Progressives Blast Mamdani for ‘Escalating’ Arrests of Black and Brown New Yorkers for Low-Level Offenses

The mayor who once wanted to defund the police is now perpetuating the city’s history of over-policing New York’s minority communities, ramping up arrests of people of color for minor infractions such as taking up two seats on the subway, according to criminal justice reform and civil rights groups.The groups, which included the Legal Aid Society, Freedom Agenda and Court Watch NYC, spent a week monitoring arraignments in courtrooms across the five boroughs earlier this month and collected data indicating that the mayor is breaking promises to his progressive base. “Mayor Mamdani campaigned on a different vision for community safety, and his administration must make good on that promise by ending the criminalization of poverty and directing resources away from police encounters and toward housing, community-based treatment, services, and other investments that actually keep communities safe,” the Legal Aid Society’s Director of Policy with Criminal Law Reform, Amanda Jack, said in a joint statement Thursday. The organizations spent a week tallying criminal defendants. Over four days and 370 arraignments, observers found that 97 percent of people arraigned were New Yorkers of color, and 57 percent were black. Almost 80 percent of the cases concerned offenses for which police could have issued a Desk Appearance Ticket rather than lock up the accused.Their data follows confrontation between the mayor and his base in May over Mr. Mamdani and Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch’s Summer Violence Reduction Plan to send an additional 3,800 officers into high-crime zones, public housing and the subway each night. The police department reported a 22.7 percent drop in major crime following implementation of a similar Winter Violence Reduction Plan at the start of the year.“Our observations of court arraignments this week proved what our members from Black and Brown communities are continuing to experience — hyper-policing, over-criminalization and incarceration,” Freedom Agenda Co-Director Darren Mack said in the statement.The groups repeatedly invoked “broken windows policing,” a concept promoted in New York by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Police Commissioner William Bratton in the 1990s. The theory was that a city could head off major crimes by targeting smaller infractions such as graffiti and turnstile jumping. While crime did drop significantly in New York and nationally throughout the 90s, critics of broken windows have attributed those gains to economic progress and skewered the approach for overwhelmingly targeting poor and minority neighborhoods. The groups say Mr. Mamdani’s police commissioner is doing more of the same.“Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch began the quality of life offense crackdown under former Mayor Eric Adams, expanding police duties to ‘non-criminal, non-emergency issues’ such as responding to 311 complaints, and has further escalated the arrests under the current administration,” they wrote.A spokesperson for the New York Police Department denied any return to the past in a statement to The New York Sun on Thursday.“The NYPD makes arrests based on complaints received from the community. Since the end of the Bloomberg administration, the NYPD has made significant efforts to reduce the amount of low level arrests. This resulted in a 50% decrease in misdemeanor arrests in 2018 from 2010,” the spokesperson said. “Since the City has emerged from the pandemic years, the amount of misdemeanor arrests have held steady at levels seen in 2018.”On Monday, as part of a news release announcing the removal of more than 3,000 guns from city streets this year, the police department also cited a 24.8 percent drop in violent crime from May 4 to August 10 under its Summer Violence Prevention Plan.

Progressives Blast Mamdani for ‘Escalating’ Arrests of Black and Brown New Yorkers for Low-Level Offenses

Progressives Blast Mamdani for ‘Escalating’ Arrests of Black and Brown New Yorkers for Low-Level Offenses

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