One quick note before this episode begins. There is a slight echo on Tiffany's voice at the beginning

of the episode, but please do not click out. It goes away in about a minute. Hello, Bird Feed,

and welcome to this week's mini legal episode here at Current Affairs. I'm Vanessa A.B., your social

media editor, and I'm joined by Oren Nimni, your legal editor.

Hello, everyone. And today we have with us newly DSA and DOR's candidate for Queens DA, Tiffany

Kaban. Hi, Tiffany. Hi, y'all. How are you? Great. How are you doing? Good. It's really, really good

to have you with us. We have lots of questions for you. We're fresh off our live show where we talked about prosecutors at length. And so I'm really stoked that our first mini legal episode back is with a progressive, a leftist running for prosecutor in Queens. So I was hoping you could start us off by introducing

yourself to everyone, telling us what pushed you to run, and just giving us a little bit about

your background. Sure. So I have been a public defender in New York City for the past seven

years. We've gotten to a place where the system is obviously

broken. You see all of these amazing things that are happening around the country in terms of

these progressive reform-minded, decarceral DAs and just the possibilities that that's opened up.

The other thing that's happening locally is that Queens especially is a place where our communities are getting

politically activated in a way that they haven't been in years and that's been super exciting. As a public

defender, I spend all day, every day talking about my clients and the system and all the ways

in which is broken. So it's been so refreshing and so invigorating to have our communities talking about those things as well.

For me, my decision to run very much so feels like the natural progression in my advocacy for my clients.

You know, the DA's office is a place where we can institute some much-needed radical reform

that could not only benefit folks from the criminal justice system

perspective, but also housing, healthcare education because they're also deeply intertwined.

I went into public defense work because I honestly come from the communities that are affected

by the criminal justice system. And so for me, it was almost this opportunity to have reparative

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