Elizabeth Glazer ’86: Keeping Cities Safe Through Policy and Practice

In the early 1990s, as a young federal prosecutor leading the organized crime and violent gangs units in the Southern District of New York, Elizabeth Glazer ’86 went after New York City’s murderous neighborhood gangs by using racketeering laws to link together a wide array of players conspiring to the same end. The goal of her pioneering strategy was to achieve sustainable change in crime levels, not merely deal with one crisis at a time. 

Now, after a long and successful career as a public servant, Glazer is still working toward fundamental changes in New York's approach to reducing crime. In 2022, the same year she was named a New York Law Journal Distinguished Leader, she founded Vital City, a quarterly journal, think tank, and policy venture that aims to provide practical solutions to the problems cities face, starting with public safety—for example, highlighting data-based studies that show how ideas such as better street lighting, more summer jobs for teenagers, and fencing vacant lots all reduce crime. 

Vital City is housed at Columbia Law School, where Glazer serves on the Dean’s Council. “Columbia Law School is a place that I feel has been important both intellectually and in my heart. It feels like a home to me. The professors, when I was a student there, were inspiring and motivating. And that is still the feeling that I have when I go and talk to people there,” she says. In 2023, Glazer spoke at the inaugural Women of Columbia Law Forum at the Forum. “I feel that Columbia has given me a lot and that I’d like to be able to return the favor to students and to the institution.” 

For her achievements and service, the Law School presented Glazer with the 2025 Medal for Excellence, its highest honor, along with fellow honoree David J. Greenwald ’83.

Revitalizing Neighborhoods to Reduce Crime 

With Vital City, Glazer’s goal is to give those in government information to make better decisions. “Ideas come from lots of different places but often get stuck in an academic journal or in a report on a shelf,” she says. Vital City works to “bring those ideas to life and make them understandable and accessible to people who are making decisions and who are spending billions of dollars every year.” 

In its first three years, the journal has focused on topics including gun violence, the use and misuse of the “broken windows” policing theory, and the New York City jails crisis. It has also addressed the broader fabric of city life, such as the impact of congestion pricing and what makes neighborhoods work.

“Safety is rooted in civic vitality and civic resources,” Glazer says. “Police are important, there is no question, but they’re one strand of a civic fabric. [Combating crime] is about managing risk and controlling behavior. And historically, city government has chosen to do that first with the police,” Glazer says. But other city agencies, including transportation, sanitation, and the school system, with their vast budgets, can be “the arterial structure of reform.”

Vital City has not only attracted readership among civic leaders but also is frequently cited in major news outlets, Glazer says. “I’m incredibly proud of how far we’ve come and the impact that we’ve had. The thing that may mean the most to me is when I get notes from people at City Hall or in the court system or in academia saying, ‘This article is huge, this point is really important for us, and we’re going to try to implement that.’” 

The idea that thriving neighborhoods are safe neighborhoods dates back more than a half-century to urban anthropologists like Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte, but the current polarized political climate makes Fiorello La Guardia’s old adage—“There is no Democratic or Republican way to clean the streets”—freshly appealing, Glazer says.

“People would like to see their lives be better and their children’s lives be better," she says. "How do you find those solutions? Is there evidence that we can actually agree upon that permits us to walk through those raindrops of left and right?” 

Glazer’s perspective that it takes more than police to reduce crime originated in her experiences in the U.S. attorney’s office. There, at the same time the office went after gangs, she says, it tried to mobilize community, civic, and residents’ organizations in violence-heavy neighborhoods to work to improve the quality of life there. 

She returned to that idea in 2014. As director of the office of criminal justice for Mayor Bill de Blasio, she helped implement NeighborhoodStat (NStat), a program that brings together city agencies, including parks and sanitation, homeless services, the public housing authority, neighborhood-based organizations, “and, crucially, residents,” to look at issues that make residents feel unsafe, she says.

“A crime is caused by many, many, many, many things. So the notion that the solution only lies in one thing is misplaced,” Glazer says.

NStat is “an incredibly promising way to knit together all the things that make a neighborhood strong,” she says. She calls it her proudest achievement, even though “it’s something that probably no one has ever heard of.” 

Struggling to Close Rikers Island 

A frequent media commentator on criminal justice policy, Glazer is often called to speak about New York’s ongoing crisis over conditions at the violence-ridden Rikers Island jail, which has been operating under a federal consent decree since 2015 and has seen a sharp rise in inmate deaths. In November, a federal judge found the city in contempt for failing to stop violence in its jails and ordered the drawing up of a plan to put the jails under federal receivership—a move Glazer supports.

“The level of violence and brutality [at Rikers] is exponentially above where it was 10 years ago, when a court found the levels of violence unconstitutional,” she says. “There is a huge question about whether the city not only has the capacity but also has the will to do what’s necessary to fix issues of management and supervision and accountability.” 

A federally appointed receiver would not be concerned about the political clout of the powerful corrections officers’ union, she says. “You need somebody [in charge] whose single-minded focus is the well-being of both the incarcerated people and the corrections officers. They’re not focused on their political future; they’re not focused on the perceptions in the press. It’s simply, ‘Is what I am about to do going to improve conditions or not?’” 

While leading the city’s criminal justice office from 2014 to 2020, Glazer and her team wrote the plan to replace Rikers with smaller jails in the boroughs. The city is required by law to close Rikers by 2027—though city officials have said that is unlikely to happen—and an independent commission has been formed to implement a plan to do so. But Glazer says the culture of violence in city jails that has caused the deaths of more than 30 detainees since 2022 must be changed—by “professionalizing the workforce, investing in training, making sure there's programming for incarcerated people.” Otherwise, she says, “What's the point of moving into decent facilities that are closer to families and courts if you're simply importing the same brutal system into those buildings?” 

Discovering the “Gears” of Society

Law wasn’t in Glazer’s initial life plan. Raised in an academic family in New York City and New Haven, Connecticut, she studied medieval intellectual history at Harvard, then spent a year in Germany as a Fulbright Scholar. Inspired by her family’s history—her grandparents fled pogroms and her stepfather fled from the Nazis—Glazer went to Southeast Asia to work in refugee camps. In the wake of the Vietnam War, she helped Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees apply for asylum in the United States. She could be more effective in asylum work, she realized, as a lawyer. By that time, Glazer had been out of college for several years, but a letter from her childhood friend Jane C. Ginsburg, now Morton L. Janklow Professor of Literary and Artistic Property Law, helped her decide to make the leap to apply to law school. 

“She said to me, ‘It is not necessary to hear the clarion call of the law at age 22,’” Glazer says, laughing. “‘It is not too late for you.’” 

It was good advice: Glazer loved Columbia Law. “Loved it. Loved it. I thought it showed me the reveal codes on how the world works. First year, I thought, was particularly terrific because it drew back the curtain on the gears of what holds society together.”

She was editor of the Columbia Law Review and, after graduating, clerked for Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’59, who was then serving on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, an experience she calls “fantastic and terrifying and wonderful. Illuminating.” Law school debt meant that her dream job offer, working on immigrant rights at the ACLU, lost out to a higher-paying post with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.

At the time, Glazer knew so little about criminal law, she says, “I read the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure on the train to my interview, just so that I would have some idea of what a grand jury was.” But she loved the experience. As a longtime investigator put it to her, “‘You have a front-row seat at the show,’” she recalls.

“You had a glimpse into lives and suffering and hope," she says. "And you had the opportunity to do justice because that was really your only job: to do the right thing. And I was very fortunate to have the best of bosses,” Mary Jo White ’74, the U.S. Attorney from 1993 to 2002. 

The job also turned out to be good preparation for overseeing other public agencies; she also served as Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s state deputy secretary for public safety. Understanding the scope of a criminal operation, figuring out a case theory, and prepping witnesses translated well into orchestrating structural changes at government agencies, lobbying legislators, and persuading budget directors to fund programs, Glazer says.

“There’s no better job than government. It is very operational and very concrete and, of course, often frustrating. Government has taken some hard knocks,” she says. “But there’s no place where you can move the ball in favor of improving people’s lives in a more direct and effective way.”

This story was updated in February 2025 when it was announced that Glazer would receive the Medal for Excellence.