Zohran Mamdani's impending high-wire act: Managing the NYPD
The state lawmaker recounted how he was informed of the shooting at 4 a.m. in Uganda and put out a statement shortly afterward, subsequently speaking with NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch. He defended his call to disband the Strategic Response Group, saying that its mandate to police protests is too far from its original mission of responding to emergencies like Monday's shooting. And he called out critics like Cuomo who have latched onto old social media posts to paint him as unfit to lead the nation's largest police department.
'Andrew Cuomo is far more comfortable living his life in the past and attacking tweets of 2020 than running against the campaign that we have been leading for the last eight months,' Mamdani said, explaining that many of his prior social media posts — like the one in which he ridiculed a police officer for crying — were penned in frustration in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder. 'The tweet that you refer to is a tweet that is out of step with the way in which I not only view police officers, the immense work that they do in this city but also the seriousness with which we need to treat that work.'
The appearance offered just a taste of the high-wire act awaiting Mamdani should he be elected and take office in 2026.
The city's institutional left has long criticized the NYPD's gang database as a racist dragnet that unfairly ensnares predominately Black youth. The department argues it is a key crime fighting tool that was recently instrumental in indicting 16 people accused of gang-related shootings.
Left-leaning state lawmakers like Mamdani have championed criminal justice reforms that began in 2019, such as eliminating cash bail for lower-level offenses. NYPD brass have railed against those same laws and blamed Albany for stubborn crime rates.
Even the NYPD's own inspector general has taken issue with a swashbuckling police unit created by Adams called the Community Response Team, which police leadership have defended as an essential tool in fighting gun violence.
Mamdani's ability to appease his base on these issues will be counteracted by logistical realities.
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But an Urban Land Institute study published just before Lightfoot launched the pilot-zone test warned that some such measures can impede the growth and socioeconomic benefit of ADUs. The City Council likely will take up the measure in September. Meanwhile, state Rep. Kam Buckner, D-Chicago, has drafted a bill for the state legislature that would ban prohibitions on ADUs and add measures designed to encourage their construction. The benefits of ADUs and the momentum toward removal of the ban are powerful enough that aldermanic privilege must not be allowed to stand in their way. A city ordinance drafted with appropriate safeguards could help address the city's housing shortage at minimum cost to our cash-strapped city. In other words, ADUs are an idea whose time has come — and the delays caused by the claims of aldermanic privilege are yet another reason why the end to that outdated tradition is long past due.
