In the wake of New York City’s deadliest mass shooting in 25 years, mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is revisiting previous calls to defund the police.
Didarul Islam, a New York Police Department officer, was one of four people killed in the shooting on Monday. Mamdani addressed reporters on Wednesday after visiting with Islam’s family, saying he had no plans to abolish the NYPD.
“I am not defunding the police. I am not running to defund the police,” Mamdani said. “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.”
Mamdani said he’s a “candidate who is not fixed in time, one that learns and one that leads, and part of that means admitting as I have grown.”
While Mamdani has a history of criticizing the NYPD, his mayoral platform calls for incremental changes in policing. Mamdani is pushing for taking mental health calls off the NYPD’s plate and “taking a public health approach to safety.” Mamdani’s plan would have health and mental health professionals respond to crisis calls, a growing practice that’s been put in place across the country.
“Despite what others may say, my vision is not to defund the police. It is, in fact, to allow those officers to respond to the serious crimes that many of them signed up to address,” Mamdani said on Wednesday.
Mayor Eric Adams and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Democrats who are running as third-party candidates in November’s mayoral election, took the chance to bring up Mamdani’s rhetoric in the aftermath of Monday’s shooting. Cuomo said Mamdani doesn’t understand the “importance of the NYPD.”
“He has said he was part of this ‘defund the police’ movement,” Cuomo told CNN on Tuesday. “It really is a reality check for all this political theory and political hype that we have going on in this country with the extreme left postulating these theories that have no connection to reality.”
