"A kind of abdication"
Revisiting Zohran Mamdani and the NYPD with Katie Way
In Issue Sixteen, Katie Way wrote about the lessons Zohran Mamdani might learn from how Bill de Blasio’s mayoralty was derailed by the New York Police Department — how, “faced with a blue wall of opposition to his reformist agenda, de Blasio faltered, and never regained his footing.” Now that we’re over a hundred days into Mamdani’s first term, our Essays Editor Lyra Walsh Fuchs checked in with Way about Mamdani’s early efforts to find his own footing when it comes to the boys in blue.
In your Drift piece, you wrote that in order to succeed, Zohran Mamdani “cannot flinch” at the reactionary voices within the NYPD. You also warned against keeping Jessica Tisch on as police commissioner — advice that Mamdani, of course, did not take. What’s your sense of the state of the relationship between the mayor and Tisch? Her own brother called Mamdani an “enemy” of Jews.
It feels pretty safe to say that, when it comes to their specific dynamic, Tisch is running the show. At City & State’s New York City Power 100 event on April 28, she made a quip about the mayor’s “core principle to ensure the strength of our city: Support, Reinforce, and Grow, or, for short, SRG.” It was a joke, but one that is ultimately about asserting her dominance: Mamdani vowed to disband the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group (SRG), which responds to protests, but Tisch hasn’t agreed to it. She doesn’t seem to be worried about political blowback.
One of the times that the mayor stood his ground against the NYPD outrage machine — because it really is an outrage machine — was when police showed up at a snowball fight that had been set up by streamers and got hit with snowballs. Mamdani was clear that he didn’t think we should arrest anyone over it. I just wish he brought a bit more of that energy to his other dealings with both Tisch and the department as a whole.
Is it possible that Mamdani is too afraid of the NYPD’s P.R. machine?
Mamdani is so politically canny. In realms where he feels more comfortable, he’s taken stands; I think he is trying to draw power from other victories. But I also think it does feel like a kind of abdication, at least so far. He announced a Mayor’s Office of Community Safety, falling short of his campaign-trail promise to create a full Department of Community Safety. And Jessica Tisch wasn’t at that announcement. No one in uniform from the NYPD was at that announcement. How much buy-in can there really be? It feels more like a pet project than a serious evolution in the way that the city imposes law and order and justice.
What’s your sense of his supporters’ reactions to all of this?
It’s only been a hundred days; it would be pretty crazy if we were having this conversation and saying: Wow. He did it all. The SRG is gone. There’s no more gangs database. Still, he could have gotten rid of Tisch.
But even as he was making these promises on the campaign trail, they weren’t his core focus. Most people were not voting for him because of a super fleshed-out NYPD-related policy. He has been delivering and putting up fights in other areas that were most important to his base. The people most likely to ding him on this are, broadly, to his left. I think his base isn’t thrilled, but is more focused on other aspects of the mayoralty.
Is there anything that has surprised you so far when it comes to Mamdani and the police?
I would have liked to have seen him react more strongly to the shooting of Jabez Chakraborty back in late January. After reaching out to the city many times, trying to get this young man mental health treatment, his family ended up calling 911 and requesting, specifically, an ambulance. Two cops showed up instead, and after less than a minute, shot Chakraborty. Thank God he didn’t die.
Mamdani commended the officers in his initial statement, which inspired a lot of anger. He did end up meeting with the family. Still, even though the mayor advised against it, Jabez did end up getting charged for assaulting an officer. The NYPD has a long history of shooting New Yorkers who are having mental health crises. Mamdani could have used the incident as more of a launch pad for the Office of Community Safety, or the Department of Community Safety.
The past week or so has seen a few flashpoints: the NYPD’s apparent support of ICE arresting an immigrant at a hospital in Bushwick, and the NYPD’s barricading of blocks around a synagogue where a real estate company was selling illegally occupied land in the West Bank. In both incidents, the NYPD violently cracked down on protesters. What’s your sense of the conversations happening within and around the Mamdani administration about these episodes?
I think the NYPD’s response to both of these incidents shows that Mamdani is letting someone else call the shots when it comes to the way law enforcement responds to protesters. NYPD’s actions showed deference toward, respectively, the federal government’s immigration policy and the Democratic establishment’s tolerance for land sales that the U.N. and International Court of Justice have both described as illegal. The former is especially striking to me because Mamdani’s star rose in the mayoral race when he was captured on video shouting down Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan last spring. One would expect (or, at least, hope) that Mamdani, as mayor, would do what he could to maintain that stance, but it seems like he doesn’t consider forbidding his police department to coordinate with ICE within the realm of possibility.
See you tonight at NeueHouse at 7 p.m. for our Issue Seventeen release party!
Alyssa Katz in the Forward reported that this was the first time that protesters had actually targeted a Jewish neighborhood rather than the immediate area next to the synagogue so FYI.