Zohran Mamdani Better Get Ready To Fight The NYPD

Wall Street oligarchs aren't the only ones ringing the alarm against the people's mayoral candidate. That's the sound of the police 

Edited by Sam Thielman and Spencer Ackerman

SPENCER HERE. Every real New Yorker knows that those who truly wield power in this city are the oligarchs and the New York Police Department. Sometimes they're the same person, like the billionaire heiress Jessica Tisch, the current NYPD Commissioner. In Zohran Mamdani, they see their worst nightmare: a serious challenge to their power, fueled by a mobilized people's movement. 

The morning after Zohran took down Andrew Cuomo and Wall Street began its crashout, I started thinking about how he's going to be in a constant struggle for power with the police. Do not think for a second that there is a vote total large enough to deter the NYPD from undermining a Mamdani mayoralty. Like KRS said, watch out, they run New York. 

But they don't have to. A big question is whether Mamdani, in City Hall, will be willing to fight back – and if New Yorkers will support him if he does. 

For a closer look at the coming clash, FOREVER WARS is proud to publish the following piece from Matthew Guariglia, author of Police and The Empire City: Race and The Origins of Modern Policing in New York and co-editor of an upcoming 50th anniversary edition of the Church Committee Report from W.W. Norton. His piece is an eye-opening primer for what a prospective Mayor Mamdani is in for from 1 Pee Pee. So without further ado…

NOW THAT ZOHRAN MAMDANI is the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York, you are about to be transported to an alternate version of the city – one that, should he win Gracie Mansion, will persist for his entire mayoralty. This version will appear in the pages of papers like the New York Post, on newscasts both local and national, and across the algorithms of the big social-media platforms. It will be one straight out of Escape from New York or The Warriors. It will be a city run amok, where no grandmother is safe, where every subway platform is a battle royale with people who would do you harm.

Of course, this is what they say about New York right now. And this chaotic vision of the city is very unlikely to manifest. Crime in New York City is currently at historically low rates. But that doesn’t stop the fear of crime from rising in ways unrelated to actual crime statistics. And that can easily be exploited by opponents of change, like the hedge-fund barons who are determined to spend whatever it will take to stop the working-class movement that just flexed its power on Tuesday. On X, shortly after Mamdani’s primary victory, the vigilante and GOP mayoral nominee Curtis Sliwa posted: "Zohran Mamdani is too extreme for a city already on the edge. I know many New Yorkers are scared right now. Scared about rent. Scared about crime."

The fear-mongering thus far is as risible as it is intense. And it's nothing compared to what's coming. Just wait until the police get involved.

Mamdani has already been accused of planning to “defund the police,” but he has said that his proposal for the NYPD is quite different. Mamdani wants to create a Department of Community Safety to take many non-criminal responsibilities off the plates of NYPD officers. Right now, officers spend much of their time responding not to murderers or the more mundane business of traffic and event management, but to calls about New Yorkers’ homeless neighbors, people going through mental health episodes, and other crises that should be handled by experts trained in deescalation or addressed proactively by violence interruption programs. Officers themselves often say that they hate responding to these calls. 

Promising fewer quality of life-related responsibilities – especially in light of the spiraling hours officers are working to meet current Mayor Eric Adams’s demands – might mean that NYPD factions aligned against Mamdani might inadvertently expose a rift between the overworked rank-and-file and the more politically committed conservatives at all levels of the force. According to Cop Cop, a new book written by two former New York City civilian complaint review board members, often it’s the police brass and the politicians at the top of the department steering the security theater and demanding officers meet arrest quotas. 

But if history is any indication, any attempts to limit or even question the infinite expansion of the NYPD’s size, budget, power, and impunity will turn police against a candidate. The leader of the Detective Endowment Association (DEA), one of the NYPD's three powerful unions, said as much to the Post when asked about the mayoral election. “We intend to make sure elected officials wake up to the power of our uniforms…our words can move the public to participate in politics, and to support officials and candidates—locally and state-wide—who support public safety,” said the DEA’s Scott Munro. They’ve done it before. 

Police have a fairly straightforward playbook when it comes to exacting political retribution on a candidate running for office or an elected official. These tactics break down to refusing to take orders, like rejecting reforms or bans on violent tactics like stop-and-frisk or chokeholds, visible signs of disrespect and disobedience, work slowdowns—anything that might either overtly or underhandedly allow the public to blame crime, disorder, and public discordance to the intended target. 

Sometimes they even riot. In 1992, New York's first Black mayor, David Dinkins, proposed removing NYPD representatives from the civilian board reviewing claims of police brutality. The NYPD responded with perhaps the most infamous incident of outright police political interference in the city's history. Police unions bused 10,000 off-duty and frankly drunken cops across the Brooklyn Bridge, while their uniformed counterparts stood aside as they yelled racist slogans, stopped traffic and took over the area around City Hall. Rudy Giuliani picked up a bullhorn and egged the cops on, leading them in chants of "bullshit!" The next year, Giuliani won the mayoralty by pledging to empower the police, setting up the next three decades of his political career. 

In 2013, Bill de Blasio, then a city council member, was one of the few candidates for mayor vocally opposed to stop-and-frisk and other controversial and racist police practices. When stop-and-frisk was found to be unconstitutional right in the middle of the Democratic primary, there were those who insisted that this change, and de Blasio’s positions, would result in gun deaths in the city. 

De Blasio, a liberal, bent over backwards to signal that he wanted zero smoke from the NYPD. He brought back the oft-sainted commissioner Bill Bratton, an architect of Rudy Giuiani's police crackdown. But the NYPD smelled fear, and escalated. In 2014, hundreds of officers turned their backs to then-Mayor de Blasio at the funeral of two police officers. What had de Blasio done to garner this mass uniformed disrespect? Weeks early, after a grand jury declined to indict NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo of executing Eric Garner with an illegal chokehold, de Blasio opened up publicly about the difficult conversations he had to have with his Black son about "the dangers" of interacting with police. 

By 2015, as the NYPD continued to rebel against de Blasio, they expanded their tactics to a full slowdown, in which officers stopped or dramatically reduced arrests. Sometimes they called in sick in protest, a ploy known as the “blue flu.” The police remained a hindrance to any reforms De Blasio wanted to make for the rest of his tenure. 

This blueprint isn’t unique to New York. In 2019, San Franciscans elected progressive prosecutor Chesa Boudin their district attorney despite police associations spending $700,000 opposing his candidacy. Once Boudin took office, police made it their mission to portray his criminal-justice reform agenda as the cause of chaos in the city. 

In San Francisco, with officers specifically upset that anyone they arrested might be “released” by Boudin, police stopped doing their job. Videos like this one began to surface of SFPD officers watching robberies in progress and a study validated that the SFPD began acting differently as soon as he was out of office. Previewing the fear and hate Mamdani received from Wall Street, wealthy donors, including right-wing billionaire David Sacks, put $6 million into a ballot initiative campaign to recall Boudin. The police were aided by two prosecutors, Brooke Jenkins and Don Du Bain, who stepped down from the District Attorney’s office while accusing Boudin of promoting lawlessness in the city. 

It worked. Voters recalled Boudin in June 2022. The media portrayed it as a reprimand against “weak on public safety” elected officials. Jenkins replaced Boudin, despite allegations of misconduct, and Du Bain rejoined the office in a more prominent role under her.

The pattern of police and their allies rejecting civilian authority has repeated across the country. San Francisco in 2022 is not New York in 2025, but that will not stop a law-and-order counteroffensive against Mamdani and a more holistic approach to community safety. Certainly not one that can draw on the near-unlimited wallet of New York's greediest. 

In the days since Mamdani’s nomination, New Yorkers have already seen conservative politicians and media predict chaos and disaster. If and when Mamdani is sworn in as mayor, a whole new round of elite revolt will begin. Expect to see television ads and flyers asking for the governor to remove the mayor from office as soon as the first headline-grabbing crime is committed. And this is New York – it will. Crime happens and when it does, the forces, including inside the police department, that want us to return to the war on drugs, stop-and-frisk, and broken-windows policing will say Mamdani is not the person to lead New York. Facts will not stop them from blaming socialism for causing the crime in question. 

Then there's the fact that Mamdani is a non-white naturalized citizen in an era of lawless ICE rampages. U.S. Representative Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) responded to Mamdani's primary victory by calling on the Trump administration to take away Mamdani’s citizenship and deport him. As despicable and demagogic as Ogles' denaturalization scheme is, the maculate history of immigration in the U.S. gives it historical precedence. The U.S. government has, for over a century, attempted to remove citizenship from foreign-born left-wingers. The Russian-born anarchist, activist, and intellectual Emma Goldman was stripped of her citizenship and deported in 1919. At a moment when the United States’ deportation machine and gatekeeping apparatus is stress testing the judicial system in hopes of finding cracks it can widen and exploit, Mamdani will undoubtedly become the target of, not just local police, but federal law enforcement as well.

THERE ARE A FEW LESSONS that Mamdani can learn from how the NYPD stymied de Blasio. People on the right are going to blast him for being soft on crime no matter what he does. But Mamdani has the ability to flip the script on them. Advocates of the status quo, unwilling to try innovative methods of community safety and crime prevention, are the ones who permit the persistence of crime. After all, the failed ways of “fighting crime” are about putting people in jail after committing crimes. A new public-safety paradigm centers on preventing it in the first place. 

Mamdani can also emphasize officer well-being and workloads by creating agencies willing to take some of the “burden” away by taking on tasks armed police should not be doing in the first place. He can be proactive about copaganda: police will be eager to link crime to a progressive mayor even if they have to manufacture a “crime wave” to do it. The future mayor’s office should be constantly vocal about how low crime is, what the city is doing to make people feel safe and prevent crime, and should not be afraid to say when police are engaged in creating a  politically-motivated narrative of fear. 

Another lesson is for New Yorkers, not Mamdani. That's to refuse to panic. 

Don’t take the bait. Stay the course. Talk to your neighbors about what safety in the city really is and the ways that we can achieve it without, figuratively and literally, leaving anyone out in the cold. Crime ebbs and flows and always has. People want safety, not policing and surveillance. But when the public cries out for safety, politicians usually only have policing and surveillance to give them. The backlash is coming just as it has for every progressive and everyone who (even moderately) tries to push back against the impunity and omnipresence of modern policing. In the days to come, Mamdani as a young, Muslim democratic socialist will be the target of grotesque propaganda and accusations, but his supporters can be forewarned and forearmed. We’ve seen their playbook.