Jumaane Williams, the New York City Public Advocate who is seeking reelection in 2025, first in the June Democratic primary, spoke with The New York Editorial Board on the morning of May 29, 2025. (photo by Juan Manuel Benítez)

Participating journalists: Juan Manuel Benítez, Nicole Gelinas, Christina Greer, Ben Max, Akash Mehta, Ben Smith, Liena Zagare.

Full Transcript

Arriving Late

Ben Smith
Thanks for coming in. I'm going to lightly moderate. So, subway, driver — how'd you get here?

Jumaane Williams
Car, my detail.

Ben Smith
Did they get lost or what's the…?

Jumaane Williams
Well, several things happened, and one, I was, I'm not feeling well, but I wanted to push through.

Ben Smith
Sorry to hear it.

Jumaane Williams
And then the commute was double the time and then, there are apparently two Café Lafayettes.

Ben Smith
Alright, that's too many things.

Preparing To Be Mayor, Running City Government

Nicole Gelinas
Good morning. Thank you for coming in to see us. You among recent public advocates have come the closest to becoming mayor. Can you tell us what you did last year and earlier this year to prepare yourself for possibly becoming mayor, and what are the three actions you would take in your first week as mayor if you did become mayor by some unforeseen eventuality?

Jumaane Williams
Well, we, one, that’s something you kind of know could happen. You don't think it's gonna happen, and if it does happen, something went really wrong. So you probably prefer that it didn't happen.

We really started trying to prepare, I think it was a Saturday. When the [mayor’s government] attorney resigned all of a sudden, and that was the one time we were like, OK, this might actually happen. So I just got folks together to just put a game plan in place: ‘What is the first step we need to do to try to make sure that folks notice continuity in government?’

So that was the number one thing, was trying to make sure that there's a message that is, continuity government, that is going to continue. Make sure that folks knew what the timeframe was and what it meant, and to have an [special] election. We were gonna make sure that everyone, I guess the second thing we gonna do is make sure everyone remaining had some COIB training and some additional EEO and, and conflict of interest training so that there was some clarity on things that may not have been so clear.

And then we wanted to look at some of the executive orders that the mayor had, and see what we need to try to address and move forward with. But the number one thing was, I, we, thought there was gonna be a lot of confusion. I was trying to – the continuity of government was really important and to make sure that folks knew this was temporary. My job there was not to be mayor, it was to transfer a working government to whoever the next mayor would be.

Ben Smith
A big part of your job has been just in some ways just to be like the world's closest observer of City Hall and this mayor. I'm curious what you've learned about governing, about running the city from watching Eric Adams. Good and bad.

Jumaane Williams
I think you need to be ready for prime-time. I think you need to understand what the mayoralty is, and because you've held office before, doesn't mean it's the exact same and you can operate it the same. And it's been hard to watch. Like, I've known Eric Adams for a very long time, and I expected the complexity of a human being. You know, he was a Republican, he was in law enforcement, he was also 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement and he also talked about public safety in a way that I think encompassed a lot of things I believe in. But I think we only got the first two parts and the rest of the parts never really came to fruition.

And I don't know who this person is, so, I mean, this was the person who he was the whole time. But it's been hard to watch and I always say it's important as a Black man looking at another Black man in a more powerful position, it's always hard to see how disgraceful this administration is and having to call that out is difficult. But it's also been a lesson of understanding that diversifying a bad system is not the answer. I prefer a diverse system than a non-diverse system, but I prefer somebody in there that wants to kind of break up the systems, I think, that have been harming people. And I don't think that's what Eric Adams was about.

Juan Manuel Benítez
And just to make sure, because you said that that weekend when the lawyer resigned, you came up with a plan. Is it that your office didn't have already a plan, and knowing that you are the first in line if something happens to the mayor, you didn't come up with a plan until then?

Jumaane Williams
No. No. You always have, you always have a plan. It doesn't get crystallized as real until a particular moment. So it's not like we had a — we had the semblance of what we would do if this ever happened. It, when it becomes real, it's different. You know, game day is different than thinking about game day.

Juan Manuel Benítez
Were you excited or were you, ‘Oh my god, I don't want this’?

Jumaane Williams
I was, I probably leaned to the ‘oh my god’ part. But that was always gonna be the case. I mean, I think if you don't go into this, into that position with a healthy, ‘oh my God,’ something might be wrong with [you]. Because I understand the weight of it. But we were definitely prepared even in that ‘oh my god’-ness and very capable of doing the job that we had to do.

Juan Manuel Benítez
And just to make sure, because you answered to Nicole saying that you didn't really want – you were going to be a transition mayor. So it's not that you thought about, well, these are the three executive orders that I would put out as soon as I come in that would signal what my agenda for this job would be?

Jumaane Williams
My agenda in that time period was to make sure that whoever the next mayor gets a functional government. Now, I would make a decision whether I would run for the job [in the special election], and then I would try to tell folks what my agenda would be. But I made a decision, I don't know that that three-month period, I should be trying to interject my agenda.

I think if you start to do too much, there was a lot of turmoil in the city already, and so you don't want to add more turmoil, start doing a bunch of stuff that someone else might undo. So I definitely know what I would want to do as a mayor, but that 90 days is not about that. So if I get the job after that, if I ran, that's a different story, but right then, it really was about continuity of government and transitioning.

Top Accomplishments, Democrats and Public Safety

Ben Max
You're running for another term here. You have a competitor in the Democratic primary. If you have one minute with voters to say what you've accomplished as public advocate over your five, six years now, what's at the top of the list in terms of accomplishments?

Jumaane Williams
You know, we're proud that we've, and this is really important, and we sometimes get lost, so we've passed more pieces of legislation than all the [other] public advocates combined, which is really important to me, even as a Council member, to show that I do the politics differently, and you can still have results. You know, some of the things I’m most proud of is the work we did around Black maternal health with the City Council. The racial impact study I think was enormous in changing how people think about rezonings. Being around for COVID in particular and being able to lift up — we got some great PPE for NYCHA that otherwise might not have not have happened, helped navigate the city in that time. I think was really, really helpful. So much so that other cities reached out to us to try to figure out how they can create a public advocate's office. Still continuing to talk about and reshape how we talk about public safety, I think, is very important.

Ben Smith
On public safety — I think we're gonna try to run through some topic areas — when Brad Lander, he came in here, like the first thing he said, unasked, was, ‘I want to acknowledge that progressives were slow to catch the sense of disorder coming out of the pandemic and kind of screwed that up.’ Do you agree with that? That progressives lost the thread?

Jumaane Williams
I think Democrats sucked when it comes to talking about public safety, period. They just have, and they ignored the affordability crisis, and it doesn't make any sense because we have better answers for it. And so that's been very frustrating to see people either ignore it or mimic talking points that don't work, or just be more concerned about incumbency protection and the kind of power grab that can happen than actually addressing the issues that people cared about. I've been talking about both of those issues my entire career, including public safety, gun violence in particular has been an issue that I've been trying to tackle. And there are ways to have the conversation, and when you have it, there's so much more agreement.

Ben Smith
What is the right way to talk about it? I mean, it was really about how scary people felt the subways have gotten. And progressives were sort-of trying to talk them out of that feeling.

Jumaane Williams
So one, you can be safe and not feel safe, which are two different things completely. And you need to talk about them kind of at the same time 'cause even if you don't feel safe, it doesn't matter if you are. And second is, context is always important. New York, literally, no matter what anyone said, was one of the safest cities in the country. Republican states are not, and that means nothing if you're a victim of crime or you've seen a crime, and both of those things are real. You often see people trying to talk about one or the other. And you gotta talk about both.

And I have three questions I ask folks everywhere. The first is, who thinks crime is an issue that we really need to address? Raise your hand. Who thinks law enforcement are partners in trying to address that? Raise your hand. And who thinks they can do it alone? And the most Democratic spaces and the most Republican spaces, most crowds answer that the same: yes, yes, no. Where we have problems is in that third question, 'cause people sometimes try to feed the fear instead of trying to address the fear and lay out a plan where law enforcement are not the people we have to depend solely on to address the issues that people know they can't solve. And we have a lot of difficulty there, 'cause it's longer than a ten-second soundbite, and people get elected off of misusing people's fears and biases.

Akash Mehta
I went to a rally in Astoria that you spoke at, years ago, and you led AOC, and Tiffany Cabán, and, I think, Brad Lander, in a chant, over and over, “Progressives are tough on crime!” What does that mean? And if that's the case, do progressives act like they’re tough on crime?

Jumaane Williams
I think I've been trying to move from “tough on crime” to being “serious about safety,” because the folks who have been really pushing “tough on crime,” generally, have meant, “How many Black and brown people can we lock up in order for us to be safe?”

And that hasn't worked. Now, again, we want to try to arrest the children of the people we arrested two decades ago, and think it's gonna have a different impact. But if you're serious about safety, well what are the things that make a community safe? So we know that law enforcement and arrests, and even carceral tools, are just that — they're tools, but they're not gonna solve the thing.

So I also ask folks to think of a community that they deem safe. Right now, I have never heard someone mention a community that has the most law enforcement, that are already sending the most people to Rikers Island. Those communities have been deemed unsafe for generations with those same things in it, which means those things alone will not solve it.

The communities that people think about as safe actually have housing that people can afford. They have more than bodegas to do their grocery shopping. They have nurses and social workers and sports programs, even, in their schools. They have access to health and mental health programs and the folks who need mental health assistance are generally not roaming the streets. They don't have to have a connection to get a continuum of care. Those communities are deemed safe and the ones that don't have those things are deemed unsafe. Let's try to address those issues, and I guarantee you safety will look different and we'll stop asking officers to do jobs that they literally don't want to do anyway.

And there are ways that we can do that. I have never been in a space in my career where people understand that mental health needs a health response, not a criminal response, yet we still have difficulty getting to the point where law enforcement are not the first people that we turn to, and so we have to put funding into these programs. But it's not just funding, it is actual infrastructure. We need an infrastructure where people can be called upon to respond to these things, but we don't have any of that right now. We generally have 911. That usually gives you a criminal response and we literally, any social ill that we cannot solve, we will send police to try to solve it.

Akash Mehta
In this mayoral race, none of the candidates, even the leftmost candidates, are proposing shrinking the NYPD's budget, which was of course the central demand of progressives five years ago. And then a year later you tried to hold up property tax collection, in part to achieve that end…How do you evaluate the political shift over those five years? And are you disappointed with the different moment that we're in?

Jumaane Williams
Well, I want to make sure we put everything in the proper context. So one is, I thought — you've never had a clip of me saying ‘defund the police,’ because I thought it was a bad slogan then; it's a bad slogan now.

And I would talk to my elected officials, say, ‘our job shouldn't be trying to scream at people in pain in the street, how to express their pain, but to try to figure out what that pain is stemming from and can we address it.’ And if you actually read why I tried to hold property tax, most folks will focus on the police classes that were coming through.

But the larger portion was that, that we had a hiring freeze on the entire city [government]. And what I said is either we have a hiring freeze or we don't. We can't have a hiring freeze during and trying to get over COVID, and we literally can't hire any more medical staff for Health and Hospitals, but the one thing that we can do is hire police.

And again, for me it is always ‘and,’and even though it's ‘and,’ most of the time it leans on law enforcement. So for me it was about, it's either equity — you can't just hire these police and not hire anything else, or you hire everything. So that's what that was focused on. There was a hyper focus on the size of the police budget, which I think is something to look at, but not in the way that folks think.

You know, you need to have, last time I checked, I haven't checked in a while, we might, I think we were around sixth in terms of officers per capita. That's the last time I checked, which you need to have a certain amount of law enforcement per population. If you count in tourists, it might be a little different. We've hovered around that part. I voted for budgets that had additional officers. I voted for budgets that didn't. But the sole focus on the officers has been my problem. Like, what else is happening at the moment in time when you're hiring officers or not? I don't think a thousand less or a thousand more are gonna change what the real issue is. And the real issue is accountability and transparency, but also how, when, and why we use law enforcement. And that's the essential question. So the budget one is important, but it's not the essential question. And the budget one gets even more important when you look at overtime. So the fact of the matter is we have had a retention problem and I think, you know, morale is a part of it.

I think some of the conversations are part of it. What I know for a fact is that a bigger part of it has been money. And so as people have felt, they don't have access to the same overtime, it affects their pension. And so they're leaving earlier. So that's the biggest part. If you have a system where overtime is so embedded in there, that's probably a problem. Department of Health and Mental Hygiene doesn't have that same problem. Why? Why don't they have to think about, ‘I need to leave because overtime is so high,’ we have enough problems for them to address, and so why is it always one agency being treated so differently than other agencies? And that's always been my broader context.

Christina Greer
I've got a quick follow-up. I wish we had more time 'cause I would've had some questions about Thibs and the Knicks, but that's—

Jumaane Williams
But let me just say, we can't get mad at him [Knicks coach Tom Thibideau] for not putting people in, and then get mad at him for putting people in. Go ahead.

Ben Smith
Which are you?

Jumaane Williams
I'm glad he played some people. It seemed to work out. The players really seem to be the issue on this one.

Ben Smith
Alright, blame the players—

Christina Greer
I disagree, and had you come earlier, we would've had a good 15 minutes where we could put that aside, but that’s neither here nor there. So, but to follow up to Akash’s question, can you give us at least two or three concrete items where your office is addressing what you just laid out?

Jumaane Williams
So the difficulty with the office is we can do bills, which we have done, the hardest bills to get passed is to try to move, make the administration do certain things. So I can't make them do something with the police department. They have to do it or not. I can provide the oversight. And so we've passed bills where we could, that we thought would help make folks safer and provide some transparency and accountability.

The How Many Stops Act was that. It amazed me. I thought the solitary bill was gonna be the harder one to [pass] – the way they went crazy off a reporting bill was astonishing. A bill that the mayor supported when he was running. So we did that. We've put out our reports that I think have taken, have moved the direction in some spaces, particularly mental health.

We're gonna actually be doing a review on that, pushing the conversation of, kind of, what's needed to address mental health and what's not. And we have helped programs get funded, from Summer Youth Employment Program and even additional funding in the crisis management system. But the funding alone doesn't help. I mean, the funding alone is not the answer. We have to make sure the infrastructure’s there, and that hasn't happened. We recently wrote some letters. One of the things we can do is get information. Sometimes the difficulty is, if they don't want to provide the information, so it has been a problem.

We've gotten some letters back asking about the involuntary hospitalizations that have occurred already, the 8,000 New Yorkers last year. And requesting that the mayor do something that I'm not even sure he had the, the power to do, which is provide a panel, ask for them to do a panel, an oversight, of someone who was in mental health crisis, and that either harmed themselves or someone harmed them, or we asked for that to happen, with the last police shooting, unfortunately. So our ability to push when we can is one of the greatest powers, and pass laws where we can. And so we've done all of those and, you know, push for funding and programming,

Worst Landlords List

Liena Zagare
Pivoting slightly to real estate: Your office has been doing the publishing of the annual worst landlord list.

Given the widespread use of LLCs that disguise the true ownership of these properties, how do you untangle who's really responsible for not being a responsible landlord? And how much do you have access to the database that was created under the LLC Transparency Act by the state? How's that going?

Jumaane Williams
I don't think it's going particularly well. As you point out, most of this has to be changes [at] the state [level]. We generally use what the city has access to because we want to use city data. If we start using a bunch of other things, then it calls into question the list that we're using.

So we've had some problems trying to pierce that veil. But I think we've generally been OK at least getting into the world of who the person is, even if they've changed who they list, we list that person, but we also know who the owner might actually be. And we have conversations around that.

The list has gone from something that causes public embarrassment, which by itself has helped some banks to pay attention, and now tenants are using it as an organizing tool, which is just very exciting — using it to help organize their buildings around folks who are the worst landlord. And we did pass some legislation to add some teeth to it, and we have some other ideas of how we can add some teeth to it as well — those bills haven't passed.

Liena Zagare
Can you speak more to that?

Jumaane Williams
What's the bill? The one, the worst landord…

Kevin Fagan (Williams’ aide)
Self-certification.

Jumaane Williams
So that folks can't self-certify if they're on that list. We’d like to move so that there are worse consequences if they're on that list, and possibly move quicker to remove the buildings from the people who've been on the list for a certain amount of time.

Because we see that happening, starting to slowly happen as one building is moving from ownership. We saw one person get arrested who's been on the list for a while, so we do see some teeth happening. It’s just happening really slowly. It's, some of the bills we have, there's questions of where we have the authority to do it. So we have to work through that.

Liena Zagare
These landlords are on the list for a decade. Why is it taking so long?

Jumaane Williams
You gotta ask the city. We think sometimes the city can be moving a lot quicker. They can move in quicker and make repairs and do trouble damages. I do think there's a lot of flipping going on. Sometimes it causes some pause. But there are folks on there that have been there for a long time, and we should be taking action sooner. And so our office can't do that. We do what we can by making a list and forcefully putting it out there and making sure people see it. Thankfully, that has started a cascade of actions happening.

I still think it hasn’t happened fast enough. And if we can find laws that we can actually pass in the city to make that happen, then we can. But we always want it to…whether the Council even has the power to do this particular thing, or whether the city has the power to do this particular thing.

Value of the Public Advocate’s Office

Juan Manuel Benítez
So if your office didn't exist what would be the specific impact to the average New Yorker?

Jumaane Williams
Well, I will say this, before we get into what the Charter says, most importantly, what I think is particularly helpful, is having a citywide voice there that can balance out, particularly, the mayor, but the Council as well. The Council as a body can't move as quickly, just by the nature of the body. It's 51 people, and you gotta figure that out. And the mayor is particularly powerful. And having a person that can have the ability to analyze information and put it out there and let folks know — “This is true or not true” — is especially helpful. We see that happening now in a particular time like this, but it's really helpful for people to have a public advocate that’s sole purpose is advocating for them.

The people that we appoint to the commissions and committees bring a different voice than the ones that the mayor appoints. The legislation that we're able to push, which I think is a tool that wasn't used as much — I'm not sure that would have happened.

Juan Manuel Benítez
So what would be the specific impact in the lives of the average New Yorker—

Ben Smith
You are trying to abolish his office?

Jumaane Williams
A few people are!

Juan Manuel Benítez
I'm just trying to understand, because you know, the City of New York employs more than 300,000 civil servants right now. You have oversight of agencies and do you think that there's a way to get a more efficient government, even more so today when we have so many technological advances, including AI…should we be shrinking the size of the city government, and that way save some money to New Yorkers?

Jumaane Williams
So the question you're asking, you have to just make sure it's balanced: So the question is, what would be the impact of any one elected official if it wasn't here? What would the impact if you had 49 Council members as opposed to 51? What would be the impact if you didn't have borough presidents? That's a very real question that should be asked, and I'm happy to continue having those conversations.

What I'm saying is having a voice like the public advocate is very impactful for the people, particularly when you have someone as powerful as a mayor and a body [the City Council] that sometimes is slower to move simply because that body is stronger.

What we've been pushing for is strengthening the public advocate’s office, would make it even more effective. And so we actually won one power, which is the mayor can no longer slash our budget, which will free up public advocates to speak louder. We believe getting subpoena power would make the job even more effective because right now, as I mentioned earlier, we can ask questions, if they don't answer the only route, next step, is a huge lawsuit, which is time consuming. We have a smaller budget than most borough presidents. So I think empowering this position more is better than figuring out how you get rid of it, because its space there is really important. I think people would feel the impact of not having a powerful citywide voice to push back. The legislation that we've put forth may not have been passed.

I think it's been very helpful for folks. And again, the voices that we are able to put on to these commissions I think are different than what the mayor and others put on by virtue of what the office is.

Housing and Development

Ben Smith
There's obviously a kind of big debate inside the Democratic Party right now around how hard it is to build in cities, how hard it is to do things — kind of YIMBY versus NIMBY. Progressives sit in a funny place — it's not obvious which is the progressive side of the development people versus the local neighborhood advocates. And I'm curious how you see that argument — the great Ezra Klein wars of 2025.

Jumaane Williams
I think there's also the other thing: First of all, I'm not sure what “progressive” means. Andrew Cuomo says he's a progressive. And so I mean, Andrew Cuomo was what he needed to be on any given day — that's a whole other conversation. But for me, the question is often who would push past what is the norm of doing things? Who would push past the risk of a leadership scheme to get things done on behalf of the people, as opposed to what's best for the leadership scheme? That's not always progressive or not progressive. And I think most of the things that quote-unquote progressives have pushed are actually things that will make people's lives better, and in the end, people generally tend to agree with it.

Ben Smith
But then, specifically, like getting rid of regulation to build more housing is the big thing.

Jumaane Williams
When we get to something like housing, again, I found sometimes things that need collective action incentivize individual behavior in a very, very difficult way.

So for housing in particular, I have another three questions I ask also. One is: Who thinks housing and homelessness is a real big issue that we have to address? Raise your hand. Yes. Who thinks the response to that should be housing at a price point that people can afford? Raise your hand. Yes. And who wants to live next to a taller building? And again, the most Democratic space, the most Republican space; the wealthiest space to the poorest space — those questions are answered the same, which says to me, most folks understand what's needed. When it gets to them, it is just difficult.

Ben Smith
So how do you deal with that? And that is the core problem. Somebody's going to have to live next to taller buildings, right?

Jumaane Williams
One thing is not to shove things down peoples’ throat. You need to have conversations with communities and you need to walk them through what we're trying to do. The fact is, if we lived the way we did a hundred years ago, we wouldn't be here. There wouldn't be enough space to live. And if we lived the same way in a hundred years, our children won't be here. Literally.

Ben Smith
They were better at building apartment buildings a hundred years ago than they are now.

Jumaane Williams
But if we stayed the way we looked…and we are New York City because of the subway system and being able to build up — those are the primary reasons, and we can't fail our next generation.

We also can't allow people to think we're going to change your neighborhood overnight. I think that's a big thing and we should address that fear. Not addressing people's fears is a big problem. And the fear is like, “I bought this in this community for this reason. I don't want to change overnight.”

One, there has to be some change. Two, it's not going to change overnight. And I've tried to push the conversation: In this community, in this community board, this Council district, whatever it is, you’ve got to give up some density. Where can we give up some density in exchange for that? For this iteration, let's try to protect some of the [open] spaces.

The other problem is we've asked folks to give up density and not provide the housing that they need. So if I see buildings going up and I can't afford it, my already innate not wanting that thing to go up is going to be even worse, because I can't afford it. So I believe that there are ways to do it. I think we tend to just either shove it down their throat, or kind of have some fake kind of conversation.

I think the lessons that I see hopefully learning is that ignoring people's fears doesn't help. So if the fear is based in reality or not, it doesn't change the way the person's going to behave. And so we have to do a better job of saying, ‘Hey, this is what you're afraid of. This is what I'm actually trying to do. It's not this thing you're afraid of, but this is a valid fear.’

Rank The Mayors

Ben Smith
I think we may be just about out of time, but I guess the last question: Can you rank the mayors of your lifetime? Best to worst, or worst to best.

Jumaane Williams
I don't think I can. Worst is Giuliani. I would just be able to say that.

Nicole Gelinas
And why would he be the worst?

Jumaane Williams
I grew up, I became a man, I guess, in the Giuliani years.

Ben Smith
How old are you?

Jumaane Williams
I am 49.

Ben Smith
Same.

Jumaane Williams
You’re 49?

Ben Smith
48, but same New York childhood.

Jumaane Williams
And being Black with locks — I've been black most of my life — so you know, with locks, earrings, loving hip hop, we just didn't feel comfortable in the Giuliani era for very many reasons. And who he turned out to be was actually who he was then, and that was a very difficult time.

It wasn't in my lifetime, but I liked some things that Lindsay was actually trying to do that I've read about, so I would rank him up here. I wish there was more support and ability to do some of those things. There were, believe it or not, some good things that Bloomberg did that I would keep. So I think there are pieces of different mayoralties that I would like to see.

Obviously, de Blasio did some things I liked as well and some things I did not. I think there was an opportunity “the progressive way” of trying to do some things that we actually never did. So sometimes we get blamed for things not working out. We didn't actually do the things that many of us were pushing. I think the Adams administration is a disgrace and will be remembered as a disgrace, irrespective of what he thinks. And that is immensely disappointing to see happen as a second Black mayor.

Ben Smith
Well, thanks for coming. Thanks for taking the time. Feel better.

Jumaane
Sure, I am very sorry [for being late]. I appreciate it. If you want to do this again by phone, I’m happy to, but I apologize, it was a perfect storm.

Share