New York Shooting Puts Mamdani On the Spot Over Policing Views

Hindustan Times

3 days ago

New York City's deadliest shooting in the past 25 years has put public safety front and center in the mayoral race and highlighted a potential vulnerability for front-runner Zohran Mamdani.
The killing of four people—a New York City police officer, a security guard, a senior Blackstone executive and a real-estate firm employee— building">in a Midtown Manhattan office building rattled a city where mass attacks are rare and overall violent crime has fallen over the last several years. It also gave Mamdani's opponents an opening to highlight his past criticism of police and question whether he could win the trust of the country's largest police force.
Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, in 2020 called for defunding the police and described the NYPD as racist.
He has since softened his stance, but former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo accused his opponent of doing so out of political interest. 'Who's going to apply to be a police officer when that's what the mayor thinks of them?' Cuomo said in an interview with the New York Daily News on Tuesday.
The Queens state assemblyman was in Uganda for his wedding at the time of the shooting. When Mamdani returned to New York on Wednesday, he went to the home of the officer's family. He said at a press conference later in the day that he had held the officer's sobbing father in his arms.
Zohran Mamdani has been criticized by opponents for social-media posts critical of the NYPD that he wrote in 2020 during national protests over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
'This is a time to lead this city in coming together,' he said. 'Not a moment to try and score the very points that turn so many New Yorkers away from politics.'
Mayor Eric Adams spent Monday evening with the family and colleagues of Officer Didarul Islam who was fatally shot. Adams, a former NYPD officer who is campaigning for re-election on a law enforcement platform, praised the role of officers in keeping the city safe while speaking in personal terms about the killing, saying it made him reflect on his own son and the possibility of losing him.
Mamdani, who recent polls have shown running ahead of Adams and Cuomo, has made affordability the centerpiece of his campaign, with crime receding into the background for many voters. An Emerson College poll released before the Democratic primary in June found that the economy and housing affordability were voters' top issues.
That is partly because violent crime has dropped. Earlier this month, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch announced that the first six months of the year saw the lowest number of shooting victims in the city's recorded history.
Retired NYPD Assistant Chief John Hart said he believed Monday's shooting will put public safety back in the conversation, especially because the attack happened in a well-secured building in the heart of the city, where throngs of people work every day.
'People are going to be on edge,' he said. 'The shooting is a persistent reminder that New York City is always under threat.'
A mayor's administration depends on a strong relationship with the police force, which in turn keeps crime in check, former NYPD chief Terence Monahan said.
'No mayor is going to be successful if he and his police department are constantly at odds,' he said.
Adams won the 2021 race by promising to stop the surge in crime during the Covid-19 pandemic. The mayor, who is running for re-election on a third-party ballot line, has continued the law-enforcement drumbeat this year. But his campaign has been hobbled by his federal bribery case, which ended with the Justice Department dismissing the charges. Several high-ranking officials in his administration, including a prior NYPD commissioner, have resigned their posts after facing investigations.
Cuomo, who lost the Democratic primary to Mamdani and is also running on a third-party ballot line in the general election, also has pushed a public safety agenda, vowing to hire thousands more police officers if he wins the election.
Even before the shooting, the former governor questioned Mamdani's ability to work with the NYPD, pointing to social-media posts that Mamdani wrote in 2020 during national protests over the police killing of George Floyd, a Black Minnesota man.
'We don't need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety,' Mamdani wrote in a post. 'What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD.'
During his campaign, Mamdani has tempered his rhetoric, including Wednesday when he conceded some of his comments were out of step with his view of police today. He has said if elected, he won't defund the police, noting the department has a critical role to play in the city.
But he didn't walk back his pledge to reduce the police department's overtime budget and to eliminate an NYPD unit that responds to protests. To improve public safety, he said he envisions creating a new city agency that focuses on mental-health services and community-based violence-intervention programs.
'The vision that we have put forward in this campaign, despite what others may say, is not to defund the police,' he said Wednesday. 'It is in fact to allow those officers to respond to the serious crimes that many of them signed up to address.'
His next test comes Thursday, when he plans to attend the slain officer's funeral.
Such moments can be fraught for elected officials. Police didn't feel supported by then-Mayor Bill de Blasio when protests erupted in 2014 over Eric Garner, a Black man who died after an NYPD officer placed him in a chokehold. Union officials accused the mayor of fostering an anti-police environment and, in a display of disapproval, officers turned their backs on de Blasio later that year when he spoke at the funeral of an officer who was fatally shot in an ambush.
Monahan, the former chief who served in high-level roles in the de Blasio administration, said his former boss's relations with officers improved over time as he recognized the importance of showing a unified front with NYPD brass.
'We disagreed on a lot of things privately,' Monahan said. 'When it came time in public, we tried to keep the messaging as a single force.'
Write to James Fanelli at [e-mail]