Bill de Blasio served as New York’s 109th mayor from 2014 to 2021. He has spent a significant portion of his career in local public service, serving in the New York City Council and as the New York Public Advocate for several years before being elected mayor. Before moving to New York, de Blasio was raised in Cambridge not far from Harvard’s campus, and returned for the fall 2022 semester as a visiting fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics. HPR sat down with de Blasio in October 2022 to discuss public service, local politics, and criminal justice reform.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Harvard Political Review: Even though you grew up mostly in Cambridge, you’ve devoted a large portion of your life to serving in New York. What drew you to local politics initially? And why did you decide to pursue that route?
Bill de Blasio: There’s an element of intention and there’s an element of accident. The sense of public service came very naturally, coming back to my time in Cambridge. The challenges, some of the pain that my family went through made me sort of socially conscious. It was a very activist moment in history and the environment. Student government, and a lot of things were pulling me towards service. But I also found in terms of electoral politics, you know, people who are fascinated by electoral politics, in sort of the language, the reality that makes sense, I don’t know if it’s genetic or what it is, but I felt it very early on.
I volunteered on my first presidential campaign when I was 15. I just felt it but I was not so convinced I would be running for office myself and sometimes I wanted to sometimes I didn’t. When I moved to New York, I really gravitated more towards movement politics, nonprofits, issue groups. I was involved in the antinuclear power movement, I was involved in the Central America solidarity movement to stop U.S. intervention, and through different things I met people. And one of the people I met, and this is sort of the sheer random, like massive, massive randomness, I was working for a group actually focused on nuclear disarmament. And one day someone came into the room I was in and said there’s a campaign job available, a presidential campaign. That was the Mondale-Ferraro campaign. “Does anyone want it?” Around the room people were like, “no,” and I was like, “sure, I’m interested,” and I went off on that campaign.
I met a colleague, who proved to be both a friend but also someone who was very deeply involved with the political family of David Dinkins, who, five years later, ran for mayor in New York City. And so my friend called me one day and said, “Would you like to come work on this campaign?” And it was as random as that. If it hadn’t been for sort of saying yes to a very short-term job and meeting one guy, maybe all this wouldn’t have happened. But once I went to work for Mayor Dinkins, I was campaigning at the City Hall, and that pulled me to local government.
HPR: There’s often a tendency, especially here at the IOP, to focus on national politics and how decisions in D.C. affect people. But often local officials are actually the ones who have the most direct contact and therefore influence. How did you see your role in major national or even international issues such as fighting COVID-19 within the grand scheme of the country’s response as a local politician?
De Blasio: Well, I agree with your thesis. What I think is increasingly clear, put aside these last few months where there actually was a relatively high level of activity in Washington and progress in terms of legislation, really, most of the history of the Obama years, the Trump years, and the Biden years has been some form of paralysis because of divided government. When I was mayor, for example, I had some conversations with President Obama. I called members of his administration for help a few times, but the basic reality was there was really very little they could do because, for most of that time, they did not have a Congress on their side during the time I was in office. So imagine a world in which, you know, you’re mayor of the nation’s largest city, and you’re thinking, a Democratic president, that’s gonna be great, and then you find that very, very little help is available.
I also found the state government, in which the legislature was divided for most of my time as mayor, and for a variety of reasons, rarely helped. So it became a reality of depending on yourself, and the ability of a city to do its own things, and it caused a lot of creativity and resourcefulness. But it also had ramifications to your question about leadership. Because in a world in which the federal government and often state governments are kind of paralyzed, or inactive, or stuck, local governments occupy more space. When Trump pulled out of the Paris Agreement, cities all over the country decided to band together and join it and abide by a sort of people’s alternative — that was powerful. When we couldn’t get a coherent immigration policy, we came up with our own ways to support immigrants. We came up with the IDNYC card, which was a way of acknowledging and documenting immigrant people in a meaningful way who are undocumented. You know, just time and again, we had to find a local solution. And some of those solutions had national ramifications.
During the pandemic, you know, I was not shocked that the Trump administration was incoherent, and the Biden ministration was trying, but they were often a little timid. I’m very proud, you know, I made a decision to try and lead the country on vaccine mandates. I knew it was controversial, and it’s very controversial in New York City, so imagine how controversial it would be in other places. But we could prove the point of the value of the mandates, and we did a series of mandates that were very expansive, and I think pretty effective. So I think to sum it up, it was the decision that it has to be your own thing. And a lot of times it would provide larger leadership because it was such a vacuum.
HPR: Your campaign received a lot of support from those in the Black community, and a lot of people cite representation as a big reason. You talk a lot about being part of a multiracial family. You also have had a hand in getting a more diverse group of people into positions of power in New York, but you also received a lot of backlash, especially from those in the Black community, during the protests in the summer of 2020. People claim that you didn’t go far enough with your police reform initiatives. Do you think that you’ve ever let symbolic change get in the way of making genuine headway in racial injustice and policing?
De Blasio: First of all, I think it’s right and fair to say that the vision and the message I put forward in the election did have a lot of support, but it raised expectations, which is always a challenge when you’re trying to make change. I think we, very earnestly, moved a substantial reform program, and what was striking to me is how little attention it seemed to garner. We settled the Central Park Five case, which had been waiting for decades, we settled the stop-and-frisk litigation, and ended the stop-and-frisk policy. We retrained the whole police force, and the escalation of it is a big series of changes because these are only a few of many, many changes.
And what I think is sort of a recognition I’ve come to is that you can make all the structural change in the world, and it doesn’t garner a public discussion unless you can somehow find some way to emotionally animate it. But clearly, painful moments, incidents, videos, I understand why they pull at people deeply. And I can understand why some of the protest movements affected people so much. It didn’t matter if overall the protests were peaceful, and both protesters and police handled themselves appropriately. What mattered is the few instances where the police didn’t get amplified, and so I think the big answer is: I don’t think it’s fair to say we didn’t move a substantial reform agenda because we did it the whole way through.
I think it is fair to say I didn’t understand how to speak to those hopes and expectations, especially in a crisis the way I should have. And that the tension, which exists to this day, is that folks, activists, in particular, progressive activists who want reform, I think, sometimes struggle to hear the other part of the equation, which is what legitimate, effective policing looks like. I think when you talk to community members, it’s kind of the other way around. They are dependent on effective and meaningful policing, they want it to be non-discriminatory, they want it to be respectful, they want it to be as de-escalatory as possible. You know, these are very clear sort of communal realities. But there’s a real world understanding that you need some kind of meaningful policing.
So this tension, I think, was very difficult to speak to. And it was almost like, I don’t want to minimize it to elite versus everyday people — I don’t think that’s the whole story — but I think there’s an element of that. Social media, Twitter, of course, is in many ways an elite exercise. Media, per se, is an elite exercise. Folks who are activists are not necessarily elite in terms of wealth or other factors, but they are elite in the sense that they are exceptional and, you know, devoting a lot of time and energy to a cause, whereas most people are going about their working lives and family lives. There is a profound separation. I think the way forward is to try and figure out how to bridge that and present a sort of communal vision of safety. If you don’t put the safety part in, you’re actually leaving behind most everyday people. But I do think there’s a communal vision that could speak to the desire for change.
HPR: So of course, you did have a very wide reform agenda, and you did make progress in a lot of areas. I think the criticism that I’ve seen the most is that people say that a lot of the reforms you made didn’t actually change the nature of power that police have. Do you think that there’s misconceptions around that? Or do you think that you weren’t able to go as far as some activists would have hoped? Why was that?
De Blasio: I think it’s so powerfully complex, and it’s interesting to be able to think about it now because when you’re in the middle of it, it feels like you can rarely stop and be able to think. You’ve got a problem of safety to begin with. Right? You have to create mechanisms for safety that inherently empower individuals to make decisions in real time. No one that I know has sort of figured out how to get around that problem. So if you have a police officer with a gun, you know, then all the human factors come into play, and the goal, of course, is choose officers very carefully, train them carefully — de-escalation, implicit bias training, these are exactly the kinds of things we did, which I think helped. But you still are depending on an individual, an armed individual, to make a split second decision in a society that is still in many ways kind of broken, right? So even if someone is well-meaning in some ways, they’re still affected by the biases and dynamics of our society. So, I think that’s a problem.
I think the second problem is police unions, which I find very problematic, and I’ve tangled with for decades. I’m a progressive, I believe in organized labor. We’re working people, and yet, in the hands of police union leadership, those powers that go to a union can often obstruct transparency and policy change. And yet I don’t know a way around that yet. And it’s like, I think there probably needs to be generational change in terms of labor leadership to start that process. So those are sort of big structural things that I don’t think lend themselves to an easy solution.
I think that the reforms were thoroughgoing. I think they did change the police behavior. Take de-escalation training. You look at how white police comported themselves before and after it, and you can see a very different reality putting aside that one moment of protest, which I think was pervaded by, unfortunately, violence on all sides. In general, de-escalation training has consistently changed the interactions. So there’s something that works there. We strengthened our civilian complaint review board as a host of things I could see had an impact. But I still can say honestly, police culture is still in many ways broken, and it can’t be us versus them. Neighbourhood Policing, as our basic philosophy, we’ve tried to make it like “us and us,” like everyone needs each other. We got set back a lot by the pandemic.
So the answer to the question would be, I believe that the reforms are real, thoroughgoing, and are going to have a lasting impact. I don’t think we profoundly changed the nature of policing culture, but I don’t think one administration was going to be able to do that alone. I do think that’s a fight, more than any legislative fight. That’s where the energy should go. We also need a lot of people who have reformed viewpoints actually going into policing, which is counterintuitive to somebody who would make a huge difference.
HPR: So then, lastly, a bit more of a question on your personal beliefs on the matter. You’ve talked about how being the parent of biracial children has affected this belief? How do you see your responsibility to your children playing into your role in public service?
De Blasio: You know, a lot of things are almost beyond the question of intellect, they’re visceral and human. Two of the things we did most intensely, pre-K and ending stop-and-frisk, both had a nexus to my kids. My kids went through pre-K, I saw what it meant and I saw what it also meant for families that didn’t have it. And yeah, my son has been very vocal about what his experience has been in terms of, you know, how we tried to train and prepare him. And you know, what he’s experienced out in the world, and he’s obviously someone who feels very, very blessed and privileged in many ways. But when there’s someone you love so deeply and feel responsible for and you have to tell them “you have to comport yourself a certain way around police officers,” it’s very challenging, it’s painful, it’s troubling. And it means something’s not right.
And I spoke about it publicly, and got a lot of pushback from police unions. And I met with them at one point, a very tense meeting and they’re like, “You have to rescind that, that’s an insult to us, and it says police are bad.” And I said “No, it doesn’t. It says you know our history is our history.” I really tried to talk it through with them to no avail. I told them that I was not trying to indict police or individual officers. I was saying that we have a history — it’s an evident history, it’s a painful history. There’s a reason why millions, millions of families prepare, particularly their young males of color, for going out in the world this way. And we can’t ignore reality, so why don’t we start figuring out the steps that we’ll take to reverse it? So I think it was all very personal.
This interview was conducted by Naomi Corlette and Muskaan Arshad for the Harvard Political Review.
