Maya Wiley, 2021 mayoral hopeful, legal analyst and a university professor at the New School, takes calls from listeners about her campaign and the issues facing the City, including NYPD reform, eviction court and community employment resources.
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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. April is Ask the Mayor tryouts month here on the Brian Lehrer Show. Just like we do Ask the Mayor every Friday with my questions and yours for Mayor Bill de Blasio, we have invited the eight leading candidates for the June primary to join us this month to do an Ask The Mayor segment with my questions and yours for them. Looks like all eight are accepting and we'll kick it off right now, with my questions and yours for candidate Maya Wiley at 646-435-7280. You can tweet a question, just use the hashtag like we do on Fridays, #AsktheMayor. Now we're going to set a few ground rules.
We want these to be policy questions, not got you questions or negative attacks. If you get on the air and we think you're a plant from the rival campaign just trying to make our guests look bad, whoever the guest is that day, we will give you very short shrift. Maya Wiley among other things was Mayor de Blasio's General Counsel early in his administration and has been the chair of the civilian complaint review board which hears accusations of police misconduct, and she's been an MSNBC commentator. Our phones are open for Ask the Mayor tryouts at 646-435-7280 or ask a question with the #AskTheMayor. With all that as prelude, Maya Wiley, welcome back to WNYC. Thanks for doing an Ask the Mayor tryout.
Maya Wiley: Thanks so much for having me, Brian. I'm honored. I only look forward to the time when we can be back in studio safely together.
Brian Lehrer: Absolutely, as do we all. I know you've all done about a million and a half Zoom forums, to your point. Is there a most common question that members of the public tend to ask you?
Maya Wiley: Yes, they're really three. [chuckles] They come up constantly, and understandably. One is obviously about getting our economy back on track, getting our people back to work. Getting them back to work safely in a way that makes sure that we also can still deliver necessary services to our city, like garbage pickup. Quality of life issues. Street homelessness is a huge one that comes up regularly, a humanitarian crisis, and also a public safety issue. I'd say the other one, obviously, is housing and housing costs, because we had an affordability crisis well before this pandemic struck us, and it's now even deeper, with hundreds of thousands of people facing eviction.
Brian Lehrer: Do you have what you would like the listeners to think of as your signature policy like, "Maya Wiley, she's the one who plans to do such and such?" Do you have one of those?
Maya Wiley: I do. I have many. As we know, we need multiple solutions all working in tandem. Look, we have incredible resources in this city that we can be deploying right now, to get our people back to work, to create 100,000 new jobs, which is what I will do. Spending $10 billion in capital construction, that's a budget I would control as mayor. It is not just stimulated by creating 100,000 jobs, it's a new deal for New York because we have to solve the problems that we faced before COVID that have deepened the impacts of the pandemic, in particular in communities of color.
Communities like South East Queens, and South Bronx and Central Brooklyn, North Shore, Staten Island, which is that when we build things, we need built like affordable housing and fix things we need fixed, like public housing or making more resiliency in the face of climate change and flooding, that we can do it where the investments are so desperately needed because we know which communities have historically been left out, but are also a huge percentage of our city. That means investing in communities of color, in particular, and communities hard hit by COVID, to make sure that we're doing things and investing things in ways that put people back to work where unemployment is the highest, and where so many of those needs are necessary.
It will benefit the entire city because it will stimulate the economy. I can do this on day one because I won't need agreement from Albany or dollars from DC. That is critical for our people and critical to know that we can do, day one.
Brian Lehrer: Let's take our first call, and it's going to be Hannah in the Bronx. You're on WNYC with mayoral candidate Maya Wiley. Hi, Hannah.
Anna: It's Anna. Hi, Maya.
Maya Wiley: Hi Anna.
Anna: Thanks for taking my call. We've seen an increase in assaults of delivery cyclists and the e-bikes. You know these are some gig workers with limited workplace rights and benefits. Just last week, one delivery cyclist was killed for his bike in East Harlem, Francisco Villalva Vitinio. He was 29 years old, and he was working for DoorDash at the time. I wanted to know what specific policy moves or next steps you would be taking to fix this because it's a big problem?
Maya Wiley: Well, thank you for that, because this is a critical issue for our workers. We know that one out of three New York City workers is a gig worker, or self-employed, independent contractor. We have all kinds of languages and words for it. I'm very proud to have been co endorsed by the Freelancers Union because of our policy positions on this incredibly important part of our economy. The bottom line is we're going to make sure we're both enforcing the important protections that we do have in the law now. That means expanding the resources and enforcement in our government agencies responsible for it.
It also means that we're going to continue to work with our workers on what kinds of solutions we get identified by the folks who are impacted by the problem. So much of the opportunity we have to be more effective through city government is to listen and learn from the experiences that people are having, and to work together on the solutions. It's one of the reasons I've been endorsed, and it's one of the things I'm very excited about in terms of the opportunity to both do more enforcement, but also find more ways to ensure that our workers are treated as the employees they actually are. That means making sure we have contracts that make sure people get paid.
It means making sure we're demonstrating who is a good contractor and making that publicly available so that folks can see who are good actors, who are bad, so that for us who are going to businesses we know who's a good and high road employer and who is not, and there's more that will do.
Brian Lehrer: Anna, let me ask you a follow-up question. What do you make this rash of assaults on e-bike delivery drivers? Are people out to get their bikes? Is that what they're taking? I don't think they carry cash very much. What do you think's going on there?
Anna: Me?
Brian Lehrer: You.
Anna: Yes, the bikes are worth about $2,000.
Brian Lehrer: It is, it's the bikes.
Anna: I wanted to follow up with Maya because it is a string of these--
Brian Lehrer: Thefts? I'm sorry.
Anna: Sorry, I'm getting nervous. These assaults. It appears that this is an organized thing that's happening. In your response, I didn't hear anything about the NYPD, and what specific meetings would happen. What is the lever that makes this stop?
Maya Wiley: I think that's extremely important Anna, and I really appreciate the follow-up question, because you're right. When we talk about the gig worker and the independent contractors in that category, is a huge category of workers in our city. There's a big issue there generally, but to the specific problem where we have very serious and significant public safety issues, I actually talk about putting the public back in public safety. Really, what I mean by that is we do have to both restructure the police department so that we're focusing policing on the things that are appropriate for the police to focus on.
There are ways in which we create better police-community relationships because we have created that focus, because there is a process of identifying from communities what the priorities are that are appropriate for policing. Your naming this is exactly one. If there's something going on, so often what we see is our residents are the experts in what the public safety issues are. So much of what we have to do with policing in terms of making it also a more just system where we're safe from crime as well as safe from police violence is focusing that attention and focusing the way they police work on the things that are appropriate.
This sounds like one that is appropriate, particularly in what you're saying, and I'm not an expert in the problem itself, but that's the point. Listening to what's happening, understanding and identifying it. It's also problem-oriented policing as the model. That's more than community policing. Community policing right now is a unit of the police department. It's not a function of policing, and to reorient policing to problem orientation means something like this is happening, we understand whether it's a policing problem or whether it's some other problem so that we're also having our agencies partner with one another.
Let me just give you a really practical example. When Eric Garner was killed, he was killed because the police were responding to calls from store owners because there were lots of folks who are low income not getting enough money in their pockets to pay rent and buy food through the month, who were selling goods on a block untaxed when the stores were selling the same things taxed, which meant they were losing business. Now that's not a public safety issue in that instance, but as the police keep getting called and what they do is arrest sweeps, that's neither keeping people safe because there's not a public safety issue there. There is a poverty problem and so it's up to police department.
Brian Lehrer: What would you have done in the short-term in that case, if these brick and mortar, legitimate businesses kept losing money because people kept going back and selling the untaxed cigarettes in front of their stores?
Maya Wiley: You organize the problem solution conversation by bringing other agencies of city government into the conversation. Problem-oriented policing, Brian and Anna, is actually a documented model. It's been talked about for 30 years, there're pilots that prove that it works. Here's the thing. In a problem-oriented model, the police being the people getting called, the department getting called would say, "There is a problem. We are the first line of hearing this problem. It is not a public safety problem but it is a problem, so we need to be partnering by calling in other agencies of government like HRA and others to say, 'This is not a policing function, but as the police, we are able to identify the problem.'"
That's calling city government together to say, "This is a poverty problem." Then that's meeting with the store owners in some instances. A good example of how this has happened in other places is you'd actually create a place and a mechanism, both for social workers to connect both to job training opportunities and a place whereby you could find a way for them to street vendor appropriately. Connecting them to other opportunities, rather than just saying, "We will arrest you." Eric Garner is dead and we don't get his life back. We don't even know, by the way, if he was selling an un-taxed cigarette, but let's say he was. His problem needed to be solved. He shouldn't have been arrested so it's a very different orientation.
Brian Lehrer: I understand. Let's move on. Anna in the Bronx, thank you for starting a good conversation. Let's go to Dawn in Brooklyn. Dawn, you're on WNYC with Mayo hopeful. Maya Wiley. Hi Dawn.
Dawn: Hi Maya. I did have a question about affordable housing. Do you feel that the de Blasio administration did a good job with affordable housing? If not, what would you do differently?
Maya Wiley: Thank you Dawn,, for that question. One of the things that called me into this race where I started thinking about it as someone who's not a politician, someone who's just a person who comes from the community with a lifetime of working on racial justice and transforming our society into one that works for us, is recognizing that we have an affordability crisis and it's a crisis that predated COVID. Before COVID we had 200,000 New Yorkers facing eviction. 200,000. Now there are some good things that have happened because, thanks to a change in city law, we actually invested in folks getting free legal services for housing court.
When people are represented by a lawyer, evictions drop. 84% of folks who've had a lawyer were not evicted. That's a good thing, but I think what we saw is we were not developing, we were not using all the tools of government to develop all the kinds of deeply affordable housing we truly needed. What I would do, and about to put out the housing platform, is, one, recognize that the city has over 1,000 acres of vacant land. Rather than selling that land, partnering with not-for-profit housing developers and creating community land trusts so that we're creating 100% permanently affordable, and permanently affordable for folks who are earning $25,000 a year, $30,000 a year, $15,000 a year.
That's critically important because we haven't developed enough of the housing for our essential workers, for people caring for us who can't care for themselves and their own families even though they're working, and for our artists and our creatives. My own daughter, who is an artsy kid figured it out. If she wanted to pursue art as a vocation, as a profession, she did the math. She's earning a minimum wage job. She needs an apartment for $600 a month. We have to actually pay attention to that. The other thing we have the opportunity to do is think about the vacancy crisis as a new opportunity to both solve vacancy.
How we need to solve that, to help bring real estate dollars back into our public coffers, but in a way that is creating more affordability. There's a real opportunity to do that right now. I would just also add that in my new deal New York plan, that's $10 billion in capital construction. That means building things we need built. We're also going to be able to do new construction, where we are going to pay attention to deeper levels of affordability. I've heard it all over the city for many, many, many different communities that it is just the rents are just too high. Even when you work, you can't pay them. That's what we're going to start to solve.
Brian Lehrer: As a follow-up, would you need to raise taxes in ways that are under the mayor's control to pay for any of that?
Maya Wiley: In my plan, this is all existing resources. That $10 billion, what we would do is create a new deal, I call it the new deal for New York because we know we have come out of both the Great Depression and also the Great recession by building things we need building things we need built, fix things that need to be fixed. The capital construction budget is just a smart play. I've talked to economists, including economists who are not New York City economists, because I wanted to make sure it was good and independent in the assessment of this as an economic strategy.
It has been blessed as really smart borrowing and will borrow an additional, new deal New York's Hour will both help identify the projects that solve problems in addition to creating the jobs for people who need them. It also means we are going to borrow an additional 2 billion. This is cheap money because interest rates are low. That's what I can do without doing anything other than utilizing that power I have as mayor. What we have seen, and I know you know this Brian, is we have an incredible opportunity to look at all our resources and think about how we're utilizing them more effectively to solve the real problems that our people are facing. Affordability is a crisis.
Brian Lehrer: : All right, we've taken a question from the Bronx and one from Brooklyn. Here's Danielle in Woodside, Queens. You're on WNYC with mayoral hopeful Maya Wiley. Hi Danielle.
Danielle: Good morning. Thank you for taking my call. Are you there?
Brian Lehrer: We're here, yes.
Maya Wiley: Good morning, Danielle.
Danielle: Good morning. I lived in Woodside from 2013 until 2018. I have to tell you that the library there, the public library, turns into a community center in the afternoon. It was a full house with over 30 children who sat and did their homework. I had been a daycare worker in Florida when my daughter was little because I chose poverty over a profession. The way the library worked was so wonderful and I heard that Bill de Blasio's community. I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with the verbiage for the program, but I heard he had a program that was very well run and successful.
Brian Lehrer: Danielle, forgive me for hustling you up, but let me ask you to get to the question for Maya. What's your question?
Danielle: The question is are you going to implement more community programs because the only way to help the community is the community helping itself?
Brian Lehrer: Maya Wiley?
Maya Wiley: Danielle, I think this is such an important observation, and question. First of all, let me say I had the great privilege to work with the public library system when I was counsel to the mayor on universal broadband access, where we help support the model for the libraries in terms of lending wireless hotspots for free as part of the ways to ensured more low-income kids could do their homework at home. The libraries are a tremendous resource and the programming in our libraries are incredibly important. They are community centers. I also helped partner with them when I was at the New School running the digital equity laboratory I created.
Here's the thing. Not only are we going to make sure our libraries are strong, vibrant, open, safe and resourced, we're going to do additional things to support community because your story, Danielle, which is one that is so powerful and COVID has made more real. So many women, literally women have lost a decade in this economy because women have either had to give up jobs because they needed to stay home and help their kids learn online, or they lost jobs because the jobs that we lost in the economy hit women hard, particularly women who are in the caring economy, who are caring for kids, caring for our elderly.
We have a huge job loss there, but I have a plan called the Universal Care Economy. That's in addition to New Deal New York where what we're going to do, and starting in hard hit communities, we're going to create community care centers. We're going to create places that are drop-off centers with quality, high level childcare, elder care, care for family members who have disabilities so that for parents. For families that need to work, need to go to a job interview, need to go to a doctor's appointment, there's a place right in the community that has real programming. Those will be union jobs. We will be job creating by also solving one of the top three costs that make New York city and extremely expensive place.
We will ensure that the kids are getting really supportive programming. That will include it trauma informed care because, coming out of COVID, and even in some of our communities even what predated COVID, violence has created a real need for trauma informed care. We will also be called locating other community-based organizations and organs of city government that do services programs in the same facility so that it's also a one-stop-shop in communities. That gives communities a way to be in relationship with one another. There's one other thing I'll mention in relation to this, because gun violence, of course, is on the rise.
It's on the rise in the communities that are hardest hit by COVID because they're the hardest hit by job loss. They're the hardest hit by trauma. In many instances where we've had the greatest job loss, literally what we've seen is folks with the highest housing insecurity. All kinds of other issues, hunger rates. What we are going to do is take $18 million from the NYPD budget in order to create a Participatory Justice Fund. That's participatory budgeting, where communities hard hit, who are the experts in their problems, can direct resources to the kinds of programs they feel will be most impactful for them.
That's putting power back in the hands of communities in order for communities to have the ability to participate in their own problem solving, which I'm a big believer in. I think city government can be much better at it.
Brian Lehrer: This is WNYC FM, HD and AM New York. WNJT FM 88.1, Trenton. WNJP 88.5, Sussex. WNGY 89.3, Netcon. WNJO 90.3, Tom's River. We are New York and New Jersey Public Radio, almost out of time for our first Ask the Mayor tryout session with candidate Maya Wiley. We'll have Scott Stringer on Wednesday for session two. Before we finish up, and I've got a little lightning round for you, but here's a follow-up question about something you said earlier coming in on Twitter. The listener writes, "Did Wiley just refer to people experiencing homelessness as a public safety issue? OMG De Blasio 2.0."
I think you did say before when homelessness came up that it's both a humanitarian and a public safety issue. What would you say to that listener who didn't like that answer?
Maya Wiley: No. Listen, we have fundamentally we have violated the human rights of people who are living on the streets because we failed to house them. Housing is a human right, and everyone is housing ready. My primary point was that folks that we see who are living on the streets are often folks who have been denied that housing opportunity, and we can solve that. We can solve that with the supportive services that they need because they have mental health issues, because they have, in some instances, drug addictions. In some instances, both. What we know is supportive housing works.
I'm going to have a housing first strategy. What I meant to say though, is mental health untreated has created a concern around whether or not people are safe. For example, I've talked to folks, we need our subway system to come back. There's no question about it. There's no question that there are folks who fear, from a public safety standpoint, being in the subway. For example, because people who are homeless and mentally ill are understandably going to the subway system to find shelter. I was on a subway platform where a homeless gentleman, clearly mentally ill, clearly deserving of housing and needing services and support was yelling aggressively the N word.
Now it was I afraid? Yes I was. I think we have to acknowledge that it is a humanitarian crisis. It's a human rights violation. In order to get our city back on track, it's also important to recognize that it also creates a sense of unsafety and we can solve that the right way, not the wrong way. Right now we've had a history of arresting the mentally ill and part of why we have to shut Rikers down is 40% of the folks in Rikers have mental illnesses. We're just not doing the right thing. The right thing will be mental health approaches, mental health crisis intervention, housing first strategies. Let's not ignore the fact that we also want people to have high quality of life and also feel safe. That's a win-win.
Brian Lehrer: Are you ready for a lightning round to conclude? Yes or no answers or very short answers. Number one, did you think Amazon headquarters in Queens would have been more good or more bad for the city?
Maya Wiley: I think, done rightly, more good.
Brian Lehrer: Should gifted and talented programs exist at all in the public schools?
Maya Wiley: Accelerated learning should exist and all our kids have gifts and talents.
Brian Lehrer: Have you ever written a city bike?
Maya Wiley: No. I have a bike. I'm fortunate enough to have my own.
Brian Lehrer: Do you own a car?
Maya Wiley: I do.
Brian Lehrer: If you're raising children or did raise children, do they or did they attend public school the whole time?
Maya Wiley: I have, collectively between my two children who are 20 and 17, 15 years in the public school system, navigating elementary, middle and high school.
Brian Lehrer: Do you have a favorite spectator sport?
Maya Wiley: Watching my cats. If you mean sports, it's football and basketball.
Brian Lehrer: Do you have a favorite team?
Maya Wiley: That's where I start to get in trouble. I'm going to do the political thing. I actually have more than one, but I'm going to say the Liberty's always going to be a central team for me, but that's NBA.
Brian Lehrer: Do you support mayor de Blasio requiring city office workers to start returning to their desks on May 3rd or do you think it's premature?
Maya Wiley: I think we should be guided by public health experts. As long as public health experts say it can be done safely I'm all for it.
Brian Lehrer: If you donate as a member to any arts organization, can you name one?
Maya Wiley: Well, Brooklyn Museum and also the Laundromat Project.
Brian Lehrer: Name one thing that you do for fun in non pandemic times that has nothing to do with politics.
Maya Wiley: The movies, I love movies. I love going to the movie theater and I miss it.
Brian Lehrer: You haven't gone back yet, I guess since they reopened?
Maya Wiley: I haven't gone back.
Brian Lehrer: What have you done for fun in the pandemic?
Maya Wiley: Honestly, eating outside. Being able to meet friends and neighbors, and eating outside so that we have some semblance of community and of life and of each other.
Brian Lehrer: Finally, with rank choice voting, is there anyone you would like your supporters to list second?
Maya Wiley: I have been very public about listing Diane Morales as second.
Brian Lehrer: There we leave it with Maya Wiley. Thank you very much for doing our inaugural Asked the Mayor tryout today. If you're elected, we hope you'll continue the Ask the Mayor tradition on the show. Meanwhile, we're going to have you and each of the mayoral candidates, the major candidates, one more time in May, so we look forward to having you back then.
Maya Wiley: Thank you for doing this, Brian. It was a lot of fun. Let me just say yes, I will continue the tradition and also just want to deeply appreciate, as a W, going first and not last.
Brian Lehrer: There's no favoritism in the random order that we have going here. Who knows, maybe going last, last licks is an advantage. However it works out, we will see. Great to talk to you today. Thank you for doing this.
Maya Wiley: Thank you. Be safe and be well.
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