A Mayor Mamdani would OBVIOUSLY be far worse than Bill de Blasio

New York City survived Mayor Bill de Blasio; can Zohran Mamdani really be that much worse? Sadly, the answer is a clear YES.Indeed, Blas just cast major doubt on Mamdani’s expensive agenda, telling the Times of London (of all places!): “In my view, the math doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, and the political hurdles are substantial.”Yep: Even Bill de Blasio is more realistic than Mamdani (who he nonetheless endorsed last month); let’s review the contrasts.Mayor de Blasio’s impact on public safety was awful, but largely delayed: Crucially, he took office certain he couldn’t let the bottom fall out after 20 years of falling crime and hired Bill Bratton, an architect of the city’s early-1990s policing turnaround, as his police commissioner — and even got the City Council to support enlarging the NYPD’s ranks in the early years.Yes, Blas’ relations with cops were rocky, since he’d won the Democratic nomination with ads that treated the NYPD as racist and he rapidly settled dubious court cases with agreements that restricted key policing powers and installed a federal monitor over the department.As the years went on, he backed decriminalizing various quality-of-life offenses, such as public urination, and in his final year went along with the increasingly radical City Council’s move to end qualified immunity for city police officers — leaving every cop at risk of being bankrupted if something goes wrong on the job through no fault of his or her own.Nor did de Blasio fight the Legislature’s deadly criminal-justice “reforms” or the lunatic drive to close the Rikers Island jails.In short, Blas’ watch was mostly peaceful but laid the groundwork for the crime explosion that started in 2020 and has yet to be fully contained.Subscribe to our daily Post Opinion newsletter! Please provide a valid email.

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