Zohran Mamdani (guest)

This is where I grew up.

And one of the things that I would think about often was the necessity of safety and justice.

And growing up meant learning about the moments in which the chasm between those things

felt as if it was only continuing to expand.

Learning about the Central Park Five, growing up in the city and reading about... The wrongly convicted.

The exonerated five.

Growing up and reading about Sean Bell, Eric Garner.

These are victims of police brutality in the city.

Reading about Michael Brown.

And then in 2020, the year the tweet is written, the murder of George Floyd.

And feeling like this chasm was at the largest I'd seen it in my own life.

And struggling with how far apart it felt.

And in the time since then, becoming an assembly member, representing about 130,000 people in Northwest Queens, Astoria and Long Island City, and learning that to deliver that justice doesn't mean to do so in isolation, it means to still fulfill these twin necessities of safety and justice.

And doing so means working with police officers,

who put their lives on the line every single day, representing Muslim New Yorkers in the district that I represent, who were illegally surveilled on the basis of their faith, going so far as even to be watched when they played soccer, and the black and brown New Yorkers who've been victims of police brutality.

It means representing all of the eight and a half million people of the city and understanding the necessities of doing so while delivering safety and justice and understanding that no one thing can be or should be pursued without the other.

The issuing of it is to reckon with the fact that it's language that I'm applying to officers when in fact what I'm speaking about are specific practices.

And when I've met officers not only over the course of being an assembly person but also running for mayor,

Understanding that behind every caricature, behind every headline, is a New Yorker trying to do their best.

And those meetings, those conversations, those are some of the ones I've appreciated the most, where I've shared an apology for the language that I've used and a desire to continue to fulfill those same ideals of safety and of justice and to do so together.