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Brian: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Now before we talk about the militia plot to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and literally overthrow the government of Michigan, 13 arrests made by the FBI last I saw this morning. Before we talk about the resistance to public health measures, starting a new COVID spike in New York and New Jersey and the mishmash of a response by Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio, and the mayor himself will be on to take your calls in an hour from now, 11:05 to be precise.

Before we talk about the Nobel Peace Prize going the United Nations World Food organization, World Food Program. Maybe it's a way to celebrate international cooperation while avoiding the hot button issues. We'll see. I wonder if President Trump ever heard of it before today, or if he doesn't now find a reason to withdraw from that too, or say they couldn't have done it without him. Our Nobel Peace Prize guests today we'll be Anne Applebaum from the Atlantic, who coincidentally just wrote an article about how China wins by the US pulling out of the UN's World Health Organization.

Before any of that, I want to take just a minute today to pay tribute to a colleague in journalism who passed away this week, the Pulitzer Prize winner Jim Dwyer. Most recently in New York City issues columnist for The New York Times. He was 63 and The Times says he died at Sloan Kettering of complications from lung cancer. The Times obit of Jim Dwyer says, "In a kaleidoscopic career, Mr. Dwyer was drawn to tales of discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities, wrongly convicted prisoners and society's mistreated outcasts. He wrote about subway straphangers and families struggling to make ends meet."

"As a student at Fordham University, he had hoped to become a doctor until he joined a student newspaper The Fordham Ram and one day wrote about a rough-looking man having an epileptic seizure on a Bronx sidewalk. Mr. Dwyer stopped to help, "People passing by were muttering, disapproval, junkie scumbag, that sort of thing," he wrote. "The seizures subsided and those of us who had stayed with him, learned he was a veteran, and had been having seizures since coming back from Vietnam. A few minutes later, off he went, but that moment stayed with me." Wrote Jim Dwyer one time and that quote is from The Times obit.

Jim was a guest on this show 23 times. I want to play a 90-second clip from his last appearance here last year, which in itself took some candor. The segment was about the 30th anniversary of the Central Park jogger attack, which of course became the false convictions of the Central Park five. Jim openly regretted some of the reporting that he had done at the time, 1989, when he was with Newsday. He recalled one day during the trial of one of the falsely accused defendants, for example.

Jim: I recall being in court when the confession of Raymond Santana was first testified to by a detective. I'm going to paraphrase but this is approximately what was said, "I then, acting with others, together, we did proceed to grab the female victim, and forcibly move her from the road," and so forth. It was all this textbook legal language and at the time, it was striking to me that both the language in that confession, so-called confession. That same day, if I'm not conflating my memory, it came out that there was no semen from the boys there, there was no blood from there, there was nothing physically linking them to the crime.

At the time, I wrote that these are not words that ever sat on the lip of any 14-year-old boy. I wish I had been more vigorous in my skepticism in public about it. One of the reporters, a columnist from Newsday at the time, who I think was almost singular in her open skepticism was a woman named Carol Agas. She vigorously reported on the case and was saying there's something wrong here. She was not shy about saying that. I regret myself that I had not been more forceful in what I said.

Brian: Jim Dwyer here last year. Jim Dwyer, Rest in peace. By the way, they are fixing the sidewalk outside my building. I'm really glad they're fixing the sidewalk outside my building. I just wish they would do it in the afternoon, but they may be finished with the jack-hammering part of that now, I hope so. That's what you can hear if there's a hammer a little rattle in the background.

Our first guest today is Maya Wiley, formerly a top lawyer for the City of New York and the De Blasio administration and a former head of New York City's Civilian Complaint Review Board. A civil rights lawyer by background and known to watchers of MSNBC the past few years as a contributor on National Legal Affairs issues, from the Russia investigation to criminal justice reform.

Maya Wiley officially announced yesterday that she is running in next year's election to be the next mayor of New York, when Mayor De Blasio is term-limited out. She has left NBC News since news organizations don't hire political candidates as paid contributors. She joins us now. Maya, thanks for coming on and welcome back to WNYC.

Maya Wiley: Brian, it's great to be with you. I just want to thank you for that tribute to Jim Dwyer, who was such an important voice, particularly in humanizing the experience with people of color. Thank you.

Brian: Thank you for that. If you actually win this race, and we keep the Asd the Mayor tradition going here, I'm going to have to stop calling you Maya and start calling you Mrs. Mayor. But for now, it's still first name if that's okay.

Maya: You could call me, Mayor Maya.

Brian: Mayor Maya. I guess if they have Mayor Pete in South Bend, maybe you'll take on a Mayor Maya persona. Before we get to your run for mayor, I'd like to ask you to keep your national politics and National Legal Affairs head-on for a moment and comment on the plot to kidnap Governor Whitmer in Michigan. The FBI has made 13 arrests. Can you put this in the context of domestic terrorism that FBI director Chris Wray recently won the country about?

Maya: This news story should really disturb every single one of us, no matter our political party. We have in this country had a rise in domestic terrorism that is being stoked. Even if you want to say it's unintentionally or ignorantly, I can't get in the mind of Donald Trump. Being stoked and empowered by a president who has both denigrated law enforcement, called it all kinds of names, at the same time that he has curried favor with a base of support that has included this very domestic terrorism.

Even Bill Barr, our attorney general, the highest law enforcement officer in the land, whose sworn oath is to protect the people and uphold the law, has participated both in denigrating the FBI but also, in some instances, hiding, the fact that domestic terror is our most pressing concern when we think of national security right now. Our own people who are racist, who are people who unfortunately have aspired to a country that is anti-democratic and now are threatening, literally threatening, democratically elected leaders, that is deeply troubling. We can't disconnect it from administration that has been undermining the rule of law using the power of public office to do so.

Brian: Do you have any expectation about what this might mean if anything for Michigan as a vital swing state in the election. Governor Whitmer, as you just did, is going after President Trump for directly or indirectly egging on militia groups like this with his tweets and liberate Michigan was one of his things. We don't know if more Michiganders will turnout motivated by her outrage or his. Do you have a take?

Maya: It's hard to have a take not being there on the ground. I think it's important to listen to local leaders on that. Having done a lot of work in Detroit, having done work in Michigan as a racial justice advocate, I can tell you that this will be highly motivating to the Detroit vote in favor of democracy, in favor of Jamala ticket. This is what I call it. Because remember that Hillary Clinton, one of the reasons that she lost Michigan was not because she didn't actually get a lot of votes in Michigan, it's because there was a 1% downturn in voter turnout of Black community and this is going to be highly motivating, especially for Black voters in Detroit. That is a really important swing vote in a swing state.

Brian: Closer to home, as you are now a candidate for mayor, I'm gonna jump right into an issue here for you as not only a candidate but a former head of the NYPD Civilian Complaint Review Board. You're calling on Mayor de Blasio to not wait for the next mayor to bring in their own Police Commissioner but to fire Police Commissioner Dermot Shea right now. Why do you believe Commissioner Shea deserves to be fired?

Maya: Commissioner Shea has not just presided over an increase in stop-and-frisks in 2019. Something that should have disturbed us even before we watched the life squeezed out of George Floyd that rightly erupted in demonstrations across this country. But that, as we saw police officers ripping face masks off of demonstrators, facing them with their arms in the air and pepper-spraying them directly in the face. After we saw images of police vehicles driving into demonstrators. After we saw instances in which we saw police taking batons randomly to residents in the street, that this police commissioner defending that conduct, having to be pressed to say anything that suggested there was a need for reform.

Then, after all that, for us to watch, for almost six hours, over two dozen riot-geared police, helicopters overhead, lay siege to the apartment building of a Black Lives Matter organizer with absolutely no arrest warrant, for using a bullhorn at a peaceful demonstration, tells us that we do not have a police commissioner who will protect the public from bad policing.

At a time when we have still so many years of police problems, Jim Dwyer having written about Abner Louima, these are not new issues. That after all these years, after having seen some important changes, like a reduction in stop-and-frisks, but we were going in the wrong direction. It is just so critically important that we restore a faith of the public in our public government, in the people who are supposed to protect and serve them.

If we don't have a police commissioner doing that, it is not going to happen and it is fundamentally the job of the person who sits in City Hall in the top seat in this city to ensure that all the leadership of city government is on mission, and Shea is not.

Brian: Mayor de Blasio constantly takes blowback from both police reformers and from the police unions, which as you know think he hates cops and is biased against them more than any mayor ever. How would you walk that line if you were mayor, and not wind up satisfying nobody as he is right now?

Maya: One of the things I learned in City Hall, having watched Eric Garner be killed in a violation of his constitutional rights, in a violation of the patrol guide by Daniel Pantaleo. The thing that happened is it changed my relationship with a lot of the rank-and-file police officers because we were all upset, but in different ways and for different reasons. I just mean totally in a personally not professionally, just real conversations about what the job was, about how police officers experience it, and how I as a Black woman in this city, with people I love who had been mistreated by the police, who do not trust the police, how those experiences are and what they are?

What I found was, when you get past the police union, who are a little misnamed, they're more of a federation than unions. If you get past them, if you get past those folks who are loud, and you get down to the experiences of police officers and you get down to the experiences of community, what you soon find is number one, there are a lot of things we agree on.

The police do not like being called to intervene in what is a mental health crisis. That they didn't sign up to intervene in and that they are not qualified to intervene in. That they too would like people who know how to respond to mental illness, to be the first responders, and to only be backed up if police are needed. Just like community does., they too actually want to be safe. They know that a good relationship with the community will help make them so.

I had one stunning conversation with a police officer I became very, very close to while I was in City Hall. He and I did not agree on a lot of politics but he told me that he disagreed with Ray Kelly and thought that Ray Kelly was a terrible police commissioner, because he lost vacation days, because he played basketball with kids in the community and he thought that was wrong.

The thing that he needed to see at the top of the police force was a commissioner that was going to stay committed to community policing, that was going to stay committed to reform. That they weren't going to have to see a different reality every time there was a new leader, and that he too wanted a clear signal that the relationship with the community was first, front and foremost.

It just told me that there was so much more we could agree on. That we wouldn't agree on everything but there was so much that we could agree on that was both about making sure my godsons, my kids, people I love can walk the streets safely and safe from both crime and safe from the police who do wrong, and that for the police who do right that they need that too. They need that leadership that incentivizes and empowers them to be those kinds of police officers.

Brian: Listeners, we have time for a few phone calls for Maya Wiley, former adviser of administration, Law Department, official former head of the Civilian Complaint Review Board. Some of you know her from MSNBC, and now running for mayor of New York, 646-435-7280. Just one more question on the police and then we'll move on to other things after that answer. Do you consider yourself part of the "Defund the police" movement? Do you use that term or advocate lower funding for the NYPD or a smaller headcount?

Because you did just talk about relationship policing, and it's sometimes seen as a progressive position to hire more cops so there can be more preventive relationship-based neighborhood policing, not just responses to 911 calls. Do you subscribe to that at all or did you ever? Do you subscribe to the term "Defund the police?"

Maya: I subscribe to the principles of what so many demonstrators, me among them, were marching for this summer. That is that we have to invest in our communities that are being over-policed. That means we have to look at what it means to fund the kinds of things that mean the police are not getting calls they shouldn't get, that was a huge part of the conversation. Everything from the school safety officers, traffic, and mental health.

Also what that means is that we must right-size the police department. There is no question to me that there is a bloated budget in the New York City Police Department at a time when we're looking at a $9 billion hole in our budget and there is absolutely no justifiable reason to leave the police department's budget, one that has been growing even where the evidence showed that we did not need that growth in the budget. We spend literally, Brian, a billion dollars over the three year period to pay settlements for police misconduct, a billion dollars. Do you know what I could do with a billion dollars?

Brian: A lot, I hope. How many fewer police would you have?

Maya: That is a conversation that requires a really sharp, principled, and smart look at what has been a black box budget. In other words, part of civilian oversight can no longer be after the police hurt somebody or kill somebody. It has to start at the front end by saying, "You don't get to hide your numbers." When I was in City Hall, it was a big part of the frustration was people not getting enough clarity about the police department budget.

There is no reason that a strong leadership cannot and should not be demanding complete clarity about why the senior executive office of the New York City Police Department has such a large budget without any real explanation of how that keeps us safer. Remember that a huge part of what we spend because of policing isn't even in the police budget. That's why I note that $1 billion figure, because the cost of how we are policing right now is not only contained in their $6 billion budget number. We have to look at it smartly, we have to look at it from principle and we have to do it with a really transformational lens in mind.

Brian: Ken in Bay Ridge, you're on WNYC with Maya Wiley. Hi, Ken.

Ken: Hi, Brian. First-time caller. Love the program.

Brian: Thank you.

Ken: I am calling to ask Maya Wiley about her thoughts on the affordable housing program in NYC. I see that there are lots of affordable housing for people who are making poverty wages, which is amazing. I see also more and more of these giant condos going up that are fairly empty, and I see that there's affordable housing for people who are making $60,000, $80,000, $90,000 a year, but there's no real middle ground. There's no real affordable housing for the people who are floating between the poverty wages and a low middle wage income.

Maya: Thank you, Ken. Thank you for that. There's no question that we must make this city one we can all afford to live in with dignity and your question goes to something critical. One, we must ensure that we are creating affordable housing for people who need it, and need is that, we do still need a lot more housing for low, very low, and extremely low income people, which includes some of the folks you've named and the middle class.

One of the opportunities we have in this crisis is to think about that vacancy, to think about the properties that may well come into the possession of the city as a result of the economic turmoil that we're in. The city being prepared to take budget appropriately in order to support utilizing that vacancy for housing affordability for people who need it, it's an opportunity we have in crisis.

The other thing we need to do is have more and be much more aggressive about community land trust, and about partnerships with nonprofit developers who are very, very strategic in creating the level of housing you're speaking about, also ensuring that it remains permanently affordable, and they work very, very, very hard to prevent eviction. We know we are looking at 400,000 New Yorkers who may be facing eviction by the end of this year alone because of the economic crisis this pandemic has caused. We need to deal with that right now.

Brian: Can you provide massive amounts of additional affordable housing without buying from the developers. I think de Blasio has tried to give them just enough right to build market-rate housing that they still have the incentive to build at all. At least, I think this is the approach that he would say he's taken. Then they're required to have at least 20% affordable or more depending on the rezoning of the area, but many communities see the balance there as too gentrifying, pushing prices up except for the set-aside units.

How do you solve that problem of getting the developers to build enough new units to balance supply and demand overall, if you're going to put more weight on the ones that aren't going to make them money?

Maya: Yes. One thing that we must do is recognize this is not a "one size fits all" problem, that we have to have multiple strategies and we have to be very aggressive about multiple strategies. There is a role for private developers. There is a role for making demands of the federal government around how we do area median income which is one of the reasons why we have a skewed sense of affordability. We can get, with the new administration in Washington potentially, a lot more room to do a lot better and create a lot more incentives, particularly with the private sector.

We also have to have a real public sector response, which is my point about thinking about the decisions that the city makes, everything from how we look at news, our capital budget, how we prioritize investment in affordable housing, and who we partner with. That includes making sure that our public housing. which is a huge source of multi income, people forget public housing also has middle-class folks in it, because our housing is so affordable, that public housing becomes both safer, healthier, and restored so that we don't lose those units.

We have vacant units right now because we have not rehabilitated them and they are not habitable. There are opportunities for the city to do that. We must partner. Agencies must partner with one another to be creative about creating the incentives. We must partner with not-for-profit developers, we must partner with for-profit developers, and we must look at innovative ways to be engaged as a public sector on housing.

Brian: Jennifer in Ridgewood, you're on WNYC with Maya Wiley. Hi, Jennifer.

Jennifer: Hi. I was troubled during the DNC primary when it was between Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, and Miss Wiley was on Twitter imploring people to vote in-person. Then consequently, when Biden became the nominee, she became very pro mail-in ballot. I'm wondering if she plans on putting people's health first, and not playing politics during a global pandemic or crisis in terms of police brutality, health, housing. Things cannot be about politics, it has to be about putting people and the citizens of New York first.

Brian: Maya?

Maya: Jennifer, I absolutely agree with you. This isn't about politics, it's about people. Let me just clarify. I certainly meant in my Twitter and always have been trying to be consistent about saying this, public health first. People need to know and understand all their opportunities to exercise their right to vote. That means understanding where and how there is early voting for folks, because we have a lot of folks, particularly elderly and low-income communities of color, that prefer voting in person, and knowing that in the city of the New York for the first time, we had early voting as an option, and understanding that was an option.

Also understanding that mail-in balloting is an option, and that what people need to do is to be able to know all of their options and make the choices that make sense to them to protect their health and their safety and exercise their right to vote. I absolutely agree with you. Secondly, the reason I am running as an unconventional candidate, as a candidate who has never run for elective office before is because I am not owned by anyone, it's because that everything I do, I do for my own sense of principles, then I'm very clear and transparent publicly about what those principles are, so thank you. I appreciate that.

Brian: One more call for Maya Wiley, former top Law Department official in the de Blasio administration, former head of the Civilian Complaint Review Board, former legal affairs commentator for MSNBC, now running for Mayor of New York in next year's election. Mary Beth on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Mary Beth.

Mary Beth: Hello, Brian. Thank you for taking this call. Maya Wiley and keeping with your vision that there is opportunity in crisis, I want you to consider how important it is that transportation be addressed in that vision and in particular, Families for Safe Streets, which I'm a co-founder. It's totally about people who have lost a loved one on the streets of New York because of traffic violence. I lost my husband almost 15 years ago. The work of Transportation Alternatives is what I turn to in my grief, and have involved with this ever since.

Last week, we buried a four-year-old, a seven-year-old. Tomorrow there will be a vigil for one of the city's Assistant District Attorneys, all killed on the streets of New York in ways that could be prevented. I want to know if you have made yourself familiar with Corey Johnson's master plan. Also, I want to make sure that you know that the mayor himself drew together an Advisory Council on all of these issues, the protected network of bike lanes, bus rapid transit, bridge openings for people to walk and ride, et cetera. That was in June--

Brian: Mary Beth. I'm going to have to get you a response because we're running out of time in the segment. You hear what happened to her with respect to her loss, you know these groups, Transportation Alternatives, Families for Safe Streets, and what they want, what would you do in that direction?

Maya: First let me say I am heartbroken by every loss. As someone who knows what that feels like to have someone taken and I know 15 years is a day in the life of that loss. My brother is a bike rider. I rode my bike to work before City Hall. I know how dangerous it can be. I am fully on board with transforming boulevards of death with taking reckless drivers off the road, with committing to figuring out how to better enforce safety in school zones and hospital zones.

I also know that if we, as a city, start believing that we can transform our public transportation system into a 22nd-century transportation system that we incentivize and make it a positive experience to get folks out of their cars, which we have to also do for climate change, that this is a vision we must come together and embrace. I am all in to work with you on that.

Brian: Maya Wiley, thank you for coming on today. As I'm saying to all the candidates, good luck in your campaign for mayor next year. I'm sure we'll talk many times between now and that election.

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