On January 1, Zohran Mamdani will be ostensibly in control of the NYPD, a massive, domineering, and well-funded department with satellite offices in 13 countries and four U.S. states.
Though candidate Mandani didn’t exactly make slamming the NYPD a central pillar of his campaign, he did propose a number of significant overhauls. Most notably, he promised to create a new agency, the Department of Community Safety, which would shift responsibility for issues like mental health crises and public homelessness away from the police, and to significantly expand the Civilian Complaint Review Board's power to discipline officers. He also shared that he wanted to disband the Strategic Response Group, a notorious military-style protest-control unit, along with ending the use of the NYPD's gang database.
But of all the issues the Mandami administration will navigate, reforming the NYPD is the most fraught with potential disaster, and recent indications suggest he'd prefer to avoid the sort of firestorm that dramatic reforms might provoke among the city's police unions, conservative media, business leaders, and financial elites.
In October, the democratic socialist who once called to defund the department he referred to as "racist, anti-queer and a major threat to public safety," apologized to the NYPD on Fox. And somewhere around the time that Jessica Tisch accepted Mamdani's offer to remain on as police commissioner, those reform proposals mutated into a series of funding quibbles and "concerns."