Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani says he not needs to “defund the police,” however his picks for his transition group positive ship the other message.
Take Alex Vitale, tapped for the “neighborhood security” committee.
The Brooklyn School prof doesn’t need to simply “defund” the police; he needs to eliminate them altogether: He even wrote a e-book titled “The Finish of Policing.”
“The issue is just not police coaching, police variety, or police strategies,” runs one description of the e-book. “The issue is policing itself.”
Vitale printed that in 2017, three years earlier than George Floyd’s dying in police custody.
Naturally, he’s a selected peeved at broken-windows policing — the apply of cracking down on small offenses and quality-of-life violations to discourage far worse crimes, an strategy that was central to town’s quarter-century of success in boosting public security.
And he’s slurred NYPD cops, claiming they’ve focused minorities.
In fact, only a few years again Mamdani himself smeared them as “racist, anti-queer & a significant risk to public security,” to not point out “depraved & corrupt.”
Sure, the mayor-elect apologized (kind of) for that in the course of the marketing campaign in a bid to guarantee voters.
Neither is Vitale the one anti-cop chief on Mamdani’s transition group.
He named Invoice de Blasio adviser Elana Leopold as its government director, regardless of (or perhaps due to?) the “open letter” she co-signed in 2020 demanding a “radical change” to policing — beginning with a $1 billion lower within the NYPD’s finances.
Different 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 Security Alliance “police-alternative” zone.
And for his community-organizing committee, the incoming mayor tapped black nationalist Lumumba Bandele, of the Malcolm X Grassroots Motion, regardless of his ties to Black Liberation Military members convicted of killing cops.
Certainly, the 400 members of the transition braintrust embrace an entire host of soft-on-crime and anti-police advocates from lefty teams just like the Authorized Help Society, New York Civil Liberties Union, Make the Street New York and the Democratic Socialists of America.
Not a crowd that’s more likely to ask awkward questions on Mamdani’s plan to shift NYPD cash to a brand new Division of Neighborhood Security, 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.
In the meantime, the transition crew’s schooling “specialists” dependably assist increased faculty spending and lefty indoctrination, with a conspicuous lack of voices demanding wonderful outcomes or supporting elevated scholar achievement.
Roughly one in seven New York Metropolis public-school kids now attends a constitution faculty, however you received’t discover a single consultant from the constitution neighborhood among the many 400 of us on this group.
Sure, the transition of us are merely advisers; Mamdani might need tapped many purely as a symbolic recognition.
However the indicators are downright worrisome on points as important as policing.
NYPD boss Jessica Tisch might have an even bigger drawback on her fingers than she imagined.
So may the entire metropolis.
