Mayor Eric Adams deserves praise for his bold move to add 5,000 new cops to beef up a depleted NYPD — and so expose Zohran Mamdani’s anti-policing obsessions.
Adding 5,000 officers is a core vow by Andrew Cuomo, Mamdani’s chief rival in Tuesday’s election, because it addresses an obvious city need.
With fewer than 35,000 officers, the NYPD headcount is at its lowest since 1990, when the city’s crime rate was at a high.
The ranks have been shrinking since 2019, thanks to retirements and an exodus to jobs elsewhere as New York politicians’ anti-policing agenda made working here ever-harder.
Officers are now hanging up their belts at the rate of 200 per month.
Staunch NYPD defunder Zohran Mamdani is not happy with Adams’ move, fuming, “It’s not a question of headcount” at a Friday campaign event. “It’s a question of safety.”
“Safety” is a popular buzzword for hard lefties, because it lets them describe all kinds of social programs as making people “feel safe” without ever addressing the question of policing, crime or orderly streets and subways.
Hence Mamdani’s plan to create a “Department of Community Safety,” employing social workers, violence interrupters and peer counselors to handle as many interactions with the public as he can strip from the NYPD.
It’ll be labeled “safety,” you see; Zohran thinks that matters more than actually delivering safety in the way that only police can.
Even more dishonest is Mamdani’s claim that he’d like to keep on Commissioner Jessica Tisch in her job at One Police Plaza.
How could she work under him?
Tisch expressed her support for the Adams hiring plan that Mamdani abhors, saying, “Every new officer means safer streets, stronger communities, and a thriving city.”
Mamdani has said all along that he means to keep NYPD ranks depleted, wants to dismantle key units and pull cops off domestic-violence and emotional-distress calls — policies that run against the grain of Tisch’s robust policing philosophy.
He’s also made it clear that the next police commissioner will have to follow his lead on public safety — which means he doesn’t want Tisch to stay.
Kudos to Adams for showing how Mamdani is still all-in on the “Defund the Police” policies he has advocated for years, but now pretends he’s outgrown.
The more Mamdani has to talk about actually governing instead of his usual Big Rock Candy Mountain tall tales, the more New Yorkers see how unready he is for the big leagues.
