Will Mamdani Abolish Police, or Simply Make Them Obsolete

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As part of his proposed city budget for 2026, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani just canceled the NYPD’s plan to hire 5,000 more police officers, undoing a key component of his predecessor Eric Adams’s initiatives. The move aligns with Mamdani’s campaign promise to keep police budgets and hiring in check. The young mayor also promised to create a Department of Community Safety while campaigning, an agency that, in theory, would divert certain emergency calls away from police. Although he did not include a line item for this department in his proposed budget, there are strong indications that the mayor plans to deliver on his abolitionist agenda by creating nonpolice alternatives to manage emergencies.

In 2020, when millions of Americans marched to protest the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd, many, including Mamdani, called for a defunding of police. But, five years later, Mamdani announced he would not, in fact, be defunding the police if elected as mayor, disappointing racial justice activists and critics of the police. And soon after his election, the mayor-elect announced in January 2026 that he would ask NYPD Police Chief Jessica Tisch to stay on in her leadership position.

Alex S. Vitale, a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and the coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project, isn’t discouraged by these moves. Author of the bestselling 2017 book, The End of Policing—considered a “bible of the movement to defund the police”—Vitale was invited in December 2025 to join the mayor’s transition team to work on community safety issues. While he disagrees with Mamdani’s decision to keep Tisch on, he speculates that the New York City mayor is protecting against “the risk of a real big political backlash” if he had started his term with an aggressive removal of Tisch and dismantling of the NYPD.

Vitale says, “We need to start by building credible........

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