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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now, we continue our series, 51 Council members in 52 Weeks. We are inviting all the New York City Council members, one per week for the whole year, neighborhood by neighborhood. Why? Well, we're doing this because it's a new era in the New York City Council. There are mostly new members this year because of term limits in addition to the new mayor, and women make up the majority of council members for the first time ever. It's week nine.

Today, we're talking to one of those women, Kristin Richardson Jordan, Council Member for District 9, which covers Central Harlem, Morningside Heights, Manhattan Valley, and East Harlem. The self-described Democratic Socialist surprised many pundits by beating longtime city council member, Bill Perkins, who had also represented much of the area for 10 years in the State Senate. Councilmember Jordan, thanks so much for coming on, and belated congratulations on your election.

Kristin Richardson Jordan: Hi, thank you. Thank you for having me on. I'm actually a huge fan. I used to listen to your show all the time back when I had more of a life.

Brian Lehrer: Now you've got no life as a city council member. Well, tell our listeners a little bit about that life, because one of the things that we're trying to do with these new members of City Council, and we've already met a number of interesting people from some of the Districts 1 through 8, who our listeners have really been enjoying getting to know, tell everybody a little bit about yourself, where you grew up, and what led you to a life of public service.

Kristin Richardson Jordan: Yes, definitely. I grew up in Harlem. I've been in Harlem since I was in diapers at three months old, and third-generation from the district. I didn't actually see myself as someone running for office. This was a really unusual race. I'm a pretty unusual politician because my background has really been in organizing and activism. I'm a writer and a poet. I have two poetry books. I was a teacher for 10 years before running for office.

I honestly always saw myself as someone railing up the machine from the outside more so than been working within the belly of the beast as a legislator. It was really transformational for me to see some of the elections of the squad on the Congress level, in the last midterms. That inspired me to think about how we could have different types of electeds. We could have people who are young, and Black and brown women, and who have progressive, even radical values and run these races and win and speak truth to power and introduce some radical new ideas and some new types of legislation. It just got me really fired up to think about the possibility.

Brian Lehrer: Do you have a particular piece of legislation that you want to introduce or maybe have already introduced?

Kristin Richardson Jordan: Yes. I'm very excited to say that I am a prime sponsor on reintroducing the Elected Civilian Review Board piece of legislation. For those who don't know what this would be is it would be a board elected by the community that would have the power to fire and suspend police officers in cases of abuse and or neglect.

It's something that we've been hurting for, for a long time, and that we do need some firm police accountability. As someone who's been an activist and an organizer and out on the streets protesting and in some of these cases of police brutality, it's really exciting to now be able to introduce this piece of legislation that I hope we can pass this time. I say reintroduced. With a new more progressive Council, I'm hopeful we might be able to really get this done and have that measure of accountability for our local police department.

Brian Lehrer: That's an interesting proposal and one for an agency that some of our listeners know about, and some don't very much, the Civilian Complaint Review Board. Currently, the CCRB doesn't even have the final say on disciplinary measures for police officers that they find commit misconduct. The NYPD still oversees that power. They only take recommendations from the CCRB. It doesn't sound like your legislation would change that necessarily, but you want the members of the CCR-- It would? You can correct that?

Kristin Richardson Jordan: Oh, yes, it would. I was going to say what you're saying is exactly correct. It's only a recommendation vote. This piece of legislation would actually make it binding.

Brian Lehrer: The members of the CCRB would be elected so they would run for office and talk about their platforms to the public?

Kristin Richardson Jordan: Yes, correct. It would be an elected board. They would also actually have what we're calling some teeth to be able to fire and suspend police officers because, you're right, the current boards are appointed, not elected, and they also only have recommendation power. We look at cases like Eric Garner, and the board in Staten Island, they recommended to fire Officer Pantaleo, but it wasn't until five, six years later, that we see that happening because the power doesn't rest with the board, the power rests with the police commissioner and the mayor.

Brian Lehrer: You recently said, in a speech, I see that quote, "The mayor's supposedly pro-Black agenda is looking an awful lot like white supremacy." Wow. I believe that was in the context of condemning the mayor for appointing three officials with anti-LGBTQ backgrounds, but I think Eric Adams would certainly disagree that he has a white supremacy agenda. Where are you coming from?

Kristin Richardson Jordan: Yes. Well, absolutely. Yes, I said that in the context of those appointments, because, listen, the logic of white supremacy is all about exclusion. It's all about oppression. It's all about upholding the status quo. It's all about limited power for a limited number of people, and supreme power for a supposedly superior group of people. The link between white supremacy and homophobia as well is well established and well documented. If you're putting homophobic individuals in these appointments, and in these feeds, you bet that is white supremacist thinking absolutely.

I also want to say that, in terms of policing, we really need to look at having a check and balance system on the police. We can't have just unfettered policing because we see what that does to our communities, particularly our Black and brown communities. I represent Central Harlem. It's a historically Black district and our community is over-policed, and our community has experienced some of these, frankly, human rights abuses, and there's no way that isn't white supremacist to have a body that is policing our community unchecked.

Brian Lehrer: Well, you got elected from your district, obviously, but I believe so did Eric Adams come in first there in the primary, and he ran on an anti-crime platform. The polls show Black New Yorkers are the strongest supporters of his policies on crime so far, according to a couple of polls that I've seen. How do you square that with what you want?

Kristin Richardson Jordan: Well, I think it's really interesting because, when you look at some of the voter data for our district, and needless to say, IMIT never looked at it pretty closely, we have people who ranked me one and ranked Eric Adams one. I ran as an abolitionist, which for those who don't know, is someone who believes in the possibility of a world actually without cops and the possibility of a world without jails. To rank me one and rank him one, it's very interesting.

I think what it is, is that voters are concerned about safety. I talked about safety a lot in my campaign, and I talk about it a lot now. Where I think there's some differences is that I always emphasize prevention, and how can we get to the root causes of crime and root out those root cause it so that we don't have the violent crimes occur in the first place, to then have the police officers responding to them. We've been really funding the wrong end of this issue, and we continue to throw the funding dollars at the police officers and at new jails. If we threw that money, instead, at education, particularly public school education, and we looked at violence interruption, and we looked at prevention, addressing root causes of poverty, mental illness, mental-emotional health, in particular, I think that's how we root out crime. I guess it seems odd, but maybe it's not so odd because we are both very interested in safety, and we both talked the voters about safety, it's just perhaps from different perspectives on how we get there.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take a few phone calls for our guest Kristen Richardson Jordan, the new City Council member for District 9, which includes parts of Central Harlem, Morningside Heights, Manhattan Valley, and East Harlem. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 or tweet @BrianLehrer. Councilmember Richardson Jordan, to follow up on what you were just saying, we ran a series about Eric Adams's blueprint to end gun violence, posted it, had our listeners read it, comment on it themselves. We did a number of segments around it.

As a premise, the blueprint says truly ending the crisis of gun violence will require both intervention and prevention. You were just talking about the prevention aspects. I wonder how you think he's doing on those with his proposal so far, even if you disagree with what he wants to do with respect to police.

Kristin Richardson Jordan: Oh, yes. I appreciate you bringing that up because I actually think that some of the attention to cure violence is something I agree on. Addressing the loophole and looking at residency requirements for officers is definitely-- I'm in agreement with that. It gets very easy, I think, sometimes, especially in mainstream media and such to just pit one against the other, but there are definitely aspects of the plan that I firmly agree with. Gun control was actually something I ran on as well and it was in my platform as something that we do need to address the guns.

I don't know if this was part of the series you did, but our public advocate, Jumaane Williams, put out a plan with some amendments to the mayor's plan and making some tweaks that would focus more on prevention.

I really stand with that and agree with that plan a lot. I also just want to say that, in terms of Black issues, that, yes, we do tend to talk about policing because it's such a sight of violence and controversy. There are all types of issues that affect our Black voters. As someone who's representing that Black plurality voting block, we hope, because there is redistrict incoming, but we hope the issues also include a variety of other things; education, housing.

We are right now in a battle over this new development proposal called the 145 project, which is over 600 units of market-rate housing and is going to displace a lot of Harlemites. I'm fighting against that. That's going to come to a council vote. I just want to put out there that there are a lot of, I think, Black community issues aside from policing as well.

Brian Lehrer: This could come up in the budget negotiations with the mayor that are going on right now, of course, City Council negotiates the annual fiscal year budget with the mayor. For you, as a member of City Council, I'm sure you're looking over the mayor's first fiscal year budget proposal which he released recently.

Some of the campaign's promises it's reported that he has broken in this budget include how much money goes to affordable housing, how much money goes to parks, and how much money goes to composting.. Those are three that political New York pointed out the other day. What do you see as important in the budget and whether it's there in the mayor's proposals for the agendas that you were just describing?

Kristin Richardson Jordan: I think those are all three excellent points. I will say that the mayor's budget does cause me concern because we're seeing a 3% cut in agencies across the board but no cut to NYPD. While there is a constant refrain that there isn't money be being added to NYPD, if you are cutting everywhere else except there, you are in my opinion defacto placing priority on the policing instead of the things that would prevent crime in the first place.

I definitely stand with Sandy Nurse who is my colleague chair of the sanitation committee here in the city council, which I also sit on. I am concerned about the composting and what we're doing in a space of sanitation where we've already seen significant cuts in which we know the sanitation needs are great.

In terms of education, there is over $200 million going to charter schools. I am concerned about the cuts to education, but I'm also concerned about where the money we do have is going in terms of supporting charter schools. I would like to see the support go to the public schools.

With affordable housing, definitely agree.

Brian Lehrer: Well actually, let me ask you a follow-up question on the schools because I know you're a big proponent of what's called community schools, which some of our listeners know about and some don't. Schools that offer wraparound services to students like tutoring, access to healthcare. It started with just 45 schools in 2014, but they're now over 300 of them. Talk about community schools.

Kristin Richardson Jordan: Absolutely. I am a fan of this model. As you said, the community school offers wraparound services. What it does is it helps the school be a one-stop-shop for the kids and their families. We're looking, not just at students' academics, and I can tell you from my lived experience as a teacher that teaching a student is beyond the academics. We're also looking at making sure there is mental, emotional health services, there's housing support if there needs to be housing support, there's food stamps if that's needed.

Also, every community school has a liaison connecting that school to local nonprofits in the surrounding area so that we can pull resources as a community. I think that community schools, rather than being something that is done, because it's often done as a last step measure when a school is not particularly doing well as a rescuing-the-school measure. I think instead of doing it in that context, we should really be looking at it as a blueprint and how we can make every school a community school.

I actually am looking at introducing some legislation that would increase the number of community schools. Our kids deserve it. Does it cost more money? It does, but this is my argument that we need to invest the funds in that space.

Brian Lehrer: Luke in central Harlem, you're on WNYC with your City Council member, Kristin Richardson Jordan. Hi, Luke.

Luke: Hi, Brian. Longtime listener, first-time caller. Thank you for taking my call. Goodmorning, Councilwoman. I do live in your neighborhood. One thing I've noticed lately, and I'm glad you touched on it is that, if you walk on St. Nicholas Avenue between 117 and 118 on the west side, there is a ton of trash that no one ever picks up. I've called 311. One thing I do love about Harlem is it's actually the first neighborhood I've ever lived in where I actually know my neighbors. I walk around the block, it takes me 45 minutes, because we're just talking all the time. It's super friendly, love it.

I do realize that everyone in the neighborhood is frustrated and everyone says that nothing will ever change because Harlem is just forgotten by the city. We have zero garbage cans on my square block. There's trash, dog poop everywhere. If you walk up and down Frederick Douglass Boulevard, it is just always disgusting. How do we handle that? How do we approach that? What are your goals? What is your mission to help fix this?

Kristin Richardson Jordan: Thank you, Luke. I definitely appreciate the question and the context. I love that about Harlem too, we do tend to know our neighbors. Actually, there was a citywide survey, and Harlem did the best in terms of a survey question around, "Do I feel like my neighbors are willing to help me?" That just shows some of that neighborhood love that I think is in our community. To get to your point, I share the frustration. I personally had a long conversation with DSNY about the lack of trash cans and I was able to already, even with not being two months in office, secure us some more trash cans. We have 32 new cans that recently went up along Lenox and 7th. Now, that part of St. Nicholas that you're talking about is definitely in need of care. We definitely need way more than just32 new cans, and we also have to address the trash pickups. These are definitely things on my radar. I will say there's a couple of things I'm doing.

The first is that, as I mentioned, I am standing with Sandy Nurse in calling for that funding for our sanitation and our sanitation budget. I also am looking at what can be done in and with discretionary, including capital funds to assist in putting more cans and increasing the pickups. Now, I get annoyed with that because it shouldn't actually have to be discretionary funds because we should be receiving more support because the environmental racism is obvious. It's something that I am talking about in and with Sanitation Committee members.

One of the things that I've suggested, and I hope we really get to do it, is to do a public hearing talking about racial disparities in sanitation, because there's no doubt that there's environmental racism at play with the level of service that we're receiving in Central Harlem versus other parts of the city. I thank you for bringing that up. The response is advocating for a bigger budget, hoping to do that hearing around the environmental discrimination, and also using my discretionary to increase cans and pickups.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Luke. This is WNYC-FM HD and AM New York, WNJT-FM 88.1 Trenton, WNJP 88.5 Sussex, WNJY 89.3 Netcong, WNJO 90.3 Toms River. We are New York and New Jersey public radio. Few more minutes with City Council member, Kristen Richardson Jordan from District 9 in parts of upper Manhattan and week nine in our 51 Council Members in 52 Weeks series. In this series, as many of we're inviting each member of City Council to bring something from the district for show and tell, not literally since it's radio. Councilmember Richardson Jordan, you can be pretty creative in what you bring, the audio version. What did you bring us for show and tell?

Kristin Richardson Jordan: I brought the Harriet Tubman statue. It's on 122nd in Frederick Douglass. It is, as described, the statue of Harriet Tubman. If it sounds like I'm outside, it's because the statue is outside. It is a testament to what artists are able to do in our community. Artists actually lobbied for this statue to get it in place, and then proposals were taken and it was designed. The history of Harlem is one of Black history and freedom movement. To have this statue of Harriet Tubman as something for the kids is just beautiful.

Brian Lehrer: Nice. Ed in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Ed.

Ed: Brian, I'm on?

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Hi.

Ed: I'd like the councilwoman-- give her an opportunity to comment on the New York Post story, February 26th, where, in effect, she characterized and took the potent line that Zelenskyy is a fascist, and that, in 2014, the legitimate government was overthrown by the United States of America although the circumstances of that revolution was that the president refused to sign an agreement that the public had endorsed concerning its relationship with the European Union, I believe. Is she the new hard-left member of the city council as the New York Post apparently has concluded?

Brian Lehrer: Ed, thank you. I think you've walked back some of that. Your constituents may be wondering why you're jumping in on Ukraine at all, but what's your position right now?

Kristin Richardson Jordan: I appreciate the opportunity to address it. I definitely think that some of the nuance was lost, but what I was working on commenting on was the fact the context of the history is decades old and it's much more than just what we saw recently. That is not at all to justify the aggressive actions of Russia, but it is to say that the people of Ukraine right now are not, in my opinion, in a fully democratically elected system right now, and that our role as the US and NATO that we definitely have a role to play in some of the oppression that has happened to the people.

As we talk about these things with oligarchs and different leaders, it is the people of Ukraine and the people of Russia who wind up suffering. In terms of being a leftist member of the council, I think that's definitely granted. I do believe, my intent, it was definitely taken in bad faith by the post, which is frankly not surprising because this is what the post does

Brian Lehrer: Well, for you as a democratic socialist, here are a couple of Bernie Sanders tweets from the last day. He tweeted, "Today, I stand in solidarity with the Ukrainian people against this war and with the Russian people who are demonstrating against their corrupt reckless president who started it." He tweeted, "Putin, a multi-billionaire, is the poster boy for greed and oligarchy. Maybe before starting a war that could kill thousands in displaced millions, he might worry more about the people of Ukraine and Russia and less about his us super-yacht."

One final one. "Putin and his oligarch friends don't want you to see these images." He posted some images. "Participating in an anti-war march in an authoritarian country-" he's referring to Russians who are marching against this war, '- is no small thing. It requires enormous courage. These very brave people deserve our respect and gratitude." That's Bernie Sanders. For you as a progressive, isn't the Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson access the bad guys here, and Ukraine being invaded by a superpower next door, the victim, pretty unambiguously?

Kristin Richardson Jordan: At the risk of offending some parties, I think we have more bad guys than that. While, yes, I do think that those actions are unexcusable, I also think that actions of supporting a coup and putting in a puppet government is also unexcusable.

Brian Lehrer: You know that a lot of people would very much dispute the history, and we don't have time to get into it, but the interpretation of history that says the US fostered a coup and put in a puppet government, Zelenskyy stood up to Donald Trump when Trump wanted him to start that fake investigation of Joe Biden. That's why Trump was impeached by the house of representatives. The evidence was clear that he was trying to do that and Zelenskyy didn't go along.

Kristin Richardson Jordan: I don't disagree with that. To go to your point, I'm not sure it makes sense to dive into the details of international politics when I'm in local government. I will say that I use my Twitter for what I see as consciousness-raising. My main goal was to spark a deeper conversation other than just Russia bad, Ukraine good, US good. Perhaps, at the expense of some people who aren't ready to discuss it deeper and go into the nuance, but I think we did accomplish that because we did get a conversation going about it.

Brian Lehrer: Let's end this as we've been ending all our 51 Council Members in 52 Weeks interviews. Week 9, you represent District 9. It's some lightning-round questions. What's the most common reason so far in your term that constituents have contacted your office?

Kristin Richardson Jordan: I would say NYCHA repairs, number one. NYCHA, the public housing, unaddressed public housing repairs.

Brian Lehrer: What's one area of policy where you've seen actual progress during your lifetime in the city?

Kristin Richardson Jordan: I think with the right to council that that's a success story right there.

Brian Lehrer: Right to have a lawyer that's for tenants in particular?

Kristin Richardson Jordan: Yes, correct. The tenants' lawyer, yes.

Brian Lehrer: Did you have any political heroes growing up?

Kristin Richardson Jordan: Got a shout-out [unintelligible 00:29:35] and Fannie Lou Hamer and just black women doing their thing.

Brian Lehrer: What's your favorite and least favorite thing about living in New York City?

Kristin Richardson Jordan: My favorite thing is definitely the people, especially the people of Harlem, the community, the legacy there, the way you feel history, it's just beautiful. My least favorite thing is the rats.

Brian Lehrer: Finally, is there a recent book or movie that you would recommend that you've seen or read?

Kristin Richardson Jordan: Well, it's been a minute, but my favorite book of all time is actually the Black Woman's Anthology. It's edited by Toni Cade Bambara, highly recommend.

Brian Lehrer: Kristin Richardson Jordan, brand new council member from District 9 in parts of Central Harlem, Morningside Heights, Manhattan Valley, East Harlem. Thanks for joining our 51 Council Members in 52 Weeks series. We really appreciate it.

Kristin Richardson Jordan: All right. Thank you. Bye.

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