Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani says he no longer wants to “defund the police,” but his picks for his transition team sure send the opposite message.
Take Alex Vitale, tapped for the “community safety” committee.
The Brooklyn College prof doesn’t want to just “defund” the police; he wants to get rid of them altogether: He even wrote a book titled “The End of Policing.”
“The problem is not police training, police diversity, or police methods,” runs one description of the book. “The problem is policing itself.”
Vitale published that in 2017, three years before George Floyd’s death in police custody.
Naturally, he’s a particular peeved at broken-windows policing — the practice of cracking down on small offenses and quality-of-life violations to discourage far worse crimes, an approach that was central to the city’s quarter-century of success in boosting public safety.
And he’s slurred NYPD cops, claiming they’ve targeted minorities.
Of course, just a few years back Mamdani himself smeared them as “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety,” not to mention “wicked & corrupt.”
Yes, the mayor-elect apologized (sort of) for that during the campaign in a bid to assure voters.
Nor is Vitale the only anti-cop leader on Mamdani’s transition team.
He named Bill de Blasio adviser Elana Leopold as its executive director, despite (or maybe because of?) the “open letter” she co-signed in 2020 demanding a “radical change” to policing — starting with a $1 billion cut in the NYPD’s budget.
Other community-safety committee standouts:
- Communities United for Police Reform Joo-Hyun Kang, an avid cop-defunder.
- A CURP board member, Jose Lopez, who insists that policing fuels racism.
- Dana Rachlin, who helped create the Brownsville Safety Alliance “police-alternative” zone.
And for his community-organizing committee, the incoming mayor tapped black nationalist Lumumba Bandele, of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, despite his ties to Black Liberation Army members convicted of killing cops.
Indeed, the 400 members of the transition braintrust include a whole host of soft-on-crime and anti-police advocates from lefty groups like the Legal Aid Society, New York Civil Liberties Union, Make the Road New York and the Democratic Socialists of America.
Not a crowd that’s likely to ask awkward questions about Mamdani’s plan to shift NYPD money to a new Department of Community Safety, scrap the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group and gang database and freeze the rank-and-file headcount — a de facto recipe for defunding NYC’s police.
Meanwhile, the transition crew’s education “experts” dependably support higher school spending and lefty indoctrination, with a conspicuous lack of voices demanding excellent outcomes or supporting increased student achievement.
Roughly one in seven New York City public-school children now attends a charter school, but you won’t find a single representative from the charter community among the 400 folks on this team.
Yes, the transition folks are simply advisers; Mamdani might have tapped many purely as a symbolic recognition.
But the signs are downright worrisome on issues as critical as policing.
NYPD boss Jessica Tisch may have a bigger problem on her hands than she imagined.
So might the whole city.
