Mamdani Is Facing Heat Over the NYPD. Here’s What He Should Do.

In recent weeks, New Yorkers have been presented with a series of false choices about how Mayor Zohran Mamdani should address public safety and the power of the NYPD.

Some have said that we can either support the police wholeheartedly or see crime and disorder rise. Others have warned that the city must implement conventional procedural police reforms or the NYPD will abuse its power. Others have suggested that the mayor must fire Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch or surrender all hope of creating a more just city.

There is perhaps no more powerful or politically sensitive entity for a New York City mayor to handle than the NYPD. Moving in any direction on policing invites anger from some portion of the mayor’s constituents. But there is a way for Mamdani to fulfill the public-safety policy pledges he campaigned on without derailing his administration. (Full disclosure: I served on the mayor’s transition team after his election, though I have no ongoing role in his government.)

Ten months into his tenure, Mamdani has avoided making an enemy of the NYPD—an accomplishment for any mayor, let alone a democratic socialist. But that peace has come at a cost: letting a variety of problems at the agency fester, or even worsen.

Since Mamdani took office, the NYPD has significantly increased low-level arrests, leading to higher headcounts at Rikers Island and backlogs in the court system. NYPD officers have repeatedly performed crowd-control duties that have facilitated ICE raids throughout the city. The Strategic Response Group unit continues to take an aggressive and at times violent approach to protests. The city’s independent Stop and Frisk Monitor has accused the NYPD of continuing to engage in unconstitutional stop-and-frisk activity and systematically underreporting the number of stops. NYPD officers accused of misconduct continue to face little or no consequences for their actions. And the NYPD continues to put the names of people accused of no crime into the racially discriminatory “Gang Database.”

Mamdani’s failure to act on these issues contradicts several of his campaign pledges. He said he would dismantle the Strategic Response Group, end the Gang Database, close down Rikers Island—which requires reducing low-level arrests—and invest heavily in a new Department of Community Safety to enhance the city’s capacity to prevent crime before it happens. The good news is that the mayor can still follow through on every one of these pledges—while avoiding some of the false choices currently on offer.

One thing Mamdani definitely does not need to do is reach for ultimately hollow versions of “police reform” that we already know won’t work. During the campaign, he rightly avoided talk of changes to training, symbolic policy adjustments, or other forms of proceduralism that have consistently failed to produce results over the last 10 years. These kinds of reforms produce the worst of all worlds: They don’t meaningfully change anything, but they still antagonize police unions and other entrenched forces.

Mamdani has mostly avoided these traps in office. (He did pledge more support for the Civilian Complaints Review Board, and has followed through on that to some degree, but this is a bit of an empty gesture since the police commissioner routinely obstructs the board’s investigations and overrules its findings.) Unfortunately, in response to the anger about the NYPD’s conduct in recent weeks, the mayor has suggested a pointless review of “use of force” policies that is destined to produce nothing of substance.

Police accountability organizers have also begun calling for the firing of Commissioner Jessica Tisch following the ICE shooting in Marble Hill and the subsequent violent NYPD response to protests there. While I counseled against retaining Tisch as early as the summer of 2025, firing her, without significant changes to public-safety policy, would be a hollow victory. If the mayor is serious about a new path for creating safety, he should focus on the substance of his agenda, not just the symbolism of who is in charge. The police commissioner works for him and should be instructed to make some major changes or, yes, step aside—the stance taken by New York City DSA. But the emphasis should be on the changes, which should be implemented in a responsible, transparent, and comprehensive manner.

As Mamdani made clear on the campaign trail, police are not the only tool for producing safety. The safest communities have low crime not because of intensive policing but because people’s everyday needs are being met. Delivering on the mayor’s affordability agenda and improving government services are important long-term strategies for enhancing public safety and community well-being.

But we also need immediate strategies to directly address crime and disorder conditions. That means following through on the mayor’s pledges to robustly fund the Department, now Office, of Community Safety, by expanding community-centered strategies to address violence, mental health crises, gender-based and domestic violence, hate crimes, and subway safety. The leadership of the new office is working hard to do this, but results have been slow to manifest, and the mayor has undercut their work with messaging that centers police as the primary tool for producing safety. Instead of leaning into this narrative, Mamdani can both dial back his material and rhetorical support for police and improve public safety through these essential evidence-based interventions.

Here are some of the changes that the mayor could make to enact his campaign pledges, respond to real community concerns about NYPD abuse, and maintain and possibly improve public safety.

The NYPD must be instructed to dial back low-level “broken windows” arrests. These are placing a tremendous burden on already poor and vulnerable communities. They are used to target almost exclusively poor people of color, many of whom are experiencing homelessness, untreated mental health and substance use disorders, and lack basic incomes.

The mayor must immediately enhance services for these populations so that everyday conditions improve for them and the communities they live in. That means adopting a robust Housing First approach that puts people in permanent housing with support services rather than endlessly cycling them through shelters, jails, hospitals, and transitional programs that fail to take into account their need for long-term stability and cost more than permanent housing. New York City currently has units designated for people in crisis, but there are often too many restrictions on accessing them and a lack of appropriate services to help people maintain stable housing.

The city also needs to expand community-based mental health and substance use facilities, including Clubhouses, Sobering Centers, Mental Health Crisis Respite Centers, and medically based drug treatment. And the mayor should look at a minimum basic income policy to create a floor for people who have been left out of the job market.

The mayor should create a plan to phase out the use of the gang database and gang suppression policing more broadly. Most of the people on the database are there simply because the police suspect they may be connected to illegal activity and violence, not because they have committed any concrete offense. There is no independent evidence that these practices reduce crime—but plenty of evidence that the harassment and criminalization of young people can actually make violence more likely.

The mayor should follow through on his prevention pledge and enlist intensive neighborhood violence reduction programs to work with these young people in real time—both to diffuse disputes and connect them with stable housing, help with mental health and substance use, and income supports. This means expanding and improving the current Crisis Management System by opening new sites and increasing their access to essential crisis stabilization services. This system has already been shown to drive down gun violence. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is already doing something along these lines, referring young people on the margins of violence to well-established programs to help steer them in a positive direction rather than surveilling and harassing them until they can be arrested and incarcerated.

The mayor does need to fulfill his promise to eliminate the current Strategic Response Group, but just as importantly, he needs to address the policies that guide the unit’s activities. Ever since it was created under Mayor de Blasio, the SRG has seen its mission primarily as one of suppressing any dissent that it perceives to be either too disruptive to daily life or too politically radical. Former NYPD chief of department John Chell recently posted that the SRG is hated because it has successfully “dominated” protesters in the service of “protecting and serving the true community members.”

The NYPD must be forced to accept that disruptive protest is a necessary and even desirable aspect of democracy and that people who engage in First Amendment activity are also legitimate community members. This means that the goal of protest policing must not be to suppress disorder at all costs.

Instead, the mayor should pursue a policy of “negotiated management” that emphasizes good communication with demonstrators before and during protests and tolerance of some disorder to help maintain an overall peaceful protest. This can be achieved in part through civilianizing the city’s approach as much as possible by creating a civilian office of community engagement that works with groups before demonstrations, issues permits, and has a visible presence during demonstrations to help keep protests on track. This can be used for the vast majority of protests that the SRG currently manages through intimidation and suppression.

That doesn’t mean that the NYPD will have no role to play in the immediate future. There will still need to be some kind of capacity to manage the possibility of violent protest and to make, when necessary, mass arrests in a responsible manner, but the SRG and its anti-terrorism focus are the wrong unit with the wrong approach.

Not all of this can be done overnight. It requires new investments, program development, and community consultation. But the mayor should begin publicly committing to move forward with these changes and implementing them as they are ready, rather than continuing to lean into a police-centered narrative about public safety and superficial calls for procedural reform that amount to little more than box-checking.