I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

But I will bear true faith and allegiance to the sea that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion and that I will will inflate the lead discharge.

The duties of the office on which I am about to enter.

So help me God, so help me God.

So help me God.

Welcome to the oath.

I'm Chuck Rosenberg and I am honored to be your host for another compelling conversation with a fascinating person from the World of Public Service.

My guest this week is Maya Wiley, a brilliant and compelling woman who has spent her professional life at the intersection of law, education and policy.

Maya was born into both privilege and poverty.

The child of two prominent civil rights activists she grew up in a loving and intact home and in a broken system.

And if these things, privilege and poverty, intact and broken, seem to you like they are contradictory, Maya will explain why they are not.

Educated at Dartmouth in Columbia, Maya served in city government and in the federal government at the United States Department of Justice.

Her most recent turn in public service put her in charge of the civilian complaint review board, the independent oversight agency of the New York City Police Department, the largest police force in the nation.

This gave Maya a unique perspective on policing in America, particularly what we need to do as a nation to address police misconduct, to improve policing, which is in dramatic need of improvement in many parts of the nation, and to build bridges between police and the communities they are sworn to serve.

Maya is moving stories, one of struggling success, of love and tragedy, of friends and mentors, and always of the pursuit of justice, dignity and equality.

Maya Wiley, welcome to the earth.

It's great to be here, Chuck.

It's a real privilege to have you on the show. Thanks for spending some time with us.

I know you were born in Syracuse, but you didn't live there very long, did you?

No, we moved to Washington, DC when I was two years old, so I really only remember Washington as a hometown, although we did visit Syracuse a couple of times.

It was interesting to me, you've said elsewhere that you did not grow up in a disadvantaged family, but that you spent much of your childhood in a low income neighborhood and in inner city schools.

You know, honestly, the balance of my time was living the privilege I was born to, but the formative years is how I would describe it, the formative years.

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