Mamdani Backslides on Public Safety, Reverting to His Old Anti-Police Habits

As a candidate, Mayor Zohran Mamdani assured the electorate that his anti-cop days were behind him. Facing criticism from New Yorkers concerned about the erosion of public safety, Mr. Mamdani insisted that he did not intend to defund the police if elected. He also issued a public apology for calling the NYPD “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety.”Now that he’s gotten comfortable in City Hall, though, Mr. Mamdani is proving that old habits die hard. He has dramatically downplayed a clear attack on NYPD officers as a harmless snowball fight that “got out of hand,” refusing to say whether charges should be pressed, despite Commissioner Jessica Tisch’s characterization of the incident as “criminal.” This came on the heels of Mr. Mamdani’s announced plan to cancel his predecessor’s plan to hire 5,000 new cops while reducing the NYPD’s roughly $6.4 billion budget by $22 million. With an estimated budget deficit of $5.4 billion, Mr. Mamdani has said his preliminary budget reflects the city’s dire fiscal straits. But he managed to find $5.6 million annually for the City’s Office of Racial Equity and $4.6 million for the Commission on Racial Equity for a combined total of $10.2 million — a 42 percent increase. Despite his campaign claim that he understood the “critical role” the police play in keeping the city safe, public safety is clearly not this mayor’s top priority. He has set a tone in which disrespect and even violence against cops is not only tolerated but dismissed as harmless. The NYPD’s former chief of department, John Chell, warned that Mr. Mamdani’s budget is a “recipe for disaster” as the blue line is stretched thin and the possibility of losing thousands more officers to retirement. Mr. Chell said the department needs a minimum of 40,000 police officers to be effective, but it is operating with around 34,000 — about 1,000 fewer than its budgeted headcount.New York City is a global hub of finance, entertainment, and tourism. A strained police force puts that all in jeopardy. While murder and violent crime rates have declined since the Covid-19 pandemic, felony assaults, rapes, and sexual assaults all increased last year, and crime on the subways rose 17 percent in the final five weeks of 2025. Mr. Mamdani says that increasing mental health outreach and homelessness aid to community patrols is a more effective and humane way to approach some of the city’s most intractable challenges. Yet he has yet to disclose how he plans to fund his proposed Department of Community Safety, which he said during the campaign would cost $1.1 billion. He also claims shifting some responsibilities to the Department of Community Safety, such as responding to some of the 200,000 mental health calls the NYPD responds to every year. But as the Police Benevolent Association’s president, Patrick Hendry, noted, those calls make up only a small fraction of the workload shouldered by an understaffed, over-extended force. Thankfully, some elected officials, including Mamdani’s fellow Democrat, Governor Kathy Hochul, assert that it is “never acceptable to throw anything at a police officer.” And it’s encouraging to see some City Council members pushing back on Mr. Mamdani’s proposed cuts; the entire body must stand firm against these dangerous reductions. Budget cuts gutted the NYPD in the 1970s, and New Yorkers paid dearly over the decades with increased violent crime, population flight, and urban decline. A dispirited, defunded police force is a disaster for the future of this City. We can’t let that happen again.

Mamdani Backslides on Public Safety, Reverting to His Old Anti-Police Habits

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