A remarkable New Yorker, and part of the founding team at Vital City
If you actually know how things work, you know that making the world a better place is less about the campaigns and politics of presidents, governors and mayors than about the daily, under-the-sink-with-a-wrench work of public servants. They are ones who figure out how to make governance flow like poetry, how to get from a to b to c, and most especially how to know that z is your goal.
Earlier this week, one of the greatest examples of this kind of public servant, Karen Shaer, died. She had been a federal prosecutor, a defense lawyer, a publishing sweepstakes business tycoon, and an advisor to a mayor and a governor. She was also the person with the widest and deepest and most devoted circle of friends and family of anyone I have known.
Karen was brilliant — not in a Hegel sort of way, but in a way that went right to the heart of the matter with clarity, precision and insight. She was kind and generous, in the confident and bracing manner of firstborns who sit comfortably with themselves and their unconscious magnetism. She had insanely good judgment, born from quiet listening, and the restraint, unusual in most, to put aside any psychodrama. She was hilarious. She lived her life with irrepressible joy and she had a keen sense of the absurd that the world can serve up.
Strange though it might be to phrase it this way, it seems uncharacteristic for her to have died, as death and Karen were not on the same wavelength. She was shockingly young, at the full height of her formidable powers.
I have known Karen since law school when I watched agog at the moot court finals in which the best of the third year students argued a case before a Supreme Court justice and two other distinguished judges. She cantered lengths ahead of her opponents. Her brilliance was not wrapped in the obscurantism that can sometimes mar legal argument. She was crisp and plain. She had that quickness of mind that good litigators (and great public servants) have, undergirded by a sixth sense in anticipating where the alternative storylines might go and an uncanny ability to put herself in someone else’s shoes. She was able to synthesize complicated topics and then push the analysis to an understandable and persuasive place.
Some years later, I was lucky enough to persuade her to work with me in the New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, where our goal was to get to the lowest crime rate with the lowest incarceration rate, using all (legal) means possible. But how? The criminal justice system is sprawling. It has no boss, with city and state agencies, independent judges, defenders, district attorneys and an enormous array of non-profits each having different obligations and interests. Our office had merely the power of cajoling and convening.
Karen was maybe 5’1”, but she was a giant when it came to organization, mobilization and persuasion. First came the data: She wanted to know about every person in jail, every story behind who was held and why — no mean task. Then came the negotiation, figuring out who could do what to get people released. Finally came the crucial work of making a regular and reliable system that could safely ensure a smaller jail population. Over the course of several years, the jail population reached historic lows (from over 11,000 to under 4,000), at a time when the city also experienced the lowest levels of crime that it had in decades.
This success was built in no small part on Karen’s capacity to do the dreary trench warfare that all byzantine bureaucracies require. But Karen was not just a strategist — she was an inspiration. She brought the best out of people because, well, she expected it, and if she expected it, you fell in line because you wanted to honor that trust. While we shouldn’t have to wait for funerals to take the measure of a life, the hundreds of people who crowded the hall at Riverside Memorial Chapel earlier this week, ranging from scores of 20-somethings to people well into their eighties, bore some testament to how her friendship had shaped so many lives.
In the early days of Vital City, before we had written a single story or published any data or issued any policy recommendations, I asked Karen if she would help us to figure out what Vital City could be. She was an absolutely crucial piece in the puzzle. As was characteristic, she sought no public credit for her work.
No person’s life is summed up in a recitation of their work. Karen maybe more than most lived in a way that demonstrated how it is the thickness of life and thought and family, all tightly interwoven, that gives richness to all our lives. And one does not stand without the other.
It is the nature of things that fame accrues to those who seek it. Campaigning and politics may win the day, but it is policy and governance that steady a city and permit it to be great. For sure, people campaign in poetry but govern in prose. But governance, when it is well-practiced, has a certain poetry too. It is the poetry of people, of human connection, bent to the common task — with all its nuts and bolts — of making cities work. There was no one better at this complicated work than Karen Shaer.
Karen leaves behind her extraordinary family. Her mother, Janice, an example of the joy and life force that marked Karen’s life; her beloved sisters, Ellen and Jen, who were her earliest co-conspirators and remain so along with their families; her adored husband Ben, and her children, Joey and Jess, and their spouses, Lisa and Matt. And, of course, their dog, Fenway.
May her memory be a blessing.
