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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
Zohran Mamdani is reaching out to the police
By Gloria Pazmino, CNN
Updated:
7:00 AM EDT, Sat August 30, 2025
Source: CNN
Months before , Zohran Mamdani sat inside a Pakistani restaurant in
Queens with around two dozen off-duty police officers.
The officers were familiar with the 33-year-old assemblyman’s and
social media posts in which he referred to police as racist and wicked.
They’d been invited to the private meet-and-greet by a retired New
York Police Department officer who’d spent years helping to boost the
department’s Bangladeshi and South Asian enrollment. He told the
officers to give Mamdani a chance.
“I was not a fan of Mamdani at all, but as I got to know him more, I
began to respect him and like him more,” said Shamsul Haque, the
meeting’s organizer and a Bangladeshi American who spent 21 years in
the department, rising to become the NYPD’s first Muslim and South
Asian to hold the rank of lieutenant commander.
If he wins November’s general election, Mamdani would oversee the
nation’s largest municipal police department. It will be a huge
political and public safety test for both sides: Mamdani as a
democratic socialist who has called for sweeping changes in law
enforcement and the NYPD as a 36,000-officer force that .
As his opponents accuse him of trying to undermine public safety,
Mamdani has disavowed his past calls to defund the police and leaned on
validators like Haque, who said he went from apprehension to a full
embrace of Mamdani due to a belief that if “given the chance,” some
of Mamdani’s proposals could “revolutionize law enforcement and
community safety in a way that will be beneficial to society.”
Mamdani is also getting support from a seasoned NYPD veteran: Rodney
Harrison, who served as chief of department, the department’s
highest-ranking uniformed officer, before his retirement in 2021 has
recently met with Mamdani and endorsed his campaign.
But Mamdani’s support among police leaders remains slim. Among those
who question his plans is Bill Bratton, under Bill de Blasio, a Mamdani
ally whom the Democratic nominee has called the best mayor of his
lifetime, as well as under Rudy Giuliani in the 1990s.
“He is thought of as being anti-police, anti-NYPD, so he’s starting
off in a tough place,” Bratton said in an interview. “It will be
interesting to see how a political novice who has never run anything
runs the largest police force in America.”
Mamdani gets a key endorsement
During his time with the NYPD, Harrison, whose support of Mamdani has
not been previously reported, helped to implement the Neighborhood
Policing Program, a de Blasio-era initiative which sought to improve
relationships between communities and the police. After retiring from
the NYPD, Harrison went on to lead the Suffolk County Police Department
where he led a successful effort to catch Rex Heuermann, .
In a statement released by the campaign, Harrison praised the idea of a
Department of Community Safety, calling it a “thoughtful and
impactful plan” that he believes could help decrease officer
workloads by bringing mental health professionals into the fold.
“I know police are working hard to keep us safe, and that we also
can’t keep using the same playbook for every issue,” Harrison said.
Mamdani’s campaign says he’s holding meetings to understand how to
implement the proposals outlined in his public safety agenda, which
seek to overhaul the way in which New York City deals with its most
vulnerable residents.
One of his major proposals is creating a Department of Community
Safety. Elle Bisgaard-Church, who ran Mamdani’s primary campaign and
is now working as his chief adviser, described the proposed department
as tackling “gun violence, subway safety, mental health crises, and
other severe issues with evidence-based solutions.”
Mamdani has met with families of New Yorkers suffering from mental
illness, including the family of Win Rozario, a 19-year-old man who was
in the throes of a mental health crisis when he called 911 for help in
March of last year.
NYPD officers arrived to find Rozario standing in the kitchen with his
mother nearby. When an officer moved toward the kitchen, Rozario seemed
to become distressed and picked up a pair of kitchen scissors. Officers
first fired their Tasers but when Rozario continued to move towards
them with scissors in his hand, the officers opened fire killing him.
The , Rozario’s family has said.
Mamdani wants to centralize and expand part of the system that already
exists by tripling the size of the city’s Mobile Crisis Team program
enabling 24-hour, 7-day-a-week service, raising their salaries and
creating a separate mobile crisis system similar to 911 where New
Yorkers would call to request help.
New York City would be far from the first city to try and implement
changes. Mamdani’s campaign is taking inspiration from smaller
cities.
In Eugene, Oregon, the – CAHOOTS for short – handles a 24/7 crisis
response system that pairs behavioral health workers and medics to
respond to non-emergency calls involving people experiencing mental
health crises. A 2020 of the program found that from approximately
24,000 calls CAHOOTS responded to in 2019, only 311 required police
back-up.
But the program has run into significant budgetary challenges. Earlier
this year, Eugene – a city of 180,000 people compared to New York’s
8 million – it would no longer serve the area due to contract and
funding issues.
Ben Struhl, executive director of the Crime and Justice Policy Lab at
the University of Pennsylvania, said Mamdani will have twin challenges:
overhauling a massive system that demands equally massive investment
while overcoming general skepticism that the government is doing its
job.
“For New York, picking some things that are problems that communities
care about and demonstrating that the government is actually trying to
solve those problems is the thing that will work to try and overcome
that cynicism,” Struhl said.
A perhaps inevitable clash with Jessica Tisch
As a prominent member of the Democratic Socialists of America, Mamdani
has previously called for policy changes and budget cuts that clash
sharply with the department’s current priorities and its leader,
Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch.
While Mamdani has praised Tisch’s leadership of the NYPD, noting she
has been effective in helping to root out corruption inside the agency
and crediting her with bringing down crime, he has stopped short of
committing to keep her in charge of the department.
The stark ideological divide between Mamdani and Tisch suggests her
future under a potential Mamdani administration remains uncertain,
though Mamdani’s campaign says it has not made any decisions on top
posts. Tisch, whose family controls the Loews Corporation, has spent
much her career in municipal government. She has emphasized
technology-focused surveillance and traditional policing tactics.
Tisch has made it a point recently to rail against criminal justice
reforms, advocating for changes that Mamdani is unlikely to support
like expanding policing teams focused on quality-of-life enforcement, a
policing strategy focused on low-level offenses like public urination,
fare jumping or panhandling.
The strategy is rooted in the belief that ignoring visible nuisances
ultimately leads to more serious crime and that keeping public order
results in increased safety and better living conditions. Critics of
the practice say quality-of-life policing disproportionately targets
communities of color.
Tisch has also been critical of the state’s Raise the Age Law,
blaming the measure for an increase in youth violence in the city. The
law, passed in 2017, raises the age of criminal responsibility in New
York from 16 to 18, keeping youth offenders from being prosecuted in
criminal court.
President Donald Trump and Republicans have made Mamdani into a key
target as they argue that Democratic-run cities are poorly run and
dangerous. Trump has deployed National Guard troops into Washington,
DC, and threatened to do the same in Chicago. The president has vowed
to “straighten out” New York if Mamdani wins.
Mamdani brushed off Trump’s threat to send soldiers into the city,
pivoting to cast the department as capable and effective while saying
Trump would actually “put New Yorkers in danger.”
Tisch and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul have reached out to the Trump
administration directly in the meantime.
Hochul spoke to Trump on the phone about his threat to deploy soldiers
in recent days, she told reporters this week. Hochul, who herself has
sent the National Guard to patrol some of the city’s busiest
transportation hubs, said she tried to talk Trump out of sending in
soldiers, telling him crime in New York city is down and that the
NYPD’s policies are working.
The conversation seemed to stick with Trump.
“I get along with Kathy. If she’d like to do that, I would do
it,” he said during a Cabinet meeting when a reporter asked him about
the prospect of deploying soldiers.
Tisch is also making her case. A source with knowledge of the meeting
confirmed to CNN the commissioner and Attorney General Pam Bondi met
this week. During what was described as a “positive and productive”
meeting that lasted about 30 minutes, Tisch told Bondi that New York
City’s crime rate is low and that the NYPD did not need federal help
or involvement from the National Guard.
An early test but more to come
An early test for Mamdani came after a that left 5 people dead
including an off-duty police officer who was working security in the
lobby of the building. The incident unfolded while Mamdani was out of
the country on vacation. After his return, Mamdani was quickly embraced
by the fallen officer’s family days after distancing himself from
previous comments that were critical of police.
Bratton said Mamdani’s proposal to task mental health professionals
with responding to calls involving people in mental distress is a
“well-intended effort” sure to come up against the city’s massive
bureaucracy and a spider-web of agencies and task forces already trying
to tackle with the city’s mental health crisis.
“I am very supportive of the concept of intervention,” said the
former police commissioner. “But how do you balance the idea of the
need for police at some of these calls? Many of them don’t need it,
but they have to be available if they are needed.”
Bratton, who has not met with Mamdani, believes any effort to
“significantly curtail quality of life enforcement” by a potential
Mamdani administration could undo a lot of the gains made in the past
few years.
“The only glimmer I see of positive light is that Mamdani is seeking
to learn as de Blasio was at first,” Bratton said. “He tried to
understand how to motivate cops, how to deal with crime and disorder at
the same time.
“Will he listen and who is he listening to?” he said. “That’s
the question.”
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