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Mamdani Is Facing Heat Over the NYPD. Here’s What He Should Do.

The mayor is being given a series of false choices over his public-safety agenda. But there is another way forward.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani speaks during an unveiling ceremony for a new 9/11 Memorial Wall at One Police Plaza on September 9, 2026, in New York City.

In recent weeks, New Yorkers have been presented with a series of false choices about how Mayor Zohran Mamdani should address public safety and the power of the NYPD.

Some have said that we can either support the police wholeheartedly or see crime and disorder rise. Others have warned that the city must implement conventional procedural police reforms or the NYPD will abuse its power. Others have suggested that the mayor must fire Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch or surrender all hope of creating a more just city.

There is perhaps no more powerful or politically sensitive entity for a New York City mayor to handle than the NYPD. Moving in any direction on policing invites anger from some portion of the mayor’s constituents. But there is a way for Mamdani to fulfill the public-safety policy pledges he campaigned on without derailing his administration. (Full disclosure: I served on the mayor’s transition team after his election, though I have no ongoing role in his government.)

Ten months into his tenure, Mamdani has avoided making an enemy of the NYPD—an accomplishment for any mayor, let alone a democratic socialist. But that peace has come at a cost: letting a variety of problems at the agency fester, or even worsen.

Since Mamdani took office, the NYPD has significantly increased low-level arrests, leading to higher headcounts at Rikers Island and backlogs in the court system. NYPD officers have repeatedly performed crowd-control duties that have facilitated ICE raids throughout the city. The Strategic Response Group unit continues to take an aggressive and at times violent approach to protests. The city’s independent Stop and Frisk Monitor has accused the NYPD of continuing to engage in unconstitutional stop-and-frisk activity and systematically underreporting the number of stops. NYPD officers accused of misconduct continue to face little or no consequences for their actions. And the NYPD continues to put the names of people accused of no crime into the racially discriminatory “Gang Database.”

Mamdani’s failure to act on these issues contradicts several of his campaign pledges. He said he would dismantle the Strategic Response Group, end the Gang Database, close down Rikers Island—which requires reducing low-level arrests—and invest heavily in a new Department of Community Safety to enhance the city’s capacity to prevent crime before it happens. The good news is that the mayor can still follow through on every one of these pledges—while avoiding some of the false choices currently on offer.

One thing Mamdani definitely does not need to do is reach for ultimately hollow versions of “police reform” that we already know won’t work. During the campaign, he rightly avoided talk of changes to training, symbolic policy adjustments, or other forms of proceduralism that have consistently failed to produce results over the last 10 years. These kinds of reforms produce the worst of all worlds: They don’t meaningfully change anything,........

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