the protests, she tells co-host Molly Jong-Fast, producer Jesse Cannon and Beast editor Harry Siegel in this members-only episode of the New Abnormal. (“You can not have a control and containment model of policing that sees who are, who are expressing first amendment rights as the enemy.”) She also made it clear that she won’t bow down to bullying from police unions like many believe deBlasio did. “[The NYPD] works for us. You're public servants,” she says. “We're going to put the public back in public safety. And what I mean by that is civilian oversight are the rules of the road. Of the priorities of policing, we are going to right-size it, because it does not make any sense to have police doing functions that other experts should be doing like mental health crisis response.” When it comes to the city’s economy, she plans to take a Depression-era approach: investing in “communities that have been hard hit by COVID.” Plus! Molly asks her about Cuomo’s allegations (“There has never been any change worth fighting for where you didn't have someone who was difficult to work with.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to another Members Only Beast Inside episode of The Daily Beast, The New, Abnormal. And we thank you so much for being here. Today we have a very special guest with New York City mayoral candidate Maya Wiley. Maya is a lawyer, professor, and civil rights activist who served as the board chair of the New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board, as well as being counseled in New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.

As we talked to her today about the questions we wanted to hear as citizens of New York, and today we were joined by Harry Siegel, who's the senior editor at the Daily So my first question for you is, I love New York and I've been here this whole time and I'm a diehard, but it feels like I'm in the minority. And I'm curious to know, what's your plan to save us? No pressure. Well, first of all, let me just start by saying, Molly, you are not in the minority. Okay, good.

You are not. And I talk to all kinds of people from all over the city. And there is just, you know, New Yorkers, when it goes tough, New Yorkers get tougher. So while there's a lot of chatter, it tends to come from some very vocal few versus the many. And so a big part of recovery from my standpoint and from what we've put out as a campaign is investing in New York coming back, stimulating the economy, but doing it in a way that utilizes what we have and that does it in a way that invests in communities that have been hard. hit by COVID. So New Deal, New York, which is exactly what it sounds like. It is modeled on the principles of the New Deal that got us out of the Great Depression, but it is spending $10 billion to build things we need to fix things that need fixing that both help communities solve

problems, but does it in a way that creates 100,000 new jobs, which we desperately need and focusing, that's everything from things like affordable housing. That's things like creating in the context of a green new deal, resiliency to flooding where we needed. It's things like creating community centers or child. Is that like a green zone around New York for the flooding stuff? What would that be? Well, it can be different things depending on what part of the city.

So what we're going to do is have a new deal czar because one of the things we have to solve is government taking too long to move capital construction projects forward, you know, to make it stimulative for the economy. We've also got to make government faster and more responsive. So having a senior cabinet member reporting directly to me as mayor who's going to help with identifying the projects that are the smart projects, meaning they create the jobs we need, but they also solve the problems we need solving and doing that in partnership with where and how those needs existing communities that are hard hit.

So it could be different things in different parts of the city. But as you know, about two-thirds of people who live in flood zones in the city are low-income and people of color. So we're going to be making sure we're investing keeping the entire city safe, but starting also where people have been hard hit. You were there early on in the Dubazzo administration. And he said a lot of things that he was running for office eight years ago about building a fairer and more resilient city.

And that was happening from like, a high watermark of money and revenue and all that. And he fell short. I think we'd probably agree. So I'm curious what it is you see that you're bringing to the table that at this very difficult moment when revenue has collapsed and there's uncertainty about the future, you'd be bringing to City Hall that would allow for a fairer recovery in a more resilient city on the other end. Thanks, Harry. I think that's true. And what I am bringing, first of all, is being a changemaker that spent 30 years on doing just this, identifying the big ideas and working on implementing them that actually makes the change happen. And doing it differently. You know, I think one of the

things that we've been making sure we're doing as a campaign is looking at and being clear about what happens inside city government that can be fixed. That's my point about having a senior team member, a cabinet member who's there to break through the gridlock. That means having smart people in charge who are getting my support to get it done because it requires a mayor, the real job of mayor, is both holding the vision, as Mayor de Blasio did for universal pre-K, if you recall. I think that's something we all celebrate and rightly so, is recognizing what the vision is, empowering and enabling the senior leaders to make it happen by putting people in place who will make it happen, and both being that not just the cheerleader for it, but the person who

moves the barriers out of the way using that bully pulpit that is the big chair in City Hall, and also, you know, making sure you're taking the body blows, which sometimes you have to take in order to get stuff done. And that's a style of leadership that is very much mine. And I'll add one other thing, because I think I'm the only candidate in this race that has been in that very hot kitchen called City Hall and knows how hot it can get in there and what it takes to be resilient in the face of that heat. And it really is being partnering, leading by listening and learning, making sure that you're bringing people with you, not trampling over top of them. And that's why one of the things we've done in the New Deal, New York strategy, and what we're going to do in everything we do

is make sure that it is reflective and responsive to the opportunities and ideas. is that people who are stakeholders in the city have because it does take us all coming to the table. And that's a very different leader style than what we've had. And what is you say your signature accomplishment is and the roles you've had? And by the way, of course, Sean Donovan, although he never mentions, it talks a lot about Obama, also does have some city hall experience. But on your resume as a prosecutor, a civil rights attorney, a professor at the new school, counsel to the mayor, head of the civilian complaint review board, like, what have you done

In those roles that show you're ready to run the city and have a workforce at 350,000 people, you know, waiting for your leave and to take on a challenge of that scope. Like what specific accomplishments up until now sort of point the way to where you would go? Yeah, you know, I went into city government after 25 years of being a not-for-profit leader and changemaker and everything from establishing a not-for-profit organization. and right after 9-11 with a baby in a bouncy seat and a mission to dismantle structural racism that nobody thought a black woman in America could raise a dime for. But I went into C-Hall after doing that for 12 years

and after litigating and after lobbying because city government is the place where you can actually implement ideas that are transformative and that touch people's lives. And when I went into City Hall, you know, that was the real, you know, a promise and possibility of the administration. And I leaned hard into that. And one of the things that the, you know, there are a couple things I would point to specifically, you know, let's take women and minority on

business enterprises, right? You know, that was something that had, there was a title with no program, no staff, no funding, you know, and we walked in and inherited about $500 million and spend to women and minority-owned business enterprises, I got that up to $1.6 billion in one year. And the way I did it is because the way you have to lead in City Hall is by recognizing you got a call on your leaders in city government, right, as well as the people who are impacted women and minority-owned businesses, as well as your other allies who are elected leaders, like in Albany, because we had to do everything from helping and supporting agencies to find all the ways they could get those numbers up, all the ways in which we had to identify barriers that

they had that were real, like getting people together and making change to legislation in Albany. And it also included recognizing how we had to hold agencies accountable. But that is management in City Hall. And that's why we made history by getting those numbers so high and match them the next year. But what I'm really in particular proud of, because that's showing city government how to do what it does better. and ways that help impacted people better. But, you know, universal broadband. You know, here's something where the mayor looked at me and said, I had been working on digital divide issues as a racial justice advocate.

And I come in a city hall and the mayor says, that's yours, universal broadband. And I say, that's great. I'm so excited. I have no idea how to do that. Because the truth is, whenever we're going to do something transformative, something different, something that needs to be done that government has, never done before. The only honest thing you can do is say, we don't know how, which is exactly your innovation opportunity. And so I both pulled together a task force of folks that were everyone

from a Fred Wilson, who's a venture capitalist, to folks that were doing it in private real estate development, to folks who are doing it in grassroots communities like Red Hook Initiative that put up this really innovative wireless corridor and hiring the guy that did it as my senior advisor on broadband. So we created a capacity, but we also, there was no one agency responsible for it. So what I had to do is, you know, when you're doing something different in city government from City Hall, sometimes you're a surgeon, you know, a neurosurgeon. You know, you have to create some neuropathways that don't exist. I got $70 million into the capital construction budget. There was no broadband capital construction line. I found revenue from things

the city was doing that were revenue generating, and I got it earmarked for broadband, and then created a plan to get broadband into public housing as a starting point for universal access, because those were the folks that needed the investment and weren't getting it, where the city controlled the buildings. So what we did is, you know, set out the plan. Ultimately, it resulted in every single apartment in Queensbridge houses, the largest public housing development in North America, not just in New York City, access that the government was paying for as a safety net to broadband access. And let me tell you, I had a plan. The mayor stood up and with Julian Castro when he was HUD Secretary, we announced developments in every single

borough of the city that we're going to get the same thing. I left city government and it didn't happen. So what I'll tell you is I know what it takes. I've gotten it done. But I also, know that a lot of what it takes is partnership, perseverance, and recognizing that people have to be held at the center of it. And that's your job as mayor. So with that, one of the most frustrating things for New York City residents has been that our MTA is constantly rated by our governor to fund upstate New York. As we see, the fair increases are told it isn't making enough money to sustain itself and some of the stops still look like they did in movies. I watch from the 1970s. Do you find this to be problematic? And what can New Yorkers expect to see

the money they put into the subway actually going to improve their own quality of life? Yeah, I mean, look, the subways are critical both to our quality of life and to our economy. And we have to recognize those two things as deeply connected. And we have transit deserts as well that we have to recognize. So I would say a couple of things. One is, yeah, absolutely, it has to be a priority. It should be a priority for the state and for the federal government because New York City, in the New York State is 8% of the GDP of this country.

We are a huge part of our national economy as well as as as well as, you know, what New York City represents to the state as part of the state economy. But it does start with this opportunity that we have right now in Washington because we do need federal help. The whole is deep both for the city and for the state. and we have Washington that is willing to do something about it, but we have to be in there actively partnering and advocating for what we need. That's something I also did in City Hall around access to broadband and some of the things we needed from federal government on that,

but also in my 25 years as a racial justice advocate in terms of a lot of the policies I was trying to move and change. And we're going to get an infrastructure bill out of this next Congress. We are. That was the one thing that Donald. Trump could have delivered that would have been truly bipartisan. He failed to do it. That's not going to happen again. But we need to be shaping that and we need to be shaping it so that it ensures that our subway is coming back and that it is serving our needs. And we also have to do it in a way that

recognizes our subways don't serve all our people. And we have to be honest about that. And, you know, the opportunities to leverage what we can do in terms of more bus and other alternatives to transportation is also something that we're going to be looking at. But can we have count on you to fight Cuomo who's constantly raiding this? It's like it seems this is a thing that every citizen is frustrated with and yet de Blasio's been asleep at the wheel on really taking him to task on it. You can absolutely count on me to make sure that we're getting our due from Albany. And I'm going to do it in many different ways. And that's going to include obviously building partnerships, both at the state level, but utilizing our delegation, which is very

powerful, both in Congress and in the state. But also, you know, I'm not going to shy away. from, you know, the fights that we have to have when we have to have it. That's part of the job of the mayor. That's part of why I put the statement out that I put out on Friday about our nursing homes and what was going on there because accountability and government matters. And we all have to be accountable and we all have to hold ourselves accountable. There's been a lot of Cuomo talk. He seems like not the easiest person to work was going to go out on a limb here.

Yeah. You know, one thing about being, how can I say this way? You know, there's nothing in life that is about bold change that is easy and where you don't have real opposition and sometimes opposition from power. You know, my parents were civil rights activists and at the forefront of the economic justice movement. I went to law school to be an activist and an advocate. What I've always done. And, you know, I'll tell you, there is never been any change worth fighting for where you didn't have someone who was difficult to work with. sometimes many people who are difficult to work.

The question isn't whether people are easy to work with. The question is how strategic are you in the partnerships and the path to getting it done? And that's what I've been in my whole career. My other question is the subway went from 24 hours to like not working at night. What happened there and do you think you can get it back? I know it's now open for more and it's only closed for two hours now, but that seemed like a big deal. It was a big deal and unfortunately a big deal for a lot of essential workers that's still had to go to work every day who picked us going. I was talking to a woman, but it's also the buses.

I was talking to a woman who's a home health aide. You know, she has, she travels four hours a day to get from one part of New York City to another to take care of a client who's in a wheelchair. She has to get up at 5 a.m. to get there on time. It's like we got to recognize we have people who work, you know, I've work all kinds of shifts at all kinds of hours and are. absolutely reliant on public transportation to do it. So this is why it's part of our economy as well as our quality of life and where and how we're able to get people where they need to go, including jobs and jobs that we need to get done. So it's absolutely a problem and it's absolutely a priority and it's good that it's opening back up and what we have to do is get it to a point

where it's serving all of our people's needs. Speaking about serving needs and working with difficult people. Police unions. We could talk about just the sergeant's union where the head of the sergeant's union called the city's health commissioner at the time. A bitch.

He called Richie Torres, who was then a city council member, is now a member of the House of Representatives in Washington. A first class whore. He docks the mayor's daughter after she was arrested. And put her in danger. With her personal information out there. And the civilian

complaint review board just recommended charges against him for offensive language and abuse of authority. So that's new. And we're going to see where that goes. But I'm curious what the CCRB did when you were there with the police unions and their leadership when they were that aggressive. And how you'd handle them as mayor, as they seem to have continually humiliated this one, even when he's bent over backward to accommodate. Well, first of all, it's, and so look, I think this is a really important question because, one, let me just say, I believe in collective bargaining. I believe that workers have a right to come together and have a voice about the terms and conditions of their employment so that they are safe and fair. After that, no, you work

for us, your public servants. So unions have had an outsized bully pulpit in a lot of ways in terms of the police unions, primarily because politicians are often afraid of them. And the power that they wield is more about the fear that they wield. Well, I'm going to tell you that the fear stop. when I am mayor because I don't I'm not running as a politician. I've never run for elective office and I'm not running for in thinking about next steps of a political career. I'm running because I love this city. This city is in pain. It's in trouble. It's too deeply divided. We are suffering from a lack of accountability at the right times and in the right places. Policing is a critical one. And we're going to put the public back in public safety.

And what I mean by that is civilian oversight of the rules of the road, of the priorities of policing. We are going to right size it because it does not make any sense to have police doing functions that other experts, other people should be doing like mental health crisis response, like traffic, like other things. And we know that we have essentially failed to make sure that we're being. sufficiently clear about what those rules of the road are that creates more accountability, that creates better relationships between police and community, that keeps community safe from crime and safe from police violence, which can be its own crime. And that's going to stop when I am mayor. And it does start by saying, I'm not going to take the bullying, and I'm not, I'm certainly not afraid. And when I was in CCRB,

look, I have a policy of speaking to everyone because, as I said, you know, there is a legitimate role for unions. And so I would have conversations with unions. But it stops at suggesting that we should violate the public trust or that they have any power that is outstripped to anything that goes beyond, you know, what are the legitimate concerns that are about fairness in the workplace. I just anecdotally have seen since, you know, this summer that when the police have gone in, we've had problems. When there was a curfew, there were a lot of problems because the police came in. Well, there shouldn't have been a curfew either when you say that. But it seems to me as if the less police, the sort of smoother things go. And that, it strikes me as perhaps there's an issue with the way the

police or policing New York. You know, Molly, I'm going to tell you a story about my father. It's on point. So bear with you. Okay. Okay. My father was a civil rights organizer. He and my mother founded with some other activists, the Congress on Racial Equality Chapter in Syracuse, New York. And when riots were happening across this country in the summer of 1963, my father, I think it was 63. It could have been 64. My father went to the police commissioner and said, stay out of the black neighborhoods. And he said, you're crazy, paraphrasing, but he basically said, what are you crazy? I got to send cops into the black neighborhood. He said, no, stay out. If you want peace, stay out. And you know what? The police commissioner listened to him. And guess which city

did not have a riot in the black community in that summer where riots were roiling the country, Syracuse, New York. But isn't that a sign that something's wrong with our policing? Yes. You can't have, look, you know, You cannot have a control and containment model of policing that sees people who are expressing First Amendment rights as the enemy. You have to see it as problem-oriented and as people-centered and focused. So let me give you an example because some people will say, well, but Maya, there were some parts of the city where we saw rioting and we saw store windows getting bashed in. That is true and that is unacceptable. Let me be clear.

That is true and unacceptable. There were some folks taking advantage of peaceful demonstrations to do that. There is a way of policing that handles that, which are police officers cordoning off in commercial quarters like that, you know, those windows am standing in front of them. But that's very different from what we were seeing. And when that happened, by the way, that is not, and I was in some of those demonstrations and where that was happening, I didn't see violence jumping off from the police. But when the police start just gettling folks, you know, actually escalating tensions or just starting to baton people randomly as we saw in some of those videos, that's not policing.

That's not problem solving. That's problem creating. That's escalation. And that is also a violation of people's rights. And so that's not the police function. And so we have to change. This is my point about the rules of the road and the priorities. of policing. We have to focus it back on what public safety is. And it's also better for the police

officers. And we should recognize that this is about what's better for everyone. This isn't just about picking sides. We're all on the same side in the sense that we all want to be safe. We all want to be able to go home at the end of the night. And we all want to know we can get where we want to go and do what we need to do and exercise our rights freely as residents of this great city. And that's what policing needs to be a part of, not a problem for. A lot of people have seemed to frame this race by comparing the candidates as those who are coming from a place of seeking social justice and those who have a business acumen. Well, I can't personally understand how after the president we just had or our second to last mayor, anyone could think a businessman makes a good mayor.

But I'm curious what you would say to people who feel it's a flaw of yours to not have as much business experience as some of the other candidates. Yeah, I think we can look to the White House and say, how is that working for you? But I think the point is what we need is leadership and recognizing what management looks like when what you're managing. is a government full of public servants, 55 agencies. You know, we're still going to have $88 billion worth of spend in the city. Much of that is personnel and a lot of other things that are supposed to be problem solving. And what the management job is of sitting in that seat called being the New York City Mayor. And really what it is and what it takes.

And I say this as, you know, I think it's understandable that people say, we want to make sure we don't have a problem of management of city government. That's absolutely right. We should not have that problem. And what it takes, though, at a time of historic crisis is you need change management. But the change that we need is about how people's needs get met. That's not the same thing as running a business that's job is the bottom line on the profit margin. This is about people.

And what we need is a management that understands that we have to pull everyone to That means government, getting government to work with itself, which frankly in a city where you have 55 agencies and almost 350,000 employees, that's a management job that I have done. But it also means understanding the partnerships you have to have as government outside of government. And that is also something I've had the privilege of doing. And it is part of the management. And it means you have to hold the responsibility of vision, a vision setting, of hiring, really smart good people of recognizing their smart and good, of listening to them, but also make sure that everyone is listening to each other. And that as I said earlier, a big part of that management is moving the barriers out of the way, having the public conversations that need to be

had, setting the principles, making them transparent publicly, inviting folks to the table, and making sure it's getting done and that it's getting done in a way that's meeting the purpose. And the purpose is that the people of New York City are benefiting. And that means many different things in many different ways from trash pickup to things like transforming our school system and our police department, but also making sure that we're partnering also with the private sector. And that's what this role calls for. And that's not just about profit. And that's what we have to recognize. We're trying to make this city a city where we can all live with dignity. And that means development without displacement. That means school system that sees all our kids as exceptional. That means every single community getting the services it needs to have quality of life. That means being safe in our streets, both from crime and from police violence, very, very specific kind of leadership and management that requires a lot of different skills and people are at the center of it. Maya, how do you feel about the Amazon deal and what went down and how it went? And do you have opinions? Well, look, my opinions are like all

of the development deals that we, you know, I've been seeing in this city, you know, we have to call, we have to be clear about principles. Principles are the people in communities, you know, of New York City should benefit. And we have to have an honest and transparent conversation about what that is, what that looks like. I did not see a transparent city hall or state government for that level. You know, and Amazon made some of its own mistakes. There's plenty of blame to go around, but I think this is the point is, you know, a leadership that says, here are the principles of development, we're going to be transparent about the process, we're going to be make sure that all the voices are heard and heard about whether these principles are going to get met because we're going to

be transparent about the deals. We also have to have much more long-term planning because we as a city don't do that. And so we get caught up in individual fight after individual fight after individual fight, rather than also feeling like we're laying a plan and a vision that we can all see and participate in in terms of what our growth opportunities are. But as mayor, I'll be involved, transparent and principled from the beginning of the process to the end on these big, important deals so that, you know, if they should sink because they're not going to deliver for people they do, if they should move forward because they're going to deliver for people they do, but it's not going to be behind closed doors. And it's not going to be ignoring the

voices of people like residents of Queensbridge houses or any other folks that deserve to have their voices heard as part of the process to stress test and make sure that what we think is going to work and deliver for them actually does. It fell apart in such a weird way. Do you think that if it had been done in the right way, been good for New York? Well, look, you know, I think the deal went down because it was viewed as a bad deal by people, but I don't know what the, this is, when you're on the outside of government looking in, what I saw was a whole lot of conversations that should have taken place that didn't. If I were mayor, I would have had a meeting with the residents of Queensbridge houses, and I would have made it information bringing where I made sure they had

all the access to the information about what the deal was, what the deal wasn't, and made sure they had a voice in it. I would have made sure that when we were talking about, you know, roughly $26 billion in revenue that was going to come to the city and state, that we were having a discussion about how real was that revenue, you know, what we had done to stress tests, whether it was real, and then what we were going to do with it to make New York City the lives of residents, both particularly in that geographic area where the development was going to happen, but also for the city, like how it was going to help our city be better? Was it going to?

Like, I think the importance of talking about what these things mean because there's been so little trust in government and there's been so little trust in development projects because so often and they haven't delivered. And it is the responsibility of government to make sure it's stress testing those things to make sure it's accountable to them and then make sure it's talking publicly and transparently about what the dollars are going to do

and what they'll be used for so that people can make an informed decision. When you were working for the administration, the Blasoo administration, a broadband access, I'm curious if you dealt with homeless shelters at all in the course of that, and how you think the mayor is doing with those right now And as that's become an issue with children there who are going to school remotely,

but can't go to school because they don't have Wi-Fi. Our plan, you know, was starting with public housing and wireless corridors and leveraging franchise agreements to get all of the access we could. In fact, we built in community centers into one of our agreements so we could get gigabit speed into more communities. And homeless shelters at that time was not yet part of the discussion. Obviously, what I can tell you having been engaged from City Hall side is what it required, that should have happened fast. It should have happened effectively.

And it didn't because I think there was not enough attention paid to leadership that would have driven that and to making sure that it was a priority and the barriers were moved out of the way to get it done. And if I had been mayor, I would have gotten it done. Thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate and I apologize. I'm hopping off. I'm just, I'm in one of those back-to-back. scheduling loads. So I didn't need to rush off, but it was really a pleasure to be with you,

and thank you so much for having. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking to smart folks from the Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics, and science. We'll help us understand what's happening to our country and the world. We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you again on the next episode. Want more great listens?

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