By Isaac Chotiner, The New Yorker, June 5, 2020
Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, who ended his Presidential campaign in January, began his political career by serving on Newark’s city council. Booker, a graduate of Stanford and Yale Law School and a former Rhodes Scholar, became known for staging a hunger strike to draw attention to drug dealing and drug-related violence in Newark, and went on to serve as the city’s mayor, from 2006 to 2013. Booker, who promised an ambitious slate of reforms, became one of the most high-profile mayors in the country, but Newark continued to be plagued by high crime rates and unemployment. In 2009, Booker formed a partnership with New Jersey’s governor, Chris Christie, and, later, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, to overhaul Newark’s schools—an effort that raised test scores but was rife with problems and controversy. (It was written about by Dale Russakoff for The New Yorker.)
During his time in the Senate, Booker has put forward multiple proposals to reform the U.S. criminal-justice system, including clemency for nonviolent drug offenders and the legalization of marijuana. And, recently, he has been speaking out on the Senate floor against police abuses and systemic institutional racism. On Wednesday night, after a week of protests over the death of George Floyd, Booker and I spoke by phone. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed his efforts at police reform in Newark, his Presidential campaign, and his friendship with Zuckerberg.
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