NYC NOW - Mayor Mamdani Promised to Rethink Policing. Six Months Later, the NYPD Is Growing

Episode Date: June 8, 2026

When Zohran Mamdani ran for mayor, he promised to reduce the NYPD’s role in responding to issues like mental health crises and homelessness while investing in civilian alternatives. Six months into his administration, the mayor is planning to add hundreds of police officers, while Mamdani’s proposed Department of Community Safety remains far smaller than what he campaigned on. WNYC and Gothamist reporter Elizabeth Kim explains how the mayor’s approach to policing has evolved, why some supporters are frustrated, and what the shift could mean for public safety and politics in New York City. [Photo: Marika Hacking/Gothamist] — Got any questions, comments or story ideas? Send us a message at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

From WNYC, this is NYC Now. I'm Jinnay Pierre. Mayor Zora Mumdani is defending his move to expand the NYPD, even though he promised he wouldn't on the campaign trail. On today's episode, we discussed the extra cops under the mayor's latest budget. But first, here's what's happening in our region. Authorities say a suspect is in custody after six people were stabbed inside Penn Station Sunday night. The FDMI says emergency crew.

responded to reports that a person has stabbed multiple people. Authorities say five victims were taken to a local hospital. One suffered serious injuries, two had moderate injuries, and two others had minor injuries. A six victim was taken to another hospital. The FDMI did not immediately provide that person's condition. Five candidates in New York City's wealthiest congressional district will take the stage Tuesday for their final broadcast debate before the June primary. The race has drawn an avalanche of candidates and candidates.

campaign cash. The candidates include East Side Assembly Member Alex Boris, West Side Assembly member Michael Lacher, lawyer George Conway, social media influencer Jack Kennedy Schloschberg, and public health expert Nina Schwalby. The 12th Congressional District spans Manhattan's Upper East Side and West Side South roughly to 14th Street. 50,000 people will get to watch the World Cup final from the Great Lawn of Central Park at a massive watch party on July 19th. Governor Katz Hockel says New York State is putting up $6 million for the event with New York City chipping

in $3.5 million. This is the summertime go-to spot for New Yorkers. And now it'll be the city's front row seat to that beautiful game. Tickets for the watch party will be free and will be distributed through a lottery. The event is being planned in conjunction with Global Citizen. They're behind an annual concert and charity event in Central Park. Registration will be open at 10 Thursday morning. For details on how to sign up, check out the story on our new site, Gothamist. Still ahead, candidate Mumdani promised to keep NYPD staffing flat, but Mayor Mumdani is doing the opposite. We'll have more on that after a quick break. Stay close. Janay, what message did you hear from Zora Mamdani when he talked about policing during the

mayoral race last year? I mean, as a Democratic socialist, I thought he would continue his call to defund the police, but instead, I do remember him just calling to maintain the department, right? That's right. I recently went out and asked some New Yorkers in downtown Brooklyn what they thought about policing in the city. And I came across people like Chris Hugh, he's a 37-year-old Bed-Stuy resident, who spoke about targeted policing on people of color. The community has changed in Brooklyn for some years. So I do know that police do target certain type of individuals, how they're dressed, how they look, and stuff like that.

So I just make sure I'm dressed accordingly. I make sure I don't attract any type of attention outside of just policing. If you draw the wrong attention, you can have some issues in life. A lot of people disagree on whether more police is good. But at one point, I come across a 25-year-old Brooklyn resident. named Muhammad Ali, and he tells me this. I think for a lot of people, they were expecting Mamdani to put more effort into, like, the community response, instead of adding more officers on the street.

So what do these responses tell us? To me, it really captures the moment we're in. What Mamdani promised to do on policing while running for mayor and what he's actually doing six months into his term are very different. On the campaign trail, Zora Mundani proposed reimagining policing by reducing the NYPD's role in certain categories of crime that resulted from failures of the social safety net. But half a year after taking office, Mayor Mundani has yet to deliver some of his promises and even broken one by expanding the size of the police force. WNYC and Gothamist reporter Elizabeth Kim is here to talk about Mumdani's handling of the NYPD and the NYPD. and how the young mayor's views on public safety have evolved since being sworn in.

So let's start with Zoran Mamdani, you know, before he became mayor. Remind us why that Brooklyn resident thought Mumdani would have put less police on the street, you know, as he said. So I think it's important to go back even further to the time when Mamdani was a state assembly member. As you said, you know, he's a Democratic socialist. In 2020, after the police killing of George Floyd, he's among many progressives who support the defund the police movement. He also becomes a vocal critic of police. He called them, quote, racist, anti-queer, and a major threat to public safety at one point on his social media. And in 2022, he's also in favor of cutting 1,300 officers by attrition.

That's what he says on his campaign website at the time. And he also writes, we need to dramatically curtail the power and presence of the NYPD. But he backed away from those positions when he ran for mayor. That's right. He apologizes for calling the police racist. But at the time, he also puts forward a plan to reform policing. And that was the Department of Community Safety, an entirely new. agency that would reduce the police's role in the mental health crisis.

In my Department of Community Safety, we are going to put together dedicated teams of mental health outreach workers who will be deployed to the top 100 subway stations with the highest levels of mental health crises and homelessness. He essentially argues that the city is overusing policing and that there are these situations that are tied to mental health, homelessness, and other social conditions that can be addressed with trained civilians. And he said that police officers would actually benefit from that because they could focus on serious crimes. And that's an important pledge to those on the left who are the biggest critics of policing. Again, Mamdani's a Democratic socialist, and he comes from this

defund world. He also has supporters who are abolitionists. These are people who want to replace traditional policing with a new community-based model. And these are both ideas that really gather steam during the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement. So you can understand why some of these people were surprised last week when police commissioner Jessica Tisch was asked about headcount by the city council and she said this. Actually, in this budget, the NYPD has received 580 new police officer. positions, bringing our budgeted headcount up to 35,55. And so that is something to be celebrated, and that is something that we appreciate deeply, especially in a time general need to, need to cut.

580, Liz, correct me if I'm wrong, but that's not a really big increase, right? I mean, there are roughly 35,000. thousand uniform police officers. That's right, Jene. It's a modest uptick, right? But what's important to note is that the size of the NYPD has been creeping upward over the past three years. And this is now the biggest the NYPD has been since Eric Adams. And you just can't escape the irony here.

Mamdani, the Democratic Socialist, is hiring more police than the former cop mayor. You wouldn't expect that, right? No. But what does Mom Dani say about this? Well, he was recently on Ask the Mayor, on Brian Lair, and this is how he responded. Over the course of the campaign, I spoke about the importance of keeping our budgeted headcount steady. When I came into office, I was informed of two things. One was that although the Bronx was of a comparative size and need to other boroughs, it had only one police zone, which is why we made the decision to split it into two patrol boroughs like there are in, Manhattan in Queens and Brooklyn. The second is that we found that while our NYPD officers were receiving extensive training in the academy, they were not receiving enough ongoing training

once they were on the job. We decided to strengthen that regular training so that officers can better do their jobs. Together, because of these two issues, we saw there's a slight increase in the budgeted headcount, and that is as a result of both of these. But it's not just the additional cops that Mamdani is hiring that's causing frustration among advocates. It's other promises, too. The Department of Community Safety that I talked about, you know, this was the main way that he was going to transform policing. And he proposed spending $1 billion to get it off the ground. But once he got into office, he scaled back his ambition. It's now a mayoral office with a budget of $300 million. That's a big difference, Liz.

So I'm assuming that the city hasn't seen teams of social workers heading into the subway system quite yet. No, and it's unclear when that will happen, if at all. Doesn't this all begin with the police commissioner, Jessica Tisch? I mean, we know that she was former Mayor Eric Adams' top cop, and it's no secret that the two of them pretty much disagreed over a lot of policing issues and some politics. But what does this say about Mamdani's relationship with Jessica Dish? What we've seen so far is that he defers to her on matters of policing. The two of them recently held a press conference in the Bronx to announce a summer surge and the splitting of the borough into two patrols.

And we really saw the mayor take this traditional law and order tone that I don't think we've seen him take before. This year, auto theft is down, shootings are down. murders are down. We will build on that progress not by surrendering our momentum, but by pursuing the proven solutions that we know to work. Tell me more about those proven solutions that work. What are those? That's where this issue of broken windows policing comes in. Janay, if you lived in New York City in the 1990s, this was a frequently debated strategy of policing. Broken Windows policing is the theory that cracking down on low-level offenses, things like public urination, vandalism, fair evasion, that that will deter more serious crimes and that it will also make people feel safer. And it wasn't just Republicans like Rudy Giuliani who embraced this idea.

Bill de Blasio was a big proponent of broken windows. A lot of us were here. in the 1980s, 1990s, and could never have imagined these kind of numbers. They are the result of a proactive strategy, that a result of a number of strategies, one of which is the broken windows approach. That's why I believe in it, because it continues to drive down crime, and think of what that means for everyday people's lives, an ever safer city. But there's also been a lot of criticism of broken windows.

Some experts say broken windows policing disproportionately affects communities of color and that it breeds distrust in the police. And they also question whether there's even evidence that it leads to a significant drop in crime. In the summer of 2014, the death of Eric Garner makes national news. Garner was killed in a police chokehold during an arrest for selling illegal cigarettes. And this really reignites the debate over broken windows. Are there any signs that broken windows policing is happening under the Mamdani administration? Well, low-level arrests have reached the highest since 2019. Criminal summonses have jumped 29% in the first three months of this year compared to the same period last year.

These are quality of life infractions like public drinking, smoking and train stations. and running red lights. Public defenders and criminal justice reformers will say that broken windows never really stopped, but they also say that it's intensifying based on some of those statistics I cited. What does the NYPD say? Tish has repeatedly maintained that this isn't broken windows. I told you I am not interested in going back to broken windows policing where you look to make a low, You look for a low-level thing to find a higher-level thing.

She was recently interrogated about this at a city council hearing. She says there's been a, quote, explosion of 3-1-1 quality-of-life complaints, and that often when officers encounter someone who's committed a low-level offense, they often find that they've committed past offenses that mean they're ineligible for a summons and that an arrest is the only option. Now, Liz, you spoke to people who were pretty divided about whether or not more policing is a good thing. And that's traditionally been the case. I imagine that for Mayor Mumdani, he's banking on keeping crime down, right?

So does this matter politically for him right now? That's right, Jeney. Every mayor is judged on crime and the perception of crime and disorder. Left-leaning mayors in particular have been. sensitive to appearing soft on crime. And with the World Cup coming right now, it means that the city is under an international spotlight. You know, longer term, if he can keep crime under control, he essentially neutralizes a line of attack from his right-leaning critics. But I would point out, Jenae, that one really ugly and tragic incident like an Eric Garner can spark a

reckoning over aggressive enforcement. Yeah. On the one hand, you're going to have mayors and police officials point to crime numbers and say, hey, it's working. But at what cost? Yeah. That's the question. Yeah, a really big question indeed.

That's WNYC's Liz Kim. Thanks a lot. Thank you, Jenae. And thank you for listening to NYC now. I'm Jenae Pierre. See you next time.