Mayor Zohran Mamdani was imbued with some pretty sky-high expectations from his supporters when he took office this year after an election that reversed a decades-long trend of abysmal voter turnout in New York City. It was inevitable that some of that energy would run into the realities of governing, and Mamdani has already made a number of pragmatic choices that have annoyed or enraged some supporters.
Still, for the most part, Mamdani has been making moves (if incremental ones) in the direction of his stated priorities and has not backed down rhetorically, with what so far appears to be one particularly notable example: the police. Nearly four months in, the mayor has kept Adams-era Commissioner Jessica Tisch, walked back from a pledge to abolish the department’s scandal-plagued gang database, slow-rolled a promise to disband the city’s anti-riot squad, the Strategic Response Group (a big enough retreat that Tisch herself appeared to recently joke about it on stage) and has generally avoided touching the third rail of NYPD reform.
Even in some high-profile recent cases that could have made for easy soundbites criticizing NYPD practices, Mamdani has demurred. After his ally Councilmember Chi Ossé was wrestled to the ground and arrested while protesting against an alleged deed theft, Mamdani launched a new office focused on deed theft but said very little about the arrest itself, even as other elected officials criticized it. After Streetsblog revealed that an NYPD officer had racked up 547 speeding tickets in the city since 2022, Mamdani called the conduct “unacceptable” but refused to say anything about official consequences, just that his administration was “going to continue to have a conversation internally around what it looks like to follow through on that.”
There are a few different strands converging here. First, the NYPD has long seen itself as a sort of meta-institution, part of the city’s civilian government structure but also meaningfully outside it, or at least in a different position than agencies like the departments of education or sanitation. Because of the police monopoly on the use of force, its presumptively uniquely dangerous nature – and its historical closeness to the city’s private power centers – it’s been the consistent position of the NYPD brass and certainly its unions that the agency must be left to more or less police itself, with little outside accountability.
In one infamous episode, Patrick Lynch, at the time the president of the Police Benevolent Association (the union for line cops in NYC), raged at the mere recommendation by an internal NYPD administrative judge to fire Daniel Pantaleo, the officer who choked and killed Eric Garner in 2014 (after having been the subject of a litany of earlier civilian complaints). Lynch, never one for understatement, said the move would “paralyze the NYPD for years to come.” The message was clear: subjecting NYPD officers to basic accountability and best practices would not be tolerated. That message has been reinforced over and over by not only union officials but NYPD officials themselves. The last act of former NYPD Commissioner Eddie Cabán, who resigned in disgrace amid federal legal scrutiny, was to water down the so-called disciplinary matrix used to determine punishments for officers. Tisch herself spent the tail end of the Adams administration unilaterally reducing misconduct penalties for officers.
A lot of this type of analysis on the NYPD’s aversion to accountability will get coded as being anti-police, but I don’t think that’s right. I would argue that, on balance and in the long term, this reflexive posture is bad for the NYPD. Lack of accountability breeds complacency, apathy, misconduct and mistrust. It is difficult to find any public polling gauging New Yorker’s confidence in the NYPD, but the past several years have seen numerous sizable police accountability protests, including during 2023 demonstrations after the killing of Jordan Neely, which has generated tens of millions of dollars in settlements related to NYPD misconduct. The idea of cops standing around looking at their phones instead of solving crimes is a public meme at this point, surely to their own chagrin.
This lack of confidence has been in large part due to the public perception that whether they do well or do poorly at reducing crime, maintaining community relations, dealing with mental health crises or whatever else, they’ll just get another budget bump and cruise along, meaningfully outside the standard chain of civilian control. Any call for reform gets branded as “defund the police” or pro-crime or whatever in a feedback loop that stalls progress to the detriment, I believe, of both the public and the police.
Public perception was decidedly not helped by the Adams administration, when the cop-turned-mayor populated his government with a litany of buddies from his time as a police officer, many of whom fell under scrutiny as part of the broader air of corruption around Adams. In addition to Cabán, there were Jeff Maddrey and Phil Banks and Tim Pearson and Dwayne Montgomery, all with their own scandals. The former FBI official brought in to right the ship after the turbulent departures of Adams’ first two NYPD commissioners would go on to sue Adams and the NYPD, alleging that the department was run as a coordinated criminal conspiracy.”
Mamdani knows all of this, and certainly spent a chunk of his career thinking about it, as evidenced by the constant hand-wringing even pre-election over his old statements on the NYPD. The thing is, he realized early on (likely around the time that he decided to keep Tisch as commissioner over the objections of some of his own base) that actually reforming the NYPD’s institutional practices and wresting it towards being a more responsible and accountable agency would require functionally going to war with his own police force, which has staked its identity as being beyond this kind of oversight.
This is a fight that I think Mamdani could effectively win, but one that would require a huge investment of time and political capital that he (probably correctly) has determined he needs instead for his more legacy-defining objectives, namely the creation of his 2-K childcare programs and large amounts of affordable housing pushes, along with his ongoing efforts to push for taxes on wealthy New Yorkers and corporations. These swing-from-the-heel items are, I think, seeming only more urgent to the mayor as the global economy teeters from the destabilizations of the Iran war and, more abstractly, the AI industry, which threatens to upend our economic system whether its proponents are right or not. If they are, we will see massive job losses as the systems hoover up what were once entry-level and increasingly high-level occupations; if they are not, the AI bubble might burst and crash financial markets that have gone all-in on betting on the technology.
In any case, I think Mamdani has a very clear understanding of what he wants to be remembered for: reversing the Bloomberg-era sense of NYC as a playground for the rich, finally getting his hands around the housing crisis and taking aim at the escalating costs like childcare and healthcare – all steps to reestablish NYC as a city that can stanch the bleeding of middle-class families leaving the city and ultimately sustain and retain an upwardly mobile middle class. Maybe he’ll pull these off, maybe he won’t, but pursuing the NYPD fight would almost certainly hamper his chances, a lesson he likely learned from the administration of former Mayor Bill de Blasio.
De Blasio never undertook that serious an effort to reform the police, yet the force hated him, engineering an effective work stoppage in 2014 and disclosing personal information about the arrest of his daughter after the 2020 racial justice protests. As one de Blasio speechwriter put it to City & State, “De Blasio meant what he said when he vowed to change the NYPD… But then he tried, and there was infinitely more pushback than he’d anticipated. Maybe the most powerful force in the municipal government openly revolted against him, and it terrified him. It has ever since.”
I can imagine this analysis changing if and when Mamdani does meaningfully achieve other objectives. If he really feels like his priorities are coasting along and he can delegate and divert attention and political effort away, he could focus on the secondary objective of reforming the NYPD. That, however, seems unlikely, at least in the short term – and I’ve been around politics long enough to avoid speculating too much about the long term. In that way, the NYPD has won by default.
