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Gabrielle Gurley

Gabrielle Gurley is The American Prospect’s deputy editor. Her Twitter is @gurleygg, and her email is ggurley@prospect.org.

Recent Articles

Getting Beyond ‘Broken Windows’ Policing in Illegal Dirt Bike Dilemma

As some cities continue to address the problem with punitive methods, other cities are taking a more collaborative approach.

Gabrielle GurleyMay 27, 2016
(Photo: AP/Connecticut Post/Autumn Driscoll)
(Photo: AP/Connecticut Post/Autumn Driscoll) Dirt bike riders cruise illegally on a city street in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in November 2014. W hen the weather warms up in New York and other cities, some young men take to the streets on non-street-legal motorcycles, known as dirt bikes and all-terrain vehicles. The illegal caravans of young men performing acrobatics and weaving in out of traffic at high speeds are free entertainment for some bystanders, but a seasonal nightmare for police departments. The bikes pollute neighborhoods with noise, put pedestrians and drivers at risk for injuries and death, and leave youth at risk for potentially dangerous confrontations with police, encounters that have a high potential for violence. “We are going to crush them on TV to make a point,” said New York Mayor Bill de Blasio last month. That’s what the New York Police Department plans to do with the hundreds of illegal dirt bikes and all-terrain vehicles that the city has seized. The dirt bike...

Long Lines and Disasters: The TSA in a Time of Troubles

A conversation with former Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Juliette Kayyem on the future of airport security.

Gabrielle GurleyMay 20, 2016
AP Photo/Ted S. Warren
AP Photo/Ted S. Warren TSA agents check passenger boarding passes and identification at a security screening checkpoint, Thursday, May 19, 2016, at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. The Transportation Security Administration is a perennial punching bag for air travelers, members of Congress, and municipal officials from coast to coast. However, the disappearance of EgyptAir Flight 804 en route to Cairo from Paris puts the ongoing furor over the long waits at TSA security checkpoints into a different perspective. “The [TSA’s] priority is security, it is not ease of travel,” says Juliette Kayyem, a former Homeland Security assistant secretary and currently an emergency management and national security lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The EgyptAir tragedy comes at a time when public frustration with the TSA has been mounting. Last week, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson warned that passengers could expect even longer waits during the summer travel season...

The Wrath of Khan

The newly elected mayor of London has some choice words for Donald Trump and the presumptive GOP nominee's brand of Islamophobia.

Gabrielle GurleyMay 13, 2016
(Photo: Rex Features via AP)
(Photo: Rex Features via AP) Sadiq Khan, the newly elected mayor of London, arrives at City Hall on his first day at work on May 9. S adiq Khan, London’s recently elected mayor, is eager to build trans-Atlantic urban partnerships. An energetic fan of great cities around the world, Khan has expressed admiration for such stateside peers as New York’s Bill de Blasio and Houston’s Annise Parker. He’s also impressed his American counterparts. The U.S. Conference of Mayors is so enthusiastic about the 45-year-old former minister of transport that the group invited him to give a keynote address at its annual conference this summer. In a normal year, the winner of the London mayor’s race would have gone unnoticed by the vast majority of Americans. But Khan, who ran under the Labour Party banner, has just become the first Muslim mayor of London, and he has also plunged headlong into a war of words with Donald Trump, deftly setting up the presumptive Republican nominee for his first major...

Can the Feds Get Washington’s Metro Right?

The D.C. Metro system is in crisis, and a power struggle between federal agencies fighting for the right to oversee safety isn’t helping.

Gabrielle GurleyMay 06, 2016
Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/AP Images
Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/AP Images A Metro trains stops at the Capitol South station on Friday, May 6, 2016. T he D.C. Metro system is in crisis, and a power struggle between federal agencies fighting for the right to oversee safety isn’t helping. Washington Area Metro Transit Authority General Manager Paul Wiedefeld’s decision to shut down portions of the system for massive repairs comes in the wake of continued infighting between federal agencies over which one of them should bring the hammer down on the hapless, accident-prone subway system. The partial shutdown will slow train travel so that work crews may expedite repairs after a troubling series of fires and other incidents. The imbroglio has its origins, in part, in the inability of the Obama administration and its predecessors to persuade Republicans on Capitol Hill to step up and provide more funding for the authority’s long-overdue maintenance and repairs. Metro, like most of the country’s big-city transit agencies, has a...

Kildee: Michigan Austerity Policies Doomed Flint

Anti-government mania is to blame for the city’s contaminated-water crisis, says Flint’s congressional representative.

Gabrielle GurleyApr 29, 2016
(Photo: AP/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
(Photo: AP/Manuel Balce Ceneta) Representative Daniel Kildee of Michigan speaks to reporters about the Flint, Michigan, lead poisoning during a news conference on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, April 20. T he contaminated-water crisis in Flint, Michigan, has propelled the city from a public relations disaster to municipal freefall. As President Obama prepared to travel next week to a city where residents still don’t trust their tap water, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette filed criminal charges against two state officials and one city employee who monitored Flint’s water supply. Meanwhile, despite a national uproar and a declared public health emergency, Congress has been slow to provide emergency aid to the poor and predominately African American city. This week, one of the city’s most outspoken leaders, U.S. Representative Dan Kildee, the Democrat who represents Michigan’s Fifth District, once again called on Congress to come up with a federal aid package . The two-term...

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