FEATURING ALEX VITALE - In 2020, when millions of Americans marched to protest the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, many, including Zohran Mamdani, called for a defunding of police. A few months before his election to become Mayor of New York City, Mamdani announced he would not in fact be defunding the police if elected. And, soon after he was elected, Mamdani announced he would be asking NYPD Police Chief Jessica Tisch to stay on.
Mamdani’s plan for policing and public safety appears to hinge on the formation of a Department of Community Safety, to provide services for New Yorkers in crisis so they can avoid contact with the criminal justice system. To that end the New York City Council introduced a bill in December 2025 to form such a department.
Alex Vitale is a Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and the Coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project. He has spent the last 30 years writing about policing and consults both police departments and human rights organizations internationally. He is also the author of a 2017 book called The End of Policing and was invited by Mamdani to join the mayor’s transition team to work on community safety issues. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about the potential promise of NYC's experiment in community safety.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: Before we get to what Mayor Mamdani is planning and what community safety actually means under his leadership, let's talk about the situation of policing and crime in New York City, prior to Mamdani taking power. NYPD chief Jessica Tisch has been credited by many, including by Mamdani himself for reducing crime levels in New York City. Crime is in fact down. Did she have something to do with it? If so, what? What has the state of policing and crime been in New York City before Mamdani took office?
Alex Vitale: So yeah, the good news is that serious crime in particular is down. And we have pretty high confidence in that this is coming down from the elevated levels that occurred during the COVID Pandemic. I think it's important to point out though, that this is a national trend.
Nationally, crime went up during the pandemic, as it did in New York and nationally, crime is coming down. And so, to say that this is the result of the strategic actions of one police leader in one city seems to really be a kind of parochial understanding of the nature of what is clearly a much larger and broader range phenomenon.
I think the main accomplishments that Tisch can point to is that she oversaw the forcing out of some of Mayor Adams' corrupt cronies who were basically selling favors and, and engaged in all kinds of corruption. So that, I think is something that definitely happened on her watch. But the idea that that a national drop in crime is the result of the actions of one police commissioner seems a bit farfetched.
