Zohran Mamdani spent his summer backtracking on his past support for defunding the police. In July an officer was killed in a mass shooting while Mamdani was out of the country. When he returned he was quick to explain his policy ideas about policing had changed.
Zohran Mamdani immediately faced backlash Wednesday over his past calls to defund the police — after New York City’s deadliest mass shooting in 25 years and the completion of his 11-day vacation to Uganda…
“I am not defunding the police; I am not running to defund the police,” Mamdani told reporters Wednesday. “Over the course of this race, I’ve been very clear about my view of public safety and the critical role that the police have in creating that public safety.”
That was a long, long way from his previous stances on the NYPD back in 2020. Some of his tweets from that era make him sound like a campus radical, and not an especially thoughtful one.
“We don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety. What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD,” he wrote on X that year.
“There is no negotiating with an institution this wicked & corrupt,” he wrote, referencing city budget negotiations around proposed cuts to the NYPD. “Defund it. Dismantle it. End the cycle of violence.”
Mamdani distanced himself from the posts. When asked if he regretted the statements, he said they were made “amidst a frustration that many New Yorkers held at the murder of George Floyd.”
Just a couple weeks ago, he was still promising to apologize for those previous remarks on Twitter about the NYPD.
Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, said on Thursday that he intended to apologize for comments he made in 2020 calling the New York Police Department “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety.”
He said that the remarks, which he wrote in June 2020 in a social media post in support of the defund the police movement, were made after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis a month earlier.
The comments were made “at the height of frustration,” he said in an interview with The New York Times, and were not reflective of his current campaign or “my view of public safety and the fact that police will be critical partners in delivering public safety.”
So that was basically his explanation: FIve years ago was a different time and I was angry about George Floyd. It wasn’t him, it was the times he was living in. Only it turns out he didn’t abandon his efforts to defund the police five years ago.
In 2022 Mamdani was running for reelection and still pushing to defund the police. [emphasis added]
“We need to dramatically curtail the power and presence of the N.Y.P.D.,” he wrote on his campaign website in 2022 as he sought re-election to his Assembly seat in Queens.
At the time, Mr. Mamdani called for the New York Police Department to reduce its work force “by 1,300 officers through attrition.” He pushed to “immediately” end police overtime, freeze hiring, cancel new officer classes and “institute a moratorium on all new equipment purchases.”
“We can’t reform our way out of a racist police system that’s working exactly as designed — as a means of control over Black & brown New Yorkers,” he wrote…
Mr. Mamdani clearly held critical views of the department more recently than the turmoil in 2020 after Mr. Floyd’s death.
He wrote in 2022 that his proposed policing cuts would help reduce the department’s budget by $3 billion, and suggested that the savings be reinvested in health, housing and community services. The department, at the time, had a $5.4 billion budget and a budgeted head count of 35,030 uniformed officers.
According to the Wayback Machine, those remarks remained on his website at least through December of 2023. Mamdani clearly didn’t feel any haste to move away from his prior positions on policing even as recently as two years ago.
Anyway, it’s interesting to see him claim his prior views were all about the heat of the moment in 2020 only to have his ongoing support for the same rhetoric and policy be uncovered years after that. What will he say now when he finally apologizes to the NYPD? Sorry I called you all racists for four years straight. New York City is going to regret electing this guy.
Editor’s Note: Zohran Mamdani is an avowed Democratic Socialist and has a real chance to become the next mayor of New York City.
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