As part of his proposed
city budget for 2026, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani
just canceled the NYPD’s plan to hire 5,000 more police
officers, undoing
a key component of his predecessor Eric Adams’s
initiatives. The move aligns with Mamdani’s campaign
promise to keep police budgets and hiring in check. The
young mayor also promised to create a Department
of Community Safety while campaigning, an agency that,
in theory, would divert certain emergency calls away from
police. Although he did not include a line item for this
department in his proposed budget, there are strong
indications that the mayor plans to deliver on his
abolitionist agenda by creating nonpolice alternatives to
manage emergencies.
In 2020, when millions of
Americans marched to protest the Minneapolis police murder
of George Floyd, many, including Mamdani, called for a defunding
of police. But, five years later, Mamdani announced
he would not, in fact, be defunding the police if elected as
mayor, disappointing racial justice activists and critics of
the police. And soon after his election, the mayor-elect
announced in January 2026 that he would ask
NYPD Police Chief Jessica Tisch to stay on in her leadership
position.
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Alex S. Vitale, a professor of sociology at
Brooklyn College and the coordinator of the Policing and Social
Justice Project, isn’t discouraged by these moves.
Author of the bestselling 2017 book, The
End of Policing—considered a “bible of the
movement to defund the police”—Vitale was invited in
December 2025 to join the mayor’s transition team to work
on community safety issues. While he disagrees
with Mamdani’s decision to keep Tisch on, he speculates
that the New York City mayor is protecting against “the
risk of a real big political backlash” if he had started
his term with an aggressive removal of Tisch and dismantling
of the NYPD.
Vitale says, “We need to start by
building credible alternatives in the communities to produce
real public safety before we start talking to the community
about somehow dialing down or dismantling policing.” In
other words, ordinary people need institutional alternatives
to the police that they can turn to when faced with an
emergency.
Vitale, who spent a lot of his time on
Mamdani’s transition team working out the details for the
Department of Community Safety, says such an agency would create
a “robust civilian mental health crisis response capacity
that is independent of the police, independent of the
hospital system, which is tied to community-based service
delivery [and] peer-to-peer outreach.” Additionally,
“There are plans to address hate crimes, subway safety,
all through a lens of what I consider to be a crisis
stabilization.” The mayor’s approach, at least in
theory, is to understand the needs of the city’s most
vulnerable and underserved residents and work to meet them.
This stands in stark contrast to the standard approach of
criminalizing low-income and unhoused people and those
struggling with mental health challenges.
Across the
country, there are thriving models of nonpolice
alternatives. A Department of Community Safety in Albuquerque, New Mexico,
has been in place for more than four years and has diverted
more
than 85 percent of emergency calls away from police. The
city hired a new type of emergency responder:
“trauma-informed professionals with a background in social
work, mental health, and community engagement.”
In
Durham,
North Carolina, a similar nonpolice approach is showing
great promise. Durham’s emergency response now includes
dispatching “unarmed teams led by mental health
professionals to behavioral health and quality-of-life
emergencies.” These teams are labeled with the appropriate
acronym HEART,
which stands for Holistic Empathetic Assistance Response
Team, and are seen as a “fifth branch” of public safety,
alongside 911, police, fire, and emergency medical
services.
Although these sound like commonsense
approaches to public safety, Mamdani faces an uphill battle
to realize his Department of Community Safety, one that
Vitale says is far more ambitious than existing models in
other cities. “I don’t think there’s any one city that
has tried to cobble together this particular range of
interventions,” he says.
Moreover, there exists nothing at the scale of New York
City, the nation’s most populous city.
Mamdani’s
proposed freeze on police hiring is already facing stiff
opposition, in spite of the fact that violent crime dramatically
dropped in the city in 2025. While Tisch
takes credit for bringing down crime, according to
Vitale, “nationally,
crime is coming down, 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.” Regardless of who is responsible, a drop in
crime means fewer police are needed, not
more.
There is a danger that Mamdani could face
substantial opposition to his community safety plans,
forcing him to backtrack—as many progressive mayors have
done across the country. Take Los Angeles, where Mayor Karen
Bass, who has roots
in grassroots community organizing and was once considered a
strong ally of abolitionist activists, is now a champion of
police, urging a budget-strapped city to fork
over millions of dollars for more cops. One of LA’s
leading abolitionist activists, Melina
Abdullah, has called Bass out over the betrayal of her
past principles.
But Vitale points out that what sets
Mamdani apart from other progressive mayors is his clear
critique of capitalism. He says
mayors like Bass “were still enamored with the politics of
neoliberalism and austerity, and their criticisms of the
police were very thin and had to do more with, ‘we are
upset about a particular act of violence or some racial
disparities in arrests, and we’re going to fix that with
some superficial procedural reforms like some training and
some body cameras.’”
Contrary to that, from the
start of his campaign, Mamdani articulated a politics of
democratic socialism that doesn’t see policing as a
necessary mechanism to enforce wealth inequality, and
instead indicts an economic system that generates inequality
as a central feature.
Given that economic inequality
is one of the greatest drivers of crime, Mamdani’s launch
of a universal
child care program, his promised
rent freeze, and his ideas for city-run
grocery stores all feed into that socialist vision of
reducing crime without the need for police. Making police
obsolete is the first step toward abolishing them.
The
new mayor hopes to hire
a deputy mayor by this spring to lead his new agency.
And, some members of the city council are on his side,
having introduced a resolution
to create a new Department of Community
Safety.
“While we don’t see a dismantling or a
dialing back of police power at this time, I think there is
a pretty strong commitment to not expanding and over
legitimating that system,” says Vitale. “The proof will
be in the pudding, so to speak.”
Author
Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning
multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and
executive producer of “Rising Up
With Sonali,” a weekly subscriber-funded television
and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica
stations. Her books include Talking
About Abolition: A Police-Free World Is Possible
(Seven Stories Press, 2025) and Rising
Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial
Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing
fellow for the Economy
for All project at the Independent Media Institute and
was a senior editor at Yes!
Magazine covering race and economy. She serves as the
co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s
Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding
Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors
of Justice Action
Center, an immigrant rights organization.
This
article was produced by Economy
for All, a project of the Independent Media
Institute.
