Democratic candidate for mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has recently come under fire for disparaging the police in old social media posts, addressed a group of NYPD officers on Tuesday night and promised to relieve them of the duty of handling the majority of mental health calls if elected.
At Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza, where he was accompanied by a group of police officers from the neighboring 78th Precinct for an annual National Night Outevent, Mamdani stated, “We must stop asking them to respond to nearly every single failure of the social safety net.” By expecting them to perform every other task we can think of, we are preventing them from performing their duties.
Mamdani, a socialist who lost to Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic mayoral primary last month, was alluding to his plan to establish the Department of Community Safety, an organization whose job it would be to react to inquiries about people going through mental health crises. Many of these calls are currently handled by police officers, but Mamdani contends that this places an excessive amount of strain on them and that the new organization would free them up to concentrate on combating crime.
In addition, Mamdani congratulated the cops, stating that the horrific shooting in Midtown last week, which claimed the lives of four New Yorkers, including NYPD Officer Didarul Islam, had given him a fresh respect for their work. “No matter which precinct they are from, I learned in the lesson from Detective Didarul Islam’s life the sacrifice and service that so many officers extend to this city every single day,” he added.
When Mamdani came, the majority of the cops at the ceremony kept their distance from him but refrained from publicly expressing their disapproval.
Mamdani was approached by two police officers, the 78th Precinct’s commanding captain and an officer of Bangladeshi heritage, who wanted to shake hands and snap photos with him. Following his public outrage to the murder of Islam, a Bangladeshi national, Mamdani informed reporters the officer thanked him.
Mamdani’s interaction with the police comes as Cuomo and Mayor Adams, who are both seeking to unseat him in the general election in November as independents, have taken notice of 2020 social media posts he made calling for the NYPD to be defunded and calling the department a racist and anti-queer organization that poses a serious threat to public safety.
Mamdani has disassociated himself from his 2020 tweets as a mayoral candidate, stating that he no longer favors defunding the NYPD and that he prefers to maintain the department’s manpower at the same level while relieving officers of their mental health responsibilities.
However, a number of NYPD union leaders, the majority of whom support Adams for reelection, have criticized his previous posts, claiming they believe they reveal his actual views on cops.
When the Daily News asked Mamdani if he was concerned that working with union leaders like the mayor would be challenging, he said that he looked forward to talking with them but that the city needed a new approach to public safety policy.
He asserted that it is our collective responsibility to present a vision that goes beyond simply repeating the same concepts we have heard over and over.
Letitia James, the state attorney general who accompanied Mamdani to the Grand Army Plaza event and is endorsing his mayoral candidacy, said he still has to put in some effort to win the trust of NYPD officers. In order to achieve this, she suggested that Mamdani and NYPD officials meet at Manhattan Riverside Church.
“I think it’s necessary because we need to heal and bring this city together, and I think Riverside Church is the best place to do that because great leaders like Dr. King and Mandela all spoke there,” she told The News.
