Mamdani’s impending high-wire act
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Zohran Mamdani’s impending high-wire act: Managing the NYPD
Zohran Mamdani has called for defunding and dismantling the NYPD. He openly mocked a crying police officer on social media. And he wants to radically change the way officers respond to calls. All of it puts him on a collision course with the NYPD’s more than 30,000 officers and their powerful labor unions. Appeasing everyone will be impossible, a former NYPD chief says. The city’s police department has long drawn the ire of New York City progressives who have accused the NYPD of overly aggressive policing, surveilling the populace, protecting officers accused of misconduct and resisting efforts at reform. But as crime and police misconduct have waned as top issues for voters, the Democratic nominee kept his focus on affordability during the primary to great effect. He walked back his more acerbic remarks about the department while offering few specifics about how he would manage it aside from a suite of pledges like reining in overtime excesses. The Midtown mass shooting has complicated that dynamic with just over three months until the November general election.
The 33-year-old democratic socialist has called for defunding and dismantling the NYPD. He openly mocked a crying police officer on social media. And he wants to radically change the way officers respond to calls — and his far-left base is expecting even more.
All of it puts Mamdani — the Democratic nominee for mayor and the leading candidate in the general election — on a collision course with the NYPD’s more than 30,000 officers and their powerful labor unions. Appeasing everyone will be impossible.
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“He’s going to walk through the door with the department and police unions very nervous,” said Terence Monahan, who previously served as chief of department, the highest uniformed rank in the NYPD. “They are going to jump on anything he does or says.”
Throughout the campaign, Mamdani has stuck to a mostly anodyne message: He has pledged to maintain funding for the department while creating a Department of Community Safety in the hopes officers and detectives can focus more on solving crimes.
But his reputation precedes him.
Two days after an NYPD officer was fatally gunned down in a mass shooting in Manhattan, Mamdani on Wednesday continued to face criticism for his past statements. While he was on vacation in Uganda — and slow to respond to the shooting — his prior views immediately resurfaced after it became clear NYPD officer Didarul Islam was among those killed.
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Pulling that tension even tighter will be how Mamdani cooperates — or not — with the administration of President Donald Trump, who has mused about taking over New York City governance on account of Mamdani’s affiliation with the Democratic Socialists of America and has falsely suggested Mamdani is in the country illegally.
The Democratic nominee has already pledged to push back against arrests being carried out by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But the NYPD collaborates with all manner of federal law enforcement agencies on issues like gun and drug trafficking and interstate pursuits of those accused of crimes.
Should Mamdani take charge of the NYPD, the effects could ripple across the city — for both New Yorkers and police officers. His oversight of the force could also define the course of his mayoralty and the democratic socialist experiment more broadly.
The city’s police department has long drawn the ire of New York City progressives who have accused the NYPD of overly aggressive policing, surveilling the populace, protecting officers accused of misconduct and resisting efforts at reform. Taken together, the department’s arch-critics argue the NYPD’s modus operandi more broadly reinforces inequality and socioeconomic stratification.
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Mamdani is no exception. But as crime and police misconduct have waned as top issues for voters, the Democratic nominee kept his focus on affordability during the primary to great effect.
He walked back his more acerbic remarks about the department while offering few specifics about how he would manage it aside from a suite of pledges like reining in overtime excesses. That reticence has given him more leeway in the general election against independents Andrew Cuomo, incumbent Eric Adams and attorney Jim Walden, along with Republican Curtis Sliwa.
“He’s a little bit of a blank slate,” said Liz Glazer, who runs the policy journal Vital City and ran the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice under former Mayor Bill de Blasio. “And it will depend a lot on who he surrounds himself with.”
The Midtown mass shooting has complicated that dynamic with just over three months until the November general election.
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Wednesday morning, just after returning to American soil, Mamdani visited the family of Islam, the slain officer, before hosting a press briefing with the co-founder of the Bangladeshi American Police Association and the head of building service workers union 32BJ SEIU — both of which lost members in the deadly rampage.
And so instead of answering questions about city-run grocery stores, how he will convince Gov. Kathy Hochul to hike taxes in an election year or the particulars of free childcare, the Democratic nominee was pressed to explain his pledge to disband the Strategic Response Group — an NYPD division, which has aggressively policed protests to the chagrin of New York City progressives and also responded to the active shooter situation Monday. And he was repeatedly asked about his prior calls to defund the department.
“I am not defunding the police; I am not running to defund the police,” Mamdani told reporters. “Over the course of this race, I’ve been very clear about my view of public safety and the critical role that the police have in creating that public safety.”
The state lawmaker recounted how he was informed of the shooting at 4 a.m. in Uganda and put out a statement shortly afterward, subsequently speaking with NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch. He defended his call to disband the Strategic Response Group, saying that its mandate to police protests is too far from its original mission of responding to emergencies like Monday’s shooting. And he called out critics like Cuomo who have latched onto old social media posts to paint him as unfit to lead the nation’s largest police department.
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“Andrew Cuomo is far more comfortable living his life in the past and attacking tweets of 2020 than running against the campaign that we have been leading for the last eight months,” Mamdani said, explaining that many of his prior social media posts — like the one in which he ridiculed a police officer for crying — were penned in frustration in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. “The tweet that you refer to is a tweet that is out of step with the way in which I not only view police officers, the immense work that they do in this city but also the seriousness with which we need to treat that work.”
The appearance offered just a taste of the high-wire act awaiting Mamdani should he be elected and take office in 2026.
The city’s institutional left has long criticized the NYPD’s gang database as a racist dragnet that unfairly ensnares predominately Black youth. The department argues it is a key crime fighting tool that was recently instrumental in indicting 16 people accused of gang-related shootings.
Left-leaning state lawmakers like Mamdani have championed criminal justice reforms that began in 2019, such as eliminating cash bail for lower-level offenses. NYPD brass have railed against those same laws and blamed Albany for stubborn crime rates.
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Even the NYPD’s own inspector general has taken issue with a swashbuckling police unit created by Adams called the Community Response Team, which police leadership have defended as an essential tool in fighting gun violence.
Mamdani’s ability to appease his base on these issues will be counteracted by logistical realities.
Much speculation has focused on who he would pick as his police commissioner. But the Democratic nominee’s hold over the department will depend just as much on roles farther down the organizational chart.
The NYPD’s chief of department, for example, oversees the daily operations of the sprawling agency and, per rules outlined in the City Charter and civil service statutes, must be someone of a certain rank. Precedent also suggests whoever fills that role should have decades of experience in a variety of high-profile positions — overseeing budgets, publicly testifying before hostile lawmakers, speaking at press conferences — to effectively wrangle a sprawling bureaucracy and earn the trust of the rank-and-file. That chief of department, in turn, will then help select deputy commissioners and chiefs who require experience of their own.
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In other words, Mamdani will need to rely on insiders to run the very institution his supporters want him to dramatically overhaul.
“There’s a reason that people spend 30 or 35 years rising up through a profession, developing greater responsibilities before you get to the level where you are remotely qualified to make the kind of life-and-death decisions that have to be made in split seconds,” said Kenneth Corey, who served as chief of department at the outset of Adams’ term.
Those department veterans will push Mamdani not only to uphold some policing techniques anathema to progressive Democrats, they will also encourage the democratic socialist to work with law enforcement agencies overseen by Trump.
Mamdani has joined with a broad swath of Democrats to condemn Trump’s focus on immigration enforcement in New York City — a federal effort that is set to grow after more than tripling the budget of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to $28 billion. Yet that represents a fraction of the cooperation between the NYPD and federal partners.
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ICE also helps police the city’s ports. Police brass convene regularly with the Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Marshals’ local fugitive task force, Homeland Security Investigations and the Secret Service. And cops have a daily meeting with the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives to address gun trafficking.
In the aftermath of Monday’s shooting, the Adams administration worked closely with the FBI to identify the shooter and conduct investigations in his hometown of Las Vegas.
New Yorkers’ feelings about policing and safety are fickle. The criminal justice reform movement of 2020 shifted so dramatically that, by 2021, the city elected a law-and-order ex-cop as its mayor. And Mamdani’s dilemma, should he become mayor, could share similarities with de Blasio’s efforts to balance support for the police with demands from his base.
De Blasio ran more explicitly on police reform, enraging police unions so thoroughly in the process that officers turned their backs on the former mayor at a hospital where two slain officers were taken just a year into his term. Patrick Lynch, the head of the Police Benevolent Association at the time, said de Blasio’s rhetoric meant he “had blood on his hands.” And officers staged what would be the first of several work slowdowns.
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Yet de Blasio also boosted NYPD headcount during his tenure and gave wide latitude to his three commissioners, all NYPD veterans who assuaged concerns within the business community. During the social justice protests of 2020, the mayor defended the actions of officers policing protests so thoroughly that he alienated some of his most loyal backers.
So far, Mamdani’s supporters are giving him the benefit of the doubt. But the lessons of de Blasio serve as a cautionary tale as the Democratic nominee faces a similar balancing act.
“Cops turning their back on [de Blasio] at funerals in late 2014 and the aggressive, yet seemingly successful, tactics of Lynch and the Police Benevolent Association, unequivocally impacted his strategic approach to these issues,” political consultant Neal Kwatra, who has advised and supported de Blasio throughout his career, told POLITICO in 2020, “and arguably the fate of his mayoralty and how history will view it.”