In Major Cities, Stubborn Crime Forces Leftist Mayors To Reverse Policies on Policing

Two of the country’s most visible socialist mayors — both of whom came to prominence, in part, by championing the “defund the police” movement and community-based policing — have instead found themselves embracing the traditional approach to public safety that they had vowed to reform.Mayor Katie Wilson of Seattle, a self-identified socialist who propelled herself to the city’s top job on a platform that called for, among other things, more homeless shelters, was forced last week to address “chronic safety issues” in a neighborhood plagued by a drug hotspot.That corridor, in the city’s Little Saigon neighborhood, had become the site of open-air drug dealing and fentanyl use, EBT fraud, and black-market vending of stolen goods —so much so that the Seattle Times described it as “the Seattle neighborhood that government forgot.”In an about-face, Ms. Wilson said she was now “committed to ending the perception” that illegal activity in Little Saigon was “acceptable.” “We are expanding police personnel in the area to engage directly with individuals participating in these activities, explain that the behavior is no longer tolerated, and help ensure that the sidewalk and transit stops are safe and accessible for all,” Ms. Wilson said.In a 2020 op-ed, Ms. Wilson, then a general secretary of the Transit Riders Union in Seattle, argued that there was “a strong argument for simply disbanding police departments and starting over.”During her 2025 mayoral campaign, Ms. Wilson ran on a platform calling to “close the revolving door from jail to homelessness and drug use” by employing the city’s existing Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program instead of street-level enforcement by police. The program aims to direct perpetrators of low-level crimes into support services rather than the criminal justice system. Yet Little Saigon presented a direct challenge to Ms. Wilson’s ambitions. Friends of Little Sài Gòn, a community nonprofit, estimated that from 2022 to 2025, 21 small businesses left Little Saigon due, in part, to safety concerns over drugs and street crime.One local business owner told Fox 13 Seattle last week that Ms. Wilson needed to enforce the law in Little Saigon, questioning why he pays “so much tax to live in unsafe cities?”In making her announcement, Ms. Wilson said that while an increased police presence was one part of her new approach, she still believes her city “can’t arrest our way out of these problems.”“Changing conditions here will take time, but I believe these steps will finally start moving us in the right direction,” she said. Two days after Ms. Wilson’s announcement, a 37-year-old woman was shot and wounded at a homeless encampment roughly one block from the drug corridor at Little Saigon.Ms. Wilson, like her ideological counterpart, Mayor Zohran Mamdani at New York, was elected on a platform that was deeply skeptical of using police resources for low-level crimes that might be better handled by civilians, among them trained public health and social workers. Yet rampant crime — coupled with the World Cup, for which both Seattle and the New York metro area are co-hosts — is forcing both mayors to embrace the traditional approach to public safety that they had vowed to reform.Mr. Mamdani campaigned on slashing the NYPD’s overtime budget and redirecting the savings to help fund his new Department of Community Safety at a projected cost of $1.1 billion. Now in the thick of the city’s busiest summer in recent memory, the democratic socialist has instead been forced to deploy more officers throughout the city for longer shifts that could cost the city an additional $20 million in overtime. In March, Mr. Mamdani signed an executive order to launch the Office of Community Safety, with a different name, smaller staff, and $260 million in funding. The new OCS aims to employ a “prevention-first, community-based” approach to issues like mental health, hate crimes, subway safety, and victim support. Yet New York’s police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, told the City Council in June that no programs have moved to the new department from the NYPD’s purview, and that her department has yet to discuss with the administration how it will work alongside his new office.In announcing the launch of OCS, Mr. Mamdani said the new division would better utilize the city’s Behavioral Health Emergency Assistance Response Division, or B-HEARD, which sends mental health professionals, and not the police, to specific mental health emergencies. During a press conference earlier this year, Mr. Mamdani said OCS would “build a mental health system rooted in prevention, and sustained care, and a real crisis response, so officers no longer have to handle these situations alone.”This past weekend, at Bedford-Stuyvesant, Lamin Simmons, a 48-year-old with a history of mental illness, was shot and killed by police inside a brownstone after hours of attempted negotiations during a hostage situation. An NYPD detective was shot in the leg in the exchange of gunfire. “I want to thank every person involved at each step of this incident, every professional who responded to an immensely challenging situation with professionalism and with calmness,” Mr. Mamdani said during a press conference on Friday.It was a striking shift from the mayor who, in January, came to the immediate support of Jabez Chakraborty, a 22-year-old with schizophrenia who was shot by two officers responding to a 911 call made by the man’s relatives. Mr. Chakraborty had charged at the cops while holding a large knife. An officer ordered Mr. Chakraborty to drop the knife eight times before shooting him, according to the Queens district attorney, Melinda Katz.Mr. Mamdani visited Mr. Chakraborty in the hospital and said on X that the man “needs mental health care, not criminal prosecution by a District Attorney.” He suggested that Mr. Chakraborty’s case would have been better handled by a department of community safety.Appearing on the “Bad Faith” podcast Monday, a professor of sociology and author of “The End of Policing,” Alex Vitale, who served on Mr. Mamdani’s transition team, said the mayor’s decision to increase the NYPD head count by 580 officers “crossed a line” for the police abolitionist. Mr. Vitale was also confused by the mayor’s decision to retain Ms. Tisch, whom “Bad Faith” host Briahna Joy Gray calls a “billionaire Zionist police commissioner,” and whom Mr. Vitale suggested may “pull levers that could undermine the rest of his agenda.”“There is also not a lot of clarity about who he’s talking to that’s leading him to make these decisions other than the police commissioner,” Mr. Vitale said. Not every socialist mayor or mayoral candidate has waited for a crisis to unfold before making the adjustment. The Democratic nominee for mayor of Washington, D.C., City Councilwoman Janeese Lewis George, a democratic socialist, has arguably struck that rare balance between proposing alternative public safety strategies and responding to the Metropolitan Police Department’s dwindling number of officers. The MPD has seen its force shrink to 3,144 as of February 2026 from more than 4,000 in 2013. The Police Executive Research Forum executive director, Chuck Wexler, attributes the decline to federal law enforcement agencies poaching officers with signing bonuses and job perks.“You have this hiring blitz going on where you have local jurisdictions competing with federal agencies,” Mr. Wexler told the Washington Post.Ms. Lewis George wants to bolster MPD’s low numbers by expanding the police cadet program and offering perks — like childcare benefits — to help make the district competitive with the federal law enforcement agencies. She has also proposed strengthening and expanding resources for detectives — a far cry from two 2019 social media posts in which she pledged to “absolutely divest” from the MPD and argued that “more policing doesn’t work, we can’t enforce our way to safer communities.”Whether Ms. Lewis George, who is heavily favored to become the next Washington mayor, will stick to her campaign promises to support the MPD with a pragmatic approach remains to be seen.Now just six months into the job at Seattle, Ms. Wilson, who had never held office prior to becoming mayor, doesn’t have the luxury of time.Her city attorney, Erika Evans, issued a memo in January telling the Seattle City Attorney’s Office’s Criminal Division to refer every drug possession and public use arrest to its LEAD Liaison Team before prosecuting.Before Ms. Wilson took office, LEAD referrals were down 30 percent from 2024 to 2025, while drug arrests by the Seattle Police Department were up by 47 percent. Last week, Ms. Wilson said that SPD would either arrest repeat offenders or enroll them in LEAD diversion programs, pledging $1.1 million in one-time funding to support additional treatment and outreach services in the neighborhood.Yet by Ms. Wilson’s own admission, Seattle’s permanent supportive housing and shelter system is “operating at capacity.” Moving drug addicts and displaced people off the streets and to the services they need will be a challenge.It was a problem that Ms. Wilson herself foreshadowed in her 2020 op-ed for Cascade PBS: “Institutional culture change is hard.”

In Major Cities, Stubborn Crime Forces Leftist Mayors To Reverse Policies on Policing

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