From Defund To Defer: Allies Are Losing Patience With Mamdani’s Light Nypd Touch

NEW YORK — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani promised a new way of policing on the campaign trail. Nine months into his term, some of his allies on the left are growing frustrated with just how little has changed.

Since taking office in January, Mamdani has done more than retain former Mayor Eric Adams’ police commissioner, Jessica Tisch. He has largely let her run the department on her terms, frustrating criminal justice advocates who expected him to more fundamentally shift how the city polices its residents.

Mamdani’s police department continues to employ a controversial DNA database used in criminal investigations. His administration is seeking to expand a public housing camera program that has sparked a lawsuit from tenants over surveillance and invasion of privacy concerns. And six people have died in NYPD custody this year, some being held on low-level charges, prompting concern about medical treatment while under arrest.

Under the mayor, the police department is still arresting sex workers even after Mamdani said he supported decriminalization. And the city’s Law Department is fighting a lawsuit accusing the department of using sealed court records of minors in criminal investigations, allegations the NYPD denies.

The Legal Aid Society, a nonprofit law firm that has long tangled with the NYPD (and whose former leader is now Mamdani’s top lawyer), provided POLITICO with a detailed list of more than a dozen practices — some initiated under Adams, many that predate him and several that are being actively litigated — that the organization contends are infringing on the rights of New Yorkers, specifically low-income residents in need of services.

Legal Aid is among the criminal justice groups losing patience with how little City Hall appears to be invested in change at the nation’s largest police department, highlighting a weakness on the mayor’s left flank.

“You can’t divorce the affordability agenda from what we’re seeing take place with the NYPD,” said Phil Desgranges, the attorney-in-charge at Legal Aid’s Criminal Law Reform Team. “You can't credibly promise to make New York more affordable while continuing to arrest, prosecute, and jail people for conduct that's often rooted in poverty.”

The NYPD defended many of its practices as key crime solving tools.

The department said its camera program in public housing is helping solve more crimes faster and argued many public housing residents support it. The medical examiner found three of the people who died in police custody succumbed to acute drug intoxication. An NYPD spokesperson noted that all but one of the detainees were either transferred to or cleared by medical facilities before their deaths. And while the department is still arresting sex workers, the NYPD pointed out that arrest numbers are down, the department is focused on trafficking and that it never charges trafficking survivors.

Policing has become a telling measure of how much Mamdani has shifted from his days as the state lawmaker who called to defund the NYPD to the mayor who now oversees it.

Retaining Tisch, for instance, appeased Gov. Kathy Hochul and repelled soft-on-crime attacks from Republicans and doomsayer Democrats. But the decision was received with wounded disbelief by supporters.

Giving near free rein to his commissioner — a billionaire heiress who has proved her mettle as a demanding municipal manager — has let Mamdani focus on campaign promises like universal childcare while she presides over declines in major crimes. But this has led him to forsake public safety pledges that conflict with Tisch’s vision: A controversial NYPD unit, the Strategic Response Group, remains intact. A database of known or suspected gang members is still in use. Separately, the mayor rolled out a Department of Community Safety that has done little to systemically change how emergency mental health calls are handled. And the number of summonses for lower level offenses, including criminal summonses, continues to rise.

“They’re owning these policies in a way I think is surprising,” Desgranges said. “We thought they’d want to take a different approach. But in the areas where we thought there would be a shift — and therefore an improvement for our clients — we’re just not seeing it play out.”

Police reform has long been central to the policy platforms of big-city Democrats, rising to new levels of prominence after the 2020 murder of George Floyd and the killing of Breonna Taylor at the hands of law enforcement.

Former Mayor Bill de Blasio campaigned on critiques of the NYPD and, during the summer of 2020, pledged to cut funding to the department (though he later reversed course and, more broadly, is also remembered for giving the NYPD a wide berth). Even Adams, a MAGA-friendly ex-NYPD captain, campaigned in the 2021 Democratic primary on his past criticism of the police department as a way to leaven his law and order message to voters.

The Mamdani administration pointed to several policing measures enacted since January to demonstrate his record of change.

Calls to 311 about homeless encampments, for example, are now routed to homeless outreach workers instead of the NYPD. Mamdani named a permanent head to an independent police misconduct body, the Civilian Complaint Review Board. And after a violent arrest in a Brooklyn liquor store, the mayor and Tisch disbanded the narcotics team responsible.

“As the Mayor has said, New Yorkers should never have to choose between safety and justice, and our administration is committed to delivering both,” mayoral spokesperson Sam Raskin said in a statement. “We’ve created the Office of Community Safety to coordinate a whole-of-government approach to public safety, appointed the first permanent CCRB chair since 2020 while increasing funding and staff for the agency, strengthened police transparency by codifying the release of body-worn camera footage within 30 days of critical incidents, ended criminal summonses for cyclists and e-bike riders for minor traffic offenses, expanded job training for people in custody and on probation, and taken significant steps to close Rikers Island and transition to a safer, more humane borough-based jail system.”

But when measured against the breadth of the NYPD’s operations, Mamdani appears to have concluded police reform is something he can afford to largely avoid, at least for now.

The 34-year-old has cultivated a fiercely loyal base willing to accept deviations from their shared ideology. The issue of municipal police reform has faded as a top priority for Democrats more focused on the transgressions of federal immigration agents. And newly empowered organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America, Mamdani’s political lodestar, are concentrating their energy on winning tax increases and opposing Israel’s war in the Middle East.

So far, that group has offered scant public criticism of Mamdani’s policing record, though when it joined a chorus of criminal justice advocates to chide the mayor over plans to hire 580 new officers earlier this year, he reversed course.

“Unless he is hearing from DSA on something as a priority, I don’t think it’s going to move him and I don’t think he will get there on his own,” said one Democratic strategist who was granted anonymity to candidly discuss the mayor’s public safety record. “This does not seem to be the thing he feels like he’s in City Hall to work on.”

And yet, the headlines that don’t seem to fit with the administration of an avowed leftist continue to pile up.

Last month, nonprofits critical of the NYPD’s use of surveillance technology found that the department had used Flock Safety, a controversial automatic license plate reader system, even though it does not have a contract with the firm. And in August, a federal monitor released a report that, while noting some improvements in the NYPD’s constitutional use of stop-and-frisk through the end of 2025, still found several shortcomings. Advocate groups have pointed to data showing racial disparities in stops have continued into the Mamdani era.

The NYPD said some of its officers had participated in a Flock Safety trial that allowed them to track license plates that had left New York City, but that the department did not share any municipal data with the company. The department also noted that stop-and-frisk incidents are a fraction of what they were 15 years ago.

One of the biggest qualms with Mamdani’s police department has been the focus on low-level offenses, part of a massive quality-of-life enforcement push that has spurred a threefold increase in summonses compared to five years ago. Tisch has billed the initiative as a way to respond to more complaints from New Yorkers about problems in their neighborhoods. But advocacy groups like VOCAL-NY, which participated in a week of court watching in August, see it instead as criminalizing poverty, a view shared by many progressive elected officials.

Other issues have received less attention, but have added to frustrations from the advocacy world.

Legal Aid is suing over the NYPD’s practice of detaining some suspects beyond a 24-hour limit between arrest and arraignment. The group is challenging in court the department’s practice of keeping suspects handcuffed throughout the arraignment process. And it’s representing clients suing over the police department’s practice of making arrests for low-level offenses instead of issuing tickets.

An NYPD spokesperson said that sometimes individuals must be held for more than 24 hours, often when they need medical attention, but that this does not violate the law.

Groups including the New York Civil Liberties Union have taken issue with the department’s use of surveillance technology like license plate readers and facial recognition. This year, NYCLU filed a lawsuit over vehicle stops, which it has called “stop-and-frisk on wheels.”

Michael Sisitzky, assistant policy director at the NYCLU, said that while Mamdani has taken some steps welcomed by advocates, more needs to be done.

“I don’t think anybody ever thought it would be easy to shift these practices in reality, but it is disappointing we haven’t seen more,” Sisitzky said. “This was a mayor who laid out a clear vision during his campaign that we needed a more just, and less harmful, approach.”

The NYPD has defended its use of facial recognition, license plate readers and its network of cameras as essential tools for solving crimes. A spokesperson noted that an officer cannot make an arrest based on a facial recognition match alone, and provided numerous examples of suspects accused of violent crimes being identified through camera footage or pings on automatic license plate readers.

Mamdani remains incredibly popular in New York City and, according to one recent survey, got the highest marks of any elected official in the state. Still, the issue of policing stands to become more divorced from Mamdani’s ideological bent the longer he's in office.

Arrest numbers have been on the rise over the last fiscal year, which includes the first six months of Mamdani’s term, and with them complaints against NYPD officers. An instance of officers shooting someone in mental distress has already alarmed Desis Rising Up & Moving, a close Mamdani ally. And the progressive wing of the City Council is pushing legislation that would force Mamdani’s hand in dissolving the SRG and the gang database.

The DSA’s approach to the growing disparity could be decisive.

The New York City chapter will soon host its city convention, which will help decide the group’s political priorities. The most popular proposal circulating among membership, according to two people with knowledge of the pitches, entails pushing for a more fulsome community safety department proposed by the mayor.

The organization is extremely invested in the success of Mamdani as an example of what democratic socialism can accomplish. With that in mind, Grace Mausser, NYC-DSA’s co-chair, said the institution has to be careful about how it pushes for police reform — which she noted is still a top priority — without impacting Mamdani’s popularity.

The idea, she said, is to help generate buy-in from both the public and within the administration before the mayor pursues the type of reforms that have bedeviled past city executives.

“We have a responsibility to change these political conditions so that Zohran can do things that I believe he wants to do — and if he could snap his fingers he would do,” she said. “But we have to make it possible, and possible in a way that he remains a popular mayor. We’ve seen many mayors fail when it comes to doing anything related to the police department … and it can handicap all the other things you want to do.”

Other allies of the mayor want to see change on a quicker timeline.

Council Member and fellow DSA-member Tiffany Cabán said the mayor has taken a big first step with his new public safety department and has done much to address affordability through other initiatives like an expansion of childcare — which she said are crucial to boosting safety by making New Yorkers less likely to commit crimes in the first place. But she argued falling back onto failed policing practices undercuts that progress, and that a major shakeup in NYPD operations is necessary. And she’s confident she's not alone.

“It's nine months in. You give a certain level of grace for coming in and having to do a whole lot in a short amount of time,” Cabán said. “But we're getting to a point where I think you’ll see outside organizations, advocacy groups and directly impacted folks knocking at the administration’s door and saying: Hey, time is kinda up. We need to see some more movement.”