Zohran Mamdani claims he “no longer believes,” as he did just five years ago, that the New York City Police Department is a “wicked and corrupt” institution that must be “defunded” and “dismantled.”
He says he really didn’t mean it when he blamed “the police themselves” for “perpetrating an enormous amount” of violent crime, “especially with regard to sexual violence.”
He insists he was misunderstood when he tweeted, “The NYPD is racist, anti-queer and a major threat to public safety.”
Bull. Mamdani will be a disaster for public safety in New York City if he becomes our mayor.
A look at his agenda makes it crystal clear.
First and worst of all, he’ll add no police officers to the force — and will cut the hours of those who remain.
The NYPD’s 32,000-officer headcount is well below the 34,300 force of 2019, the safest year in more than 40 years. Index felony crimes are 26% higher today.
The city has compensated for the reduced patrol strength via overtime, which pays for extra subway police patrols, arrest processing and investigations and keeping order at protests and public events.
Yet Mamdani has long railed against police overtime and plans to eliminate it to fund his other programs — notably his Department of Community Safety.
Reducing overtime without expanding the force means fewer police on the street, making the city less safe and more chaotic.
Mamdani also remains full-steam-ahead on closing Rikers Island, which currently houses some 7,600 inmates — and replacing it with new borough-based jails containing room for just 4,100. (As a candidate for Assembly in 2020, he advocated building no Rikers replacement at all.)
That will put thousands of the most dangerous repeat offenders in the city on the street, with 2,500 of them lodged in “supportive housing” in a neighborhood near you, under the aegis of Mamdani’s DCS.
Mamdani has signed on to the Democratic Socialists of America’s “Agenda for Decarceration,” which calls for fully eliminating cash bail, repealing all mandatory minimum sentences, decriminalizing sex work and more. He has not repudiated those principles.
We’ve seen this movie before: When the city released 2,000 Rikers inmates under “bail reform” in 2020, crime shot up by 20%. When we released another 2,000 during the COVID-19 pandemic, shootings and murders doubled.
Now the city’s jail population stands at about 7,600, and crime has begun to slowly decrease.
Mamdani’s decarceration agenda will reverse that progress, as he pressures DAs to release defendants and drop prosecution of minor crimes.
His enforcement policies, too, will handcuff police instead of wrongdoers.
Incredibly, Mamdani would halt NYPD response to domestic-violence calls, claiming that poor police training escalates such situations. He’d have social workers respond instead.
He opposes any consequences for turnstile jumpers, thereby making farebeating legal. Why pay?
Mamdani opposes involuntary commitment of those with mental illness — you know, the guy sleeping in the subway or ranting at imaginary demons on the street.
“People should be allowed to make their own mental health care decisions,” no matter how delusional they are, he told The City.
He’d further restrict City Hall’s limited cooperation with federal immigration enforcement — meaning that he would release illegal aliens convicted of violent crimes onto our streets without informing ICE.
And a Mayor Mamdani would do lasting damage to public safety via the judges he appoints to the Criminal Court bench.
These judges, who set bail on criminal cases, will be taking their cues from the mayor — and will presumably be on board with his desire to basically do away with incarceration.
Under state law, judges decide whether to set bail, and in what amount. What do you think Mamdani’s judges will do?
And all of this is to say nothing about NYPD morale under a mayor who sees its officers as racist, homophobic sexual predators.
Recruitment and retention are difficult now; just wait until Mamdani takes office.
Politicians can normally be forgiven some of the stupid statements they’ve made in the past, when they were pandering to the public will (or their perception of it).
But Mamdani is no politician. He is a radical socialist and an anti-police ideologue.
He truly believes what he said in 2020: When it comes to crime, he cares more about the 7,600 people in city jails — victims, he believes, of an evil capitalist system — than about the city’s 8.5 million law-abiding citizens.
Under his watch, Rikers will close, jails will empty, criminals will walk free, police officers will be second-guessed and police patrols will decline.
We’ll see fewer arrests made, fewer crimes solved and far more dangerous streets.
But we’ll all be comrades in the glorious Democratic People’s Republic of New York City.
Jim Quinn was executive district attorney in the Queens District Attorney’s Office, where he served for 42 years.
