Mamdani still plans to unravel the NYPD and with it, public safety

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign promise to destroy the NYPD by eliminating the Strategic Response Group and scrubbing the gang database was back-burnered as he got his sea legs, but recent statements signal that he is still on track to neuter our Finest.As part of his effort to turn the NYPD into a passive “community safety” agency, Mamdani dispatched a fact-finding team to Columbus, Ohio, (of all places) to learn how the police there manage crowds at protests.You might think that New York, which has thousands of protests — both planned and spontaneous — every year, involving sometimes hundreds of thousands of people, would have adequate experience with crowd control.Certainly more than Columbus, a city a tenth our size.But Columbus has a supposedly innovative policy of “deploying officers skilled in dialogue and problem-solving” at protests in order to “foster legitimacy, trust, and mutual understanding.”These “Dialogue Officers” are backed up by riot control police kept at a distance.But this is already what the NYPD does at protests.Per Commissioner Jessica Tisch, the SRG was deployed — distantly — at only 6% of 2025’s 4,255 protests and made arrests at only a few dozen demonstrations.It was only in 2023 that the city legally adopted a hands-off “tiered” approach to policing street protests, and agreed not to encircle protesters or otherwise disturb their “First Amendment Activity,” which is how the left describes all protesting, even such blatantly illegal behavior as blocking traffic.Gotham is already doing what Columbus does, but leftists are addicted to identifying “best practices” elsewhere to justify their own approach here.

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Never miss a story.We saw this when Mamdani’s mayoral campaign cited the CAHOOTS program in Eugen...