From his days at New York City Hall to his studies at NYU Law to his work with nonprofit organizations countering gun violence and police misconduct, Max Markham has long been drawn to public policy advocacy and addressing societal wrongs. This past summer, Markham ’21 joined the Policing Project at NYU as executive director. In a Q&A with NYU Law, he shares lessons from his stint in politics, talks about lasting impressions from a trip to Ghana while in law school, and explains why reigning in police surveillance is of critical importance.
How did your career in politics begin?
My mother instilled an appreciation for public service in me from a young age. I grew up in a housing complex on the East Side of Manhattan called Waterside Plaza, formerly in the Mitchell-Lama program [which provides affordable housing to middle-income families]. My mother was also active with our tenants’ association. I never forgot seeing how the tenants were advocating for themselves.
When I came back [to New York] from Stanford, I knew that I wanted to get involved locally. So I went to the offices of my local representatives: City Council, State Senate, and the State Assembly. I told them that I was from Waterside Plaza and that I had a strong interest in helping to serve my community. I ended up working with a political consultant, who was handling races uptown in Washington Heights and Inwood. I also worked on some swing races in the outskirts of Syracuse, Rochester, and in the Hudson Valley.
Then in 2014, I started to work for State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal. I was working as a legislative analyst and was responsible for keeping track of the issues happening in the central portion and east side of [his Manhattan] district. I would go to community board meetings. I focused on issues like education and health care. It was the privilege of a lifetime to be able to work on issues that impacted my mom, my friends, and my family.
You also worked in City Hall during the de Blasio administration. What was that experience like?
I started [in 2015] as a special assistant to the first deputy mayor, who had one of the widest-ranging portfolios under Mayor de Blasio. As a team of policy folks, we dealt with issues concerning all of the uniformed officers—sanitation, police, fire, corrections. We also focused on education and infrastructure issues.
In the final year that I was in city government [2018], I became chief of staff to a new office, the Mayor’s Office of Policy and Planning, which focused on the long-term sustainability of policies across city agencies—in terms of costs, staffing, and community buy-in. Working for the Mayor of New York was an incredible experience, and very humbling.
What sparked your decision to attend law school?
If I’m being honest, I wasn’t particularly committed to being a lawyer. I didn’t really have lawyers in my family nor did I fully understand the law as a vehicle to make impact. But I knew that NYU had, and still does, such an amazing array of opportunities, professors, clinics. I also worked with a lot of lawyers in city government, and I respected a lot of them. So, knowing that a law degree could lift my career to the next level was a big driving factor.
I don’t know if I would have gone to law school if it weren’t for the Root-Tilden-Kern Scholarship. It’s such a game changer for folks like myself who have always been scholarship kids and who would not have been able to pay a sticker price or even a strongly discounted price of tuition. And I really think those kinds of scholarships are what move the ball forward in terms of equity and having real diversity in a field that has been historically closed-off to outsiders.
Did you have a favorite professor?
Easily, it was [Margaret B. Hoppin Professor of Clinical Law] Deborah Archer. Her Civil Rights clinic was the most foundational experience for me on campus. We got to work on a variety of policy research, litigation, investigations, mediation. We did stuff related to policing and civilian oversight of police. She has been an amazing mentor and friend to me.
Actually, the year that I started as a 1L [in 2018], she was also relatively new to NYU at the time. I remember reaching out to her and seeing her incredible background and just asking for some time to talk. We spoke for over an hour. And we still do that to this day.
At the Policing Project, she’s on our advisory board. And so having a relationship as adults, frankly, with someone who is incredibly caring, whip-smart, and has done so much for Black communities, for public service, and in the public interest generally is very powerful.
What was your most memorable experience at NYU Law?
What stands out to me the most was Black Law Students Association (BLSA). It was the first organization that reached out and welcomed me after I was accepted. As someone who worked in predominantly white spaces and had gone to predominantly white institutions, it was important to see people who looked like me. I knew that I wanted to be a part of it from the moment that I set foot on campus and I was really grateful to be able to lead it at one point.
Historically, BLSA has also done a service and cultural exchange trip, either during the winter or spring break. Ours was to Ghana in early 2019. We did community service, we sat in on their version of court arraignments in the capital of Accra, and we were able to help out with some caseload intake at prison facilities. We were there for about six days. And for some of us, it really felt like a homecoming.
After graduating from NYU Law, you worked for the student-led, gun control group March for Our Lives as its policy and legal director. Tell us about that.
It was my first job that focused on national advocacy, and it was really eye-opening to work on issues ranging from federal appropriations to advocating for the first ever White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. We submitted amicus briefs to the Supreme Court and various other courts around the country that were considering Second Amendment cases, to try to put the voices of young people in front of justices. We brought survivors of gun violence before state legislatures, before members of Congress, to try to help them address the proliferation of gun violence from a public health perspective. I was grateful to have that experience right out of law school and to immediately get to work using all of the legal, advocacy, and policy-building skills that are not always applied until many years after law school.
After about 18 months, I moved over to the Center for Policing Equity a Black-led organization that uses data and science to promote justice. CPE is committed to specifically lifting up and supporting Black communities that have been impacted by racial disparities in policing. I was the vice president of policy and community engagement. My job was to help ensure that some of the more complex issues of policing were accessible to everyday people. I led a team that advocated for and helped implement policy changes to address and minimize disparities in policing.
It’s been seven months since you joined the Policing Project. What have you been working on?
I was fortunate to join the organization at an incredibly exciting time. We’ve grown enormously and are now a larger organization, working on more issues and having more impact than we ever have in our almost ten years of existence. But there’s a lot more work ahead. I see it as my job to ensure we remain prepared to meet those challenges.
The core of our mission is to establish democratic accountability in policing. We work with everyone – activists, advocates, police, and public officials of all political stripes – to ensure that there are sensible laws and policies in place to prevent the worst-case-scenarios that we see so often in policing. Sometimes that requires advocating for bills to set forth clear standards, and sometimes it means bringing lawsuits against agencies or government entities that we feel are using unconstitutional practices or exceeding their authority.
One area of focus right now is on police use of artificial intelligence. Police use of AI has the potential to make us safer, but it also can threaten our rights and lead to discrimination and wrongful arrests. We’re working to make sure there are rules in place to allow for the former while preventing the latter.
One initiative, dubbed 30x30, aims to draw more women to law enforcement by at least a 30 percent threshold. Can you say more about that?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there’s a huge under-representation of women in policing. That’s partly due to the basic workplace obstacles – things like uniforms and bulletproof vests that don’t fit women’s bodies, or inflexible work arrangements that don’t accommodate parents or caretakers. It is also due, in part, to the macho culture of policing. Despite their disproportionately low numbers, women officers bring a ton of public safety benefits to their communities. There’s a growing body of research showing this.
Now, especially amid a staffing crisis across all of policing, we’re seeing more and more agencies that are willing to engage in this conversation and do what it takes to make policing a palatable profession for women, or get rid of unnecessary obstacles. Ultimately, this helps the bottom line of policing in a number of ways: having more women officers improves safety, helps staffing numbers, brings excessive use of force incidents down, and helps bring complaints down.
Are there any policy items that you would like to have the Policing Project address in the foreseeable future?
One is how we regulate tech and surveillance. This space is already over-saturated with vendors and tech companies trying to offer police agencies services that collect people’s data. We don’t know where it’s stored, we don’t know who’s in it, and we don’t know who is potentially being targeted. This is a longstanding issue that is only growing more urgent in the age of AI. [The Policing Project is] releasing a suite of resources that helps legislators, policymakers, and law enforcement agencies grapple with how to use tech and surveillance, what we think they should avoid, and best practices.
The other piece that I really see as mission critical is addressing the various ways in which police are made to respond to situations that might not require law enforcement. Take traffic enforcement. Most traffic stops don’t require someone with a weapon or the power to arrest someone, yet we’ve seen so many situations that escalate or turn violent in spite of this. And shouldn’t police be responding to violent crime or other high-priority issues rather than stopping drivers for tinted windows or broken tail lights? I think that we should be looking into ways to right-size and—in some areas—reduce the footprint of policing, particularly in traffic spaces. I’m really excited about the work that we’re already doing, but those are two places where I really want to see us continue to build out our work.
Posted January 27, 2025