On Wednesday morning, as Mayor Zohran Mamdani was mugging with toddlers at a press event reminding parents to sign up for the pre-K and 3K lottery, reporters were locked in on a different topic: the great NYPD Snowball Fight Discourse, now in its fourth day.
If you haven't been following, the issue is this: Some police officers were in Washington Square Park during a big social-media supercharged snowball fight, and while at that snowball fight, those cops got hit with some snowballs. Some people—the police commissioner, the police unions, disgraced former governor and twice-defeated mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo, a Long Island Republican assemblymember, others—raised a hue and cry, demanding arrests and felony charges for the snowball tossers.
As we tried to point out in our own way on Tuesday, this dudgeon is, on its face, deeply stupid and embarrassing for everyone perpetuating it. That's not stopping anyone.
"Mr. Mayor, are you willing to revise your statement regarding the snowball fight, given that this was not exactly a friendly back-and-forth snowball fight?" 1010 WINS reporter Juliet Papa intoned gravely at Wednesday's press conference. "The police that were there were not throwing any snowballs."
Mamdani answered evenly: "I am not going to be banning snowball fights."
The fact that the police commissioner, elected officials, and the holders of journalistic sinecures are litigating a snowball fight like husky red-faced third graders is obviously absurd. (When it serves its public relations purposes, the NYPD loves a snowball fight as much as anyone.)
But just underneath the absurdity lies one of the most volatile fault lines in city politics: The rift between elected government on the one hand, and the political power of the NYPD and the constellation of interests with which it is aligned on the other.
Or, more specifically, the gulf, minimized and papered over in official statements, between Mayor Mamdani and his police commissioner, Jessica Tisch.
When Hell Gate pressed then-candidate Mamdani in October about the wisdom of retaining Jessica Tisch as his police commissioner, given her demonstrated hostility to his avowed criminal justice positions, his answer was simple. "The police commissioner will follow my lead because at the end of the day, I am the mayor."
For close watchers of city politics in general and the NYPD in particular, that answer felt naive if not willfully misleading. The reality of the situation, as the mayor must know by now, is that One Police Plaza has long been an independent and imposing node of political power quite distinct from whatever executive in City Hall the department may nominally report to.
That independence is less glaringly obvious in administrations where the interests of the police and the mayor align, as in the mayoralties of Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, or in administrations in which the department effectively swallows City Hall, as in the administration of Mayor (and retired NYPD officer) Eric Adams.
But when a mayor is deemed insufficiently deferential to police power, the police have ways of imposing a political cost, as David Dinkins learned while trying to impose civilian oversight on police misconduct, and as Bill de Blasio learned after he failed to condemn protesters upset that the cop who killed Eric Garner wasn't charged with a crime.
Throughout all types of administrations, police exceptionalism is a constant. Summoned to appear before the people's elected representatives in City Council, department leadership may or may not choose to attend. The NYPD's roughly $10 billion budget is inviolable, and the shadow budget it receives from wealthy private interests through the New York Police Foundation is opaque. The NYPD sports a press-and-propaganda shop that dwarfs those of City Hall or any other agency, and a powerful legal bureau that overwrites City policy with its own preferences. When the NYPD doesn't like the civilian oversight of the CCRB or the Department of Investigation, it disregards it. When the NYPD doesn't like the laws it is bound by, it ignores them.
The source of the NYPD's political power is compound and complicated. The NYPD is positioned as the guarantor of safety for people worried about crime, as well as the guarantor of order—the order that makes living cheek by jowl in a city bearable, but also the order of social relationships, power, and wealth distribution that governs our society. Threats to the NYPD's unbounded ability to enforce that order are treated as a threat to the order itself.
The city's law enforcement unions negotiate contracts and defend their members' labor rights like any other union, but are unique among the city's municipal unions in also pursuing a political agenda of mandatory police worship and accountability sabotage that is both frequently unhinged and wholly complementary to the department's maintenance of independent political power.
In 2020, when street protests put police accountability squarely on the political agenda, police officials and unions had a predictable freak-out, often amplified by a credulous press. Anarchist schemers were stashing pallets of bricks around town to hurl at officers, we were told. Malevolent Shake Shack servers were poisoning cops' smoothies.
It is the threat of this kind of revolt of the order-keepers that the police and their allies have held over Mamdani's head even before he was elected. As a democratic socialist with redistributionist policy aspirations, Mamdani is clearly aware that his political enemies are waiting to pounce on any opportunity to portray him as a poor custodian of New York's order. Mamdani has so far attempted to defend that flank by giving the NYPD power bloc what it wants: Leaving its commissioner in place, apparently abandoning some of his promised police reforms. In exchange, he clearly hopes, he'll get a little room to move his core agenda of affordability down the field.
The Police Snowball Fight Discourse reveals the folly of this bet. Police unions operate at the same piercing frequency of grievance whether an officer is killed or just gets wet. Billionaires, the corporate lobby, and the political right don't need an uptick in crime numbers as pretext to start drawing blood from the mayor. Tisch doesn't require any reformist provocation from the mayor to openly defy his leadership. The battle between Mamdani and his political opponents was always going to be fought, in bad faith, on the terrain of public safety. It is deeply stupid, but ultimately not surprising, that the precipitating event of that battle should be a snowball fight.
Mamdani himself has done a good job with his remarks on the subject, saying that police and all municipal workers should be respected, while reminding everyone that we're talking about a snowball fight. But he is evidently unable or unwilling to bring his police department into line. Mamdani says he doesn't think that the people who threw snowballs should be criminally charged with assault. Yet his police commissioner has launched a criminal investigation, and his police department is distributing photos of snowball fight participants announcing that they are wanted for assault. Thursday morning, the NYPD announced one of them has already been arrested.
Mamdani has the authority to call that off, but he's not. He's letting it happen. The decision to let the NYPD go rogue and openly flout his own public position will have very real and immediate consequences for the people the NYPD intends to charge with assault on a peace officer, a C-class felony that carries a sentence of three and a half to 15 years in prison.
It will also, of course, have consequences for the future of his relationship with Tisch, the NYPD, the police unions, and everyone who hopes to bully him with law-and-order rhetoric.
To them, and to the rest of us, it raises the question: If Mamdani won't stand his ground on something as ludicrous as a snowball fight, will he stand his ground at all?