Elizabeth Glazer on How Left Progressive Blue Cities Should Tackle Public Safety

Elizabeth Glazer is a former law clerk for Ruth Bader Ginsburg and federal prosecutor who prosecuted violent gang activity, who then went on to serve first as Deputy Secretary for Public Safety for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and later as Director of the Office of Criminal Justice under progressive New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio. Now Glazer is the founder of Vital City, a respected and influential urban policy ideas shop housed at Columbia Law School in New York City. Launched in 2022, Vital City puts a particular emphasis on championing innovative public safety policies that get past the typical blue city divides between movement left and center left. Some of Vital City’s public safety ideas have caught the attention of New York’s socialist superstar, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, so we asked Liz to join us on BCB to talk about how to do public safety right in big blue cities with fractious politics and fraught racial and class dynamics. At a time when democratic socialist insurgents are capturing mayor’s offices in cities like New York, Seattle and Washington, D.C., and are then faced with reconciling their progressive ideological commitments with the need to deliver safe and welcoming environments for their constituents, we wanted to explore with Glazer how best to fill effectively the ideological and policy no man’s land between old school, largely discredited “blunderbuss” policing and the willfully naïve anti-enforcement utopianism of many present day progressive activists. In our conversation, Glazer argues that public safety in blue cities, properly construed, should be understood less as an ideological contest and more as a basic function of effective government. The author of a recent Atlantic piece, “A Cheap Fix for Urban Crime,” that provides a fascinating (no shit, really!) argument that dramatically enhanced lighting and making other landscape improvements in high crime neighborhoods can reduce violence and other criminal activity, Glazer argues that smart policy choices that marry environmental design, prevention strategies, and social services with carefully targeted law enforcement can deliver the promise of successful progressive governance. As the discussion continues, we discuss with Glazer how her thinking about public safety has been informed by the original meaning of “broken windows policing,” but how that concept evolved over time into the mass police stops, sweeping gang prosecutions, and police targeting of entire neighborhoods, resulting in biased and overly intrusive policing. Liz expresses her optimism about the direction of public safety thinking in blue cities. Ideas once considered radical—civilian mental-health responders, violence interrupters, diversion programs, and summer employment as crime prevention—have entered the mainstream. The next challenge, she says, is integrating those innovations with policing instead of forcing cities to choose one side or the other. Cities should combine restrained, targeted enforcement with violence prevention, mental-health response, youth employment, good lighting, maintained public spaces, and strong social infrastructure. “There is a way to create a safety strategy in which police are one civic service—but they’re just one—and there are many other civic services that can be woven together in order to provide a safe and vibrant city,” Glazer tells us. OUTSIDE SOURCES: Elizabeth Glazer, "A Cheap Fix for Urban Crime," The Atlantic, May 19, 2026. George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson, "Broken Windows: The police and neighborhood safety," The Atlantic, March 1982. And you can learn more about the work of Vital City at www.vitalcitynyc.org. If you are in Seattle join us for a live joint taping of the Blue City Blues & GeekWire Podcasts: Two Cities, One Industry: Big Tech, Power and Politics in Seattle and San Francisco, Sept 29, 2026