Exclusive | Mamdani tries to save face with Darializa Avila Chevalier, DSA comrades after ditching plan to scrap NYPD unit

Mayor Zohran Mamdani is scrambling to save face with Darializa Avila Chevalier and other increasingly frustrated city socialists after he put a campaign promise to scrap an elite NYPD unit on the “backburner,” The Post has learned.Hizzoner issued an urgent mandate to police brass and City Hall officials last month to cobble together police policy change about the department’s Strategic Response Group, or SRG, a counter-terrorist and protest unit, according to sources with knowledge of the talks.Mamdani, who took office this year, is trying to craft a move that would appease his base about the ignored campaign vow while juggling the realities of policing in the Big Apple, the sources added.“It wasn’t really a priority,” said one source with knowledge, adding that the talks had started earlier this year but proved to be seemingly too complicated to navigate politically and were put off.“It was on the backburner,” they added.The hasty order from the mayor came in response to House member-elect Darializa Avila Chevalier, whom Mamdani endorsed in June.The liberal firebrand had dragged the police commissioner online, calling for her to resign and for the SRG to be disbanded, the insiders noted.A potential disbandment has proved to be a near-impossible task, without leaving the country’s largest police force without a terror or mass casualty response unit, according to sources.But anything short of eliminating the unit for good could fall far short in the eyes of the far-left wing of his party, including Chevalier, who won in New York’s 13th Congressional District primary in large part from the mayor’s endorsement.Chevalier, a defund the police and prison abolitionist, sparked the mayoral backlash from the left in mid-October when she accused the SRG of misconduct after she was pushed during an unruly protest.

She was captured on camera getting in the face of cops, screaming.The claim came even though the SRG didn’t respond to the protest.Regardles...