Elizabeth Glazer on How Left Progressive Blue Cities Should Tackle Public Safety

[00:00:10] Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Blue City Blues, the only podcast featuring smart guests talking about the problems facing blue cities and how to fix them. I'm David Hyde with Sandeep Kaushik. Sandeep, I don't know if it's the only podcast, honestly. I just added that this week. But I also wanted to mention, I'm looking forward to our upcoming live taping with the GeekWire podcast here in Seattle. We're calling it Two Cities, One Industry, Big Tech, Power and Politics in Seattle and San Francisco.

[00:00:37] We've got an all-star cast of panelists and that's coming up on September 29th if you live in Seattle and would like to attend. Absolutely, man. At the Nordic Museum, it is a really great panel. Margaret O'Mara from the University of Washington who wrote The Definitive History of Silicon Valley and Jonathan Weber, a veteran San Francisco journalist who just has a new book out called City on the Edge,

[00:01:03] which is really about how tech transformed San Francisco over the last 20 years, the good, the bad and the ugly of that. And then, yeah, as you said, John Cook from GeekWire on that panel. So obviously Seattle and San Francisco have been, I would say, radically transformed by the rise of the knowledge economy and the Internet and tech. And there's a lot to unpack in that conversation. So I'm super looking forward to it.

[00:01:26] And I don't know. We still don't know exactly where there's just so much happening right now with AI and data centers and Elon Musk and Peter Thiel's. And how do we get here is really the question I think we're going to be asking that that event. September 29th, I'll drop a link in our show notes. But moving on at the Nordic Museum. Yes, at the Nordic, the National Nordic Museum here in Seattle. On today's podcast, a new take on public safety with our very special guest, Elizabeth Glazer,

[00:01:55] who previously served as a federal prosecutor and as a criminal justice advisor to a New York governor and a New York mayor. She's also the founder of Vital City, a digital policy journal and platform that's focused on urban policy, civic life and public safety in New York City and I want to say and beyond. And the author of a recent piece in The Atlantic that's titled A Cheap Fix for Urban Crime. Elizabeth Glazer, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks so much, David. A lot of fun to be here.

[00:02:26] So you found Vital City in 2022. And when I think 2022, I think this is a moment when blue cities kind of lost their ability to think coherently or clearly about public safety and how to address it. Stemming really from some very legitimate concerns about things like mass incarceration and race and racism and unconstitutional policing.

[00:02:54] But as we've explored on this podcast, you know, the the the cause of criminal justice reform and of really kind of fixing those problems turned into something much more revolutionary, where people perhaps understandably came to believe that we'd be better off without policing and better off without a criminal justice system. No, no jails, no prisons.

[00:03:15] And unfortunately, or ironically, that more revolutionary politics actually, according to some of our guests who are criminal justice reformers, really set back the cause of criminal justice reform in many ways. So this is a moment where the world is sort of losing its mind and you decide you're going to start Vital Cities to try to help address some of that is my guess. But tell us a little bit. To get back on sanity. Absolutely. Yeah.

[00:03:45] Well, definitely. I think 2022 felt very much in the buzzsaw between right and left. No question about it. And I guess, you know, I have what many might think is quite a retrograde background. You know, I was a federal prosecutor, as you mentioned. I essentially ran, you know, the state prison, Homeland Security, National Guard. I was in New York that worked for a very progressive mayor.

[00:04:14] And I guess the thing that struck me is that there were actually ways to get to agreement about safety that weren't coded red and blue and right and left and progressive law enforcement.

[00:04:29] And that if we could hold on for dear life to things that actually work, not just to make us safe, but the flip side of that, to make our cities flourish, of which safety is a piece, that that would be a very, very good thing. And I think we had sort of come through this period of, you know, the 1970s, nothing works.

[00:04:57] You know, 1990s, broken windows. You know, after that, Michelle Alexander, mass incarceration. And what period are we living through now? Now, I was hoping, I still hope that we're living in a period in which evidence can get us closer to an approach that's really about the flourishing of cities, of which, as I said, you know, safety is one important piece.

[00:05:28] And so when I think about, and so really what Vital City was about was, is there a way to serve up to busy bureaucrats great ideas in a way that they can plug and play?

[00:05:47] And having been a busy bureaucrat myself, you know, I can tell you that people in government work with like a blowtorch in their face every day. And so where do you find the great ideas? You're not going to be reading like the quarterly report of crimes and misdemeanors. And then even if you do, if you don't know what endogenous means, which I don't, you know, then, you know, like, how do you?

[00:06:15] So I thought, wouldn't it be like so great to start a magazine that I would read and that would imprint instantly in your head because it was angelically written. It was incredibly beautiful. And it told you kind of crisply and cleanly, here are some great things to do to make your city work. So that's a very long way to say that that was kind of the moment. And that was what the impulse was.

[00:06:45] So let me put a pin in Vital City because I think it's a I've only recently discovered Vital City fascinating organizations. And I've been asking around people here have been telling me incredibly respected by policymakers in New York and around the country. So we'll definitely want to talk more about that. But yes, please tell your friends and relatives. I will. I will. But but Liz, I want to get to your bio a little bit here. As you said, you worked for a very progressive mayor, Bill de Blasio. Right. As his criminal justice advisor.

[00:07:14] But you also worked for Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York. Right. More of a more of a centrist. And so I I kind of think you're uniquely maybe not uniquely, but but perfectly positioned for the questions that that I kind of have. And I hope we'll talk about more in this episode, which is how do progressive mayors in big American cities really get a handle around public safety issues?

[00:07:44] The whole panoply of of of questions and ideas around public safety. And and and don't they, in some sense, start a little bit more behind the eight ball than, say, a more main line kind of Andrew Cuomo type Democrat just because of where progressives are in some of this stuff. So I'm just going to kind of curious about that. Can you talk a little bit about your time working for de Blasio and what that meant to be a public safety advisor in a very progressive coded administration?

[00:08:14] Yeah, I mean, I think it helped a lot in a very progressive coded administration where safety has to do with not just one. It's not just the police department, not just nonprofits, but everybody. It actually helped a lot to have been a federal prosecutor that prosecuted gang cases because that would give you instant credibility or some credibility.

[00:08:43] One would hope in talking to courts and prosecutors and the police department and in trying to present ideas that may not be immediately where they would go, but but could be presented in a way where we're all on the side of safety.

[00:09:04] And let me show you why this particular diversion program or this particular way of focusing on gun violence can actually advance the thing that we all care about, which is keeping our neighborhoods safe. So I think, you know, it's sort of it played both ways.

[00:09:25] But I would also say that, you know, thinking about Bill de Blasio as a progressive mayor and now thinking about Zoran Mondani as not just a progressive mayor, but a socialist mayor. That I think the thing that I think that I think that I think is maybe a lesson nationwide is. Because he has.

[00:09:54] He has doubled down on. I want to deliver. Services to you, New Yorkers, and whether that's an affordable city or a safe city or whatever, judge me on filling the potholes, the fact the crime is going down. And I think that's a very attractive. That's very attractive to people.

[00:10:21] And yes, sure, there are people who are still coding it left and right. But the reason why, for example, I like the idea of lighting or other things as ways to reduce crime is that they're neither left nor right. They're civic services that you're going to produce anyway, but they happen to have an unbelievable impact both on crime and civic life.

[00:10:47] So I think this issue of is safety really just about does safety not know either left or right? Is it really just about being effective in some ways? Is it sort of an abundance agenda for safety? It's about whether cities work.

[00:11:16] Hey, Blue City Blues listeners. We've got a special event coming up later this month for folks who live in Seattle. It's called Two Cities, One Industry. Big Tech, Power and Politics in Seattle and San Francisco. A live taping of Blue City Blues and the GeekWire podcasts at the National Nordic Museum featuring historian Margaret O'Meara. She's at the University of Washington and she's the author of The Code, Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America.

[00:11:43] We also have GeekWire's John Cook and journalist Jonathan Weber. He's got a newish book out called City on the Edge, Technology, Politics and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco. So the conversation is going to look at how these two different cities became the twin capitals of tech and how the relationship between big tech and local governments that host tech continues to evolve. Recorded live for both podcasts, Sandeep and I are going to be asking some questions. So check that out.

[00:12:12] September 29th starting at 6 p.m. We'll put a link in our show notes if you want to get in on that and we hope you can join us. Thanks. So let's pick up on that piece and talk a little bit about lighting. But I am thinking about your comments about Mondami there and the ways in which he wants to deliver because he wants his socialist progressive agenda to be successful.

[00:12:37] And he knows that means perhaps he knows or let's hope he means that means not buying into the sort of anarcho-libertarian politics around policing and the criminal justice system that we've seen from progressives over the last 10 years and may still be seeing in a city like Seattle. But I love your point about this being not necessarily a left-right thing. It's about just building better cities.

[00:12:58] And one of the very simple things you can focus on is lighting, which is a lot more exciting than it might seem in reading your article in The Atlantic. It is so exciting, David and Sandeep. Spread the word. Yeah. We're very excited. I was excited when I read it. And let me just tell you, there's more where that came from. Because it's not just about lighting.

[00:13:24] So the thing, here's the thing that I love about lighting and that I love about the physical city more generally, is like when you think about what does it mean to produce a safe city? What does it mean to reduce crime? It's really all about, you know, managing behavior and controlling risk. We've chosen to do that mainly through cops and handcuffs.

[00:13:53] But that's not the only thing that changes behavior. So lighting changes behavior. Random controlled trials in New York City Housing Authority showed that violent crime goes down by 36 percent. Not in like 10 years when the program kicks in, but when you turn on the lights. And then it sustains that going forward.

[00:14:22] And so the thing that is interesting about it is that lighting isn't really the purview of the police department. It's like the Department of Transportation or Public Works, you know, in your city. It's somebody else who's in charge of that. But these are all pieces that both are providing essential civic services that cities are going to provide anyway.

[00:14:51] But they also, with just a little bit of a jigger, can be twofers and provide important civic services and make us much safer. The Atlantic article really is fascinating. And everybody should read it. We'll definitely link it in the show notes.

[00:15:09] It is really remarkable the statistics you provide in this article about how effective something like just adding lighting in public housing projects was. And as you detail in the piece, you say in the early days of the de Blasio administration in New York, you've got a summer crime spike wave that's going on. And you're like, what are we going to do about it? Why don't we try?

[00:15:35] Let's spend a couple hundred million dollars and just light up a whole bunch of the public housing projects in the city of New York. And the staffs that come out of that, as you said, criminologists did a controlled study of the places where you didn't do lighting versus the places you did. He had 35 percent drop in crime without a rise in arrests in that area.

[00:15:58] And then looking at a similar kind of project in Philadelphia, he found a 15 percent drop in outdoor nighttime street crimes and a 21 percent drop in outdoor nighttime gun violence. Those are amazing numbers. Just throwing on a few lights at night, right? Totally. And in some ways it's totally self-evident, right? It's sort of like instinctively like who goes into a dark alley?

[00:16:26] You don't if you don't want to get knifed. And what do lights do? It's not just the negative of you don't get knifed. What lights do is that they bring people out into public places. And there's nothing that reduces crime better than human interaction, positive human interaction in, you know, playgrounds and sidewalks. And that's what lights do is that they make people feel safe.

[00:16:56] They don't avoid the stairways and the, you know, streets. And it's not just lighting. You know, there is something about the physical environment. And while I can't quote you a random controlled trial, you know, on the effect of scaffolding or other things, there are many random controlled trials about other kinds of physical improvements.

[00:17:23] You know, greening of vacant lots. All kinds of things that essentially are signaling to people who live in the neighborhood. These places are cared for. Someone's looking out, not in a big brother-y way, but in a I'm your next door neighbor and like don't do that here.

[00:17:48] So, but the thing I find exciting about it is that in this sort of right-left, more police, left-police, focused deterrence, cure violence.

[00:18:02] Something that, like lighting or like the physical condition of the city, sort of signals that there's a way to create a safety strategy in which police are one civic service, but they're just one. And there are many other civic services that can be woven together in order to provide a safe city. Safe and vibrant, I would say, because you can have a safe city.

[00:18:31] You just, you know, everybody gets locked up. You have, you know, Berlin Wall, Klee Blights and Rake Sand. That's not what we're talking about. I wanted to ask how your theory of lighting is sort of similar to and different from a departure from broken windows theory that folks remember from the 80s and 90s.

[00:18:53] I remember when I was a student, a political science student at Reed College in the mid 80s, reading James Q. Wilson's article about that for some political science class and the very liberal political science professor saying, you know, this data is pretty good surrounding broken windows theory. I mean, it was, it was the Reagan era, but even a liberal political science professor at Reed College was embracing some of those ideas.

[00:19:17] It sounded like to me at the time, but yeah, how is, how is your theory of lighting similar to and maybe a departure from some of those original theories, at least how they were practiced? So I'm so glad you brought it up and I hope you'll put the original Atlantic article on broken windows in your show notes too, because it's, you know, it's not so long, long an article.

[00:19:39] It's very well written and it's absolutely fascinating how different the article is from the meaning that everybody has filled it up with. Right. Yeah.

[00:19:50] And so, you know, essentially what the article said is it was focused on the physical layout and care of a street and said, as the, you know, as the title suggests, when it appears that streets are not taken care of, when the first rock is thrown through the window, eventually people will come and, you know, squat in the houses, will be turned into a crack house, et cetera.

[00:20:19] These things will snowball. And so the idea was really focused on the physical condition, but the way in which it was interpreted was let's flood the zone with police to arrest, you know, do these mass arrests of people for very small offenses. And there's this great sociologist named Eric Kleinenberg who wrote a book called Palaces for the People.

[00:20:49] And in it, he describes this experiment in Philadelphia, which I love the name of it. It was called the Philadelphia Horticultural Society Experiment because it was done in conjunction with the Horticultural Society.

[00:21:08] And they, there were a lot of vacant lots in Philadelphia and they decided they would do a random control trial and clean up some of them and leave the rest of them the way they were. And crime just cratered in the places where the lots were cleaned up.

[00:21:27] And what Kleinenberg says is imagine if broken windows had been read literally and translated into policing or civic practices as this cleaning up of lots instead of the arresting of numerous numbers of young men, usually black young men from poor neighborhoods.

[00:21:53] You would have had a major reduction in crime without all the blowback that ultimately came as a result of broken windows, you know, the further erosion of trust, you know, a sense of sort of, you know, a standoff between police and communities. So I think there's a lot of power to that.

[00:22:19] So just unbelievably long way of saying, I think broken windows is originally written is very aligned with the way in which I think about about the physical environment. And I think for kind of the way in which I think about crime, which is it is this knitting together of civic services and of the last resort of law enforcement.

[00:22:47] What we need to do is have like a brilliant two word description as brilliant as broken windows was, as graphic as broken windows was. But that isn't. What you often hear, which is a holistic approach and all of government approach, it's like that doesn't stick. No one no one is going to follow that one.

[00:23:13] So we had David Kennedy, a criminologist at John Jay College, previous guest on the podcast. And of course, we asked him about broken windows. He's actually the originator of Focus Deterrence, which we'll talk about more in a minute. But and Liz, he said very similar to you. He said, you know, it was a really in its original formula formulation, a really subtle and important kind of creative way of thinking about how, you know, crime develops and operates.

[00:23:42] And in a city. But he says it's been in its present day formulation, completely discredited as an idea because it turned into stop and frisk. And as you say in your Atlantic piece at the last days of the I guess it was the Bloomberg administration before de Blasio takes office, they're stopping and frisking 700,000 people a year on the streets of New York City. Mostly poor black, brown.

[00:24:07] You know, I mean, obviously, there's a racial dimension to how the cops were operating and in what neighborhoods they were operating and that kind of stuff. And misdemeanor arrests quadrupled right over, you know. So so that's bad, right? I think we can all say, like, that's not the right way we should be doing policing. And that wasn't the original concept of broken windows.

[00:24:29] But there's a transitional thing that I think gets at some of where the friction starts to develop between the ideas we all agree with and where there's there's dispute, which is another guest we had on the podcast, Nicole Gelinas. You know, who's was writing for The New York Times a lot on the opinion pages. She's actually codes as a conservative. I think she's a Manhattan Institute person. And she actually we had her on actually to write about a very good book she wrote about the kind of battle or a century long battle over transit and cars in New York City.

[00:24:58] Really great conversation. But in her book, she tells the story of Bill Bratton, young up and coming cop who gets appointed in 1990 as the head of the transit police in New York City. And he takes this 80s article about about broken windows and he decides to apply it to the problem they have of significant serious crime on the subways in New York City that was really impeding people's sense of safety and riding the trains.

[00:25:28] And what he decides to do is fare evasion is rampant on the New York City subway back then. I lived in New York in that era. I remember it. And and he's like, I'm just going to crack down on fare evasion. And that's what he does. And there is a remarkable drop in serious crime on the New York City subways after he does that. Right.

[00:25:49] And he's sort of saying, I'm taking this broken windows idea, focusing on the little stuff that we're looking the other way and tolerating these these seemingly, you know, relatively harmless behavior, kids jumping turnstiles, stuff like that. But it turns out a lot of the people that are doing that are disproportionately causing a huge amount of the actual serious crime on the subway. So that seems like a real success story and one that progressives forgot as they sort of unwound all this like fare enforcement and stuff in places like Seattle and New York and places like that.

[00:26:18] But that's also that. That was an enforcement based approach. Right. It wasn't just the social environment or lighting or what have you. And it seemed to be a very effective enforcement based approach, like stop, get the little stuff. But then it turns into it sort of morphs over time into something much more problematic. Right. I do think the question is, to some degree, moderation.

[00:26:48] So it is not that all fair evaders are violent felons. It may be that all violent felons are fair evaders, you know, that if you're going to be going on the trains to stick people up, maybe you're not, you know, thinking that much about paying your fare. Yeah. And so the question is, how much, you know, how how targeted can you be in making those arrests?

[00:27:17] Like, are you trying to stop fair evasion or are you trying to stop violent crime? And if you're trying to stop violent crime, what percentage of the fair evaders, in fact, are your violent criminals and are there other ways to do it? If you're trying to stop fair evasion, it's a little bit of question of kind of the resource issue. You know, is it worth that much policeman power for your fare box revenue?

[00:27:46] And are there other ways potentially, again, come back to the physical environment to deal with that or a million other ways to address the question of fair evasion? So I do think a piece of it is just, you know, it's not all or nothing. It's a question of a little bit of a mix and trying to be as targeted as you can.

[00:28:12] And and that means first identifying what is the problem that you're trying to solve? So from broken windows to Liz Glazer's fix what's broken theory or something like that. And but police do remain involved to some extent. But you actually say there's an improvement in the kind of policing that we're able to do when we fix the lighting. Yes, absolutely.

[00:28:40] And and I think that policing has very much evolved. So, you know, policing did used to be this blunderbuss approach. You know, Sandeep mentioned the, you know, almost 700000 stops in New York. The notion that when you did a takedown of a gang, it wouldn't just be, you know, the 10 shooters. It would be their 50 associates as well.

[00:29:09] And I think what at least has proven successful in New York is a much more kind of precise way of thinking about who is it that you should be focusing your resources on to arrest, to incarcerate. And what isn't worth it? So I, you know, I think.

[00:29:40] There's been quite a positive evolution, both in what we know and how we act about what to do about crime, what there hasn't yet been.

[00:29:52] And I think this is a little bit of what your mayor is trying to do and what our mayor in New York City is trying to do is how do you have some kind of integrated strategy that brings together both the enforcement power of the police and the many, many other things we know that both reduce crime and boost productivity? We really do struggle with that in Seattle, let me just say.

[00:30:22] Everywhere, right? Everywhere. That is the question of the moment, I think. It is. How do you integrate the kind of community and social services pieces with the law enforcement and policing elements in a kind of systemic way that is not over-relying on one or the other? And so, which gets us to this question because we're having a debate right now in Seattle about gun violence. Crime is down in Seattle like it is everywhere else.

[00:30:52] But there are, there is certainly still a problem that we face here, persistent problem with street disorder. We have a lot of public drug use. We have big open air drug markets. That kind of shocked the conscience, I think, of a lot of folks to see when you drive by Little Saigon here and you kind of see what's going on. And it's, it's kind of a Hieronymus Bosch hellscape, right?

[00:31:16] You know, people, you know, bent over in the fentanyl, all of it, stolen people selling, the whole thing. We all know what that looks like. And also, I mean, I'll just add, right, really high rates of property crime, which we haven't talked about enough. Yeah, yeah, we do. Exceptionally high rates of property crime, car theft and that sort of thing. Totally downstream from the, from the fact that we have high rates of addiction, you know, untreated addiction in the, on the streets of Seattle, right? So there is this kind of persistent street disorder.

[00:31:44] And there are pockets and flare ups in the city of significant violence, right? Gun violence that, you know, again, kind of shocked the conscience. We had six shootings in 24 hours in one neighborhood just a couple weekends ago that really caught. We had a, we had a big festival where the bite of Seattle, where there was a shooting that was terrifying to folks.

[00:32:08] And so the debate here has been, how do we address that gun violence stuff? And some members of our city council have latched onto this idea of focused deterrence, which I mentioned David Kennedy. This is his brainchild in the 90s. And it's basically a strategy of integrating, identifying the small universe of people that commit the disproportionate levels of violent crimes.

[00:32:34] And it's getting all those folks in a room and basically, and doing a kind of tag team unified front between community leaders who kind of make a moral argument to them that they're hurting the community and the need to stop. Along with social service agencies who are there to say, what do you need? A job treatment, you know, other kinds of services, housing. We'll work with you and get you all of that if you change your behaviors. But also the cops who come in and say, we know who you are.

[00:33:01] And dude, if you keep doing, if you keep slinging dope on that corner or whatever, we're going to bust your ass, right? Like, and, and, you know, you're going to the pokey. And so that there's a body of evidence, right? Around, around focused deterrence that says it can be very, very effective, but it bothers a lot of progressives. I think here in Seattle and other places who prefer other approaches, right?

[00:33:27] And Liz, I know you guys have written about this at Vital City, but they like things like violence interrupters, right? Finding former gang members, former people that were in that life that were part of drug crews and kind of using them as ambassadors and outreach figures to proactively intervene with these younger kids who are engaging in those activities to try to get them to go in a better direction. Makes, you know, so anyway, talk about that, right? That gets at kind of the heart of sort of the friction we're seeing in Seattle.

[00:33:56] And I think we've seen in a lot of other cities around how do we do this integration piece and what is the role of law enforcement? And so, yeah, so a big sprawling question. Sorry, but yeah, it gets at, gets at. I think what I'm, what I'm trying to figure out myself, right? As I think about. Yeah. I mean, you know, as you know, I mean, there has been.

[00:34:24] For as long as both of these programs have been around and at one time they were both called the same thing, ceasefire, right? Confusingly. Yeah. There's been this tension between the two of them. You know, in some ways the Cure Violence guys, you know, are backlit by a bit of an abolitionist impulse.

[00:34:45] It's a way to, to deescalate arguments before they get to the point of, you know, of gun violence and to do it in a really effective way. And so the police are never really involved. And that's quite an important part of the model.

[00:35:04] And I think also from a political point of view, if you're an elected representative and there's been something like, you know, the six shootings that you just mentioned.

[00:35:17] And you want to have a visible, immediate presence, but you don't want to call them the police saying, I'm going to set up a Cure Violence group here or I'm going to put money into that is it gives the same boost that to other elected officials saying, and we're going to flood the zone with police. You know, it's not as, you know, it's just as you know, it's just as you know, and so I think there's, you know, both there's great evidence that works.

[00:35:46] You know, two, it makes complete sense on many different levels. I think sort of the difficulty that some cities have seen is it depends on local groups and figuring out how you actually produce, you know, this is true of cities and all nonprofits,

[00:36:07] but figuring out how you actually figure out which groups are doing the best job, what's working, what's not can be difficult because they're not city run. There often aren't metrics, et cetera. And then on the other side, you know, focused deterrence goes at something different. These are two kinds of approaches that can coexist.

[00:36:38] So where Cure Violence is kind of intervening before it escalates, the focused deterrence is looking at the course of behavior and saying, no rules of the road, you cannot do this anymore. And if you do, we're going to come down and you're like a ton of bricks, but we don't want to do that. So here are jobs, here are social services.

[00:37:07] And here also is the moral voice of the community saying, we love you, but we don't want you in jail or in the hospital. So you got to cut it out. And so there are two very different models, but it seems to me that they intersect. But that the reason why it seems to me that there has been all this tension is because of the kind of theory that's backlighting them, you know,

[00:37:34] on one more of an abolitionist tinge and on the other, no, this is what police are supposed to do. Well, it's sort of what's so great about Vital City and your perspective on this stuff, because it's just so unfortunate because these are both progressive approaches. Neither one of these approaches is going to be endorsed by the Trump administration anytime soon, as far as I can tell.

[00:38:00] They just want to, you know, bash heads and bring back, you know, old school policing from the 19th century or something. Mass policing. Yeah. Yeah. And so it does seem like if you look at really pragmatic progressive mayors like Michelle Wu in Boston, as far as I can tell, that's what she's pursuing is this kind of hybrid approach. Focused deterrence on the one hand, plus all this other great progressive stuff.

[00:38:25] Let's do all of it, you know, insofar as we can afford it and see what and see what yields the best results. The other thing I would say about focused deterrence is that at the end of the day, strip everything away. It's about restrained and precise policing in a way that I would think if you're willing to have a police department, you would want any police department to act.

[00:38:54] And so really what it does is set a model for police departments to say, figure out who the 5% is that's driving the 90% of your violence and focus on them. That's sort of just basic good policing, good prosecution, you know, don't do the blunderbuss. And then but then there are all these other pieces, you know, connected to it.

[00:39:25] Well, and don't over police entire neighborhoods as opposed to, you know, a more focused approach. Right. Exactly right. And and is that isn't that what you all tried or did in the de Blasio administration? Well, is you brought up this idea of precision policing in your Atlantic piece? And I don't know much about that. And so what was the well, was it just this that you're what you're talking about here? Yeah. So we did a lot of different things.

[00:39:52] We had an enormous, a huge network still exists and I think has grown of pure violence providers. There is a smaller focus deterrence effort. The police department itself was always looking at ways to try and be more precise. And so this is exactly what they were all about.

[00:40:16] It's who are the 200, 700, the 2000 shooters who are the people we really want to go after. And, you know, that, as I said, is simply good policing because police can do things that no one else can. And so that should be their highest and best use.

[00:41:09] You know, it just occurs to me while you're talking. I don't think their points of view are particularly evidence based either. And even though they're a small portion of cities like New York and Seattle, they kind of have this weird effect of taking up space in a really unhelpful way. I wonder if you have any thoughts about that in terms of the debate. Yeah, I mean, I think people are always going to have opinions.

[00:41:35] And I think the thing that I try to keep in mind is how far we've come in a way that we don't even notice. It's like, you know, if you have kids and you live with them every day, you don't realize that they've suddenly grown 12 feet. But somebody who's visiting them after a couple of months is going to go, oh, my God, what happened?

[00:41:59] And similarly, in our cities, if you think back 10 years or even 20 years about what the reflex was about how to reduce crime or what the best way was to go about things, the notion that you would ever divert anyone, that you might send a civilian to respond to a mental health call,

[00:42:24] that you might have civilians who might be good at de-escalating disputes, that summer youth employment actually has an impact on both crime and mortality. All of these things that we now kind of take for granted were like, wow, you come from Mars if you think those things, right? Yeah.

[00:42:48] And so I think there's been this enormous, these enormous steps forward in which we now understand and almost reflexively believe the evidence behind this huge panoply of ways that we can make ourselves safe. But I think the next step that we're not quite at, and I think, you know, the disputes that you're talking about in Seattle,

[00:43:17] the ones that we have in New York that frankly are across the country, is how actually do you integrate these two different ways of keeping ourselves safe, of making our cities flourish? And that, you know, jury's still out on how to do that. One of my big frustrations is how polarized we've become, not just nationally between kind of red and blue, but in blue cities.

[00:43:47] We are so, and David gets to your point, like, you know, it's, yes, there are some conservatives in Seattle or New York or wherever, you know, like, like, but the divide between what I would call center left and movement left has become something of a chasm in recent years. And we operate almost from different premises. We're very siloed, very tribalized.

[00:44:14] And a lot of the complicated problems that we face at cities demand solutions that it seems to me are multi-pronged and that force everybody outside of their ideological comfort zones, because you got to do a little bit of this that you like and a little bit of this other stuff that you're skeptical, right? And so, so let's speak to that. I mean, isn't that the challenge here that we've just become so locked down? Well, for sure.

[00:44:43] I mean, the narcissism of small differences is just vicious. And in New York, as in Seattle, too, you know, we run the gamut of opinion between A and B, but we're so furiously at each other's throats about it. And the reason why I think the way to kind of walk through those raindrops or that buzzsaw,

[00:45:09] why I'm so enamored of the notion of these sort of physical changes or the kinds of things that reduce crime but are otherwise also just city services that you're investing in anyway, is that potentially it permits you to break, you know, break that headlock that we seem to be in.

[00:45:34] Yeah. And just taking a full circle, if you're a progressive or a more centrist mayor of a blue city, either way, you want to be successful. And if you're not stupid, you're going to look at the evidence and try to figure out what's going to work because you're trying to make a great city. I mean, that's what we all really want. And so, you know, hopefully our elected officials can see past their tribalism and their ideology and do that. And there's some reasons for ostomism, it sounds like, in New York City.

[00:46:03] And I'm still clinging to hope here in Seattle that that's... Turn on the lights. Yeah, turn on the lights. By the way, there's going to be a huge blowback, as there was against the de Blasio administration here, about urban lighting and what it's doing to the birds, et cetera. That was a thing, right? No, there's that. There's that. Yeah, yeah. But it doesn't have to just be lighting and it can be lighting the way you have it in Hawaii and some of the dark islands, you know, where they...

[00:46:31] It's only at a certain wattage and it's shielded from above. There's a way to address those concerns. Okay, I wanted to bring that up. So I wanted to bring the conversation back a little bit to New York and the Mamdani administration. He obviously comes in with this huge fanfare, you know, democratic socialist mayor, very charismatic. And interestingly, he makes some decisions. He decides to keep the police commissioner, Jessica Tish, you know, who's...

[00:46:59] Even though there are... I think there are some progressives who are, you know, kind of urging him to boot her and bring somebody else in. And Liz, you know, talking to... And just looking at the work you all are doing at Vital City, it seems like you guys actually have a good dialogue and working, you know, relationship with the Mamdani administration.

[00:47:22] So talk a little bit about how they've been grappling with some of these issues we've been talking about here and kind of what's working or what you think they need to do. Yeah. So, you know, I think on the public safety front, Mamdani ran on a platform that made very prominent this Department of Community Safety, which was essentially about civilian response, whether in mental illness or violence interrupters or all kinds of things.

[00:47:52] But I think he has been quite adept. And it's not just in the public safety sphere, but in a bunch of spheres of sort of nipping and tucking where necessary. You know, he ran on also on the platform of fast and free buses. Free buses was going nowhere. Fast buses? We could all get behind. So, you know, so I think he's an enormously talented politician.

[00:48:20] And so he's been able to navigate that. I think jury's still out on how the police department and the Department of Community Safety, as it's been called, are going to integrate. You know, the police department is, you know, the big player here. You know, they have an 11 billion dollar budget and the Department of Community Safety.

[00:48:48] It's, you know, well under one billion. And the police department has been in operation for a long time. It's 24 seven in every single neighborhood and et cetera, et cetera. And so navigating that, the deputy mayor for community safety, Renita Francois, is an enormously talented, smart and experienced person who's been involved on both sides of sort of the public safety issue.

[00:49:20] But it's no small feat to figure out how these things are integrated and how these two approaches live together, each of which have important contributions to make to public safety and to and to public engagement and public trust. Yes. Super interesting what you're saying, Liz, because this has been a huge problem also in Seattle. Right. We have had real trouble standing up a kind of third way, you know, non armed response.

[00:49:49] We finally did it. But as you're saying, our police union kind of locked up on and bargained a contract with the previous mayor. Right. Supposedly the centrist mayor of Seattle who got ousted last year, gave the cops a pretty I mean, gave the union enormous control and ability to limit.

[00:50:12] When you could actually deploy this non police response in ways that just seem way too restrictive. Right. You know, and really undermining the ability to create this integration, as you say, between when do we send the armed officer? When do we send the social service workers to deal with somebody who's in crisis on the street?

[00:50:34] And it's just super frustrating that you run into all of these workplace rules and stuff that's been set up about it. I do think this comes back to this notion of, you know, these are all terrible words, but I think they've hit on something. The abundance agenda, but for public safety. And what does it mean to have like state capacity?

[00:51:02] Like you can, you know, have the greatest slogans in the world and the greatest ideas in the world. But if you don't have, you know, if you're not under the sink with a wrench fixing the pipes and making sure that it actually operates, then the greatest civilian response team, you know, the greatest idea about how these two things are going to mesh are never going to work.

[00:51:29] And that's, I think, where the very unglamorous but super, super important work lies. And it is the job of government to get that done. Well, we are at time. So Liz Glazer, head of Vital City in New York, author of an excellent, super exciting piece in The Atlantic about lighting. Very, very exciting lighting.

[00:51:58] I actually, I'm laughing, but I actually mean that. And we are going to link it along with lots and lots of other work. Liz Glazer, thank you so much for coming on with us at Blue City Blues to talk about this stuff. Thanks so much, Sandeep and David. It was really fun to talk. Yeah. Thank you so much, Liz. Well, that's it for another edition of Blue City Blues. He's Sandeep Kashuk. I'm David Hyde.

[00:52:20] And check our show notes if you want to attend our live taping with GeekWire podcast here in Seattle on the sort of history and future of tech in two cities, Seattle and San Francisco. That's coming up September 29th. And thanks, everybody, so much for listening. Bye.