New York’s Possible Next Mayor’s Radical Agenda Would Gut NYPD and Empty Prisons

NEW YORK, NY- If New Yorkers elect far-left communist nutjob Zohran Mamdani as mayor of the Big Apple, they will get precisely what they deserve. 

Mamdani, who would give Stalin, Lenin, and Marx a run for their money, was the subject of a doozy this past weekend. The New York Post reports that Mamdani and his cadre of Marxist/Commies at the Democratic Socialists of America have had their platform revealed. 

According to a platform proposal, DSA and Mamdani are proposing the elimination of misdemeanors as arrestable offenses. The group claims that policing and detention are “instruments of war” which are designed to “guarantee the domination of the working class.” They are demanding an end to “the criminalization of working-class survival.” The implication is that crimes such as shoplifting, petty theft, burglary, and the like are necessary for some people to survive. 

“For all of the working class to achieve collective liberation, we must constrain, diminish, and abolish the carceral forces of the state–from prisons and police themselves, to their manifestations in all forms throughout society,” the party’s latest platform, adopted in 2021, reads. 

Mamdani has been parroting that exact proposal on the campaign trail when he isn’t pushing for city-run grocery stores, free public transportation, free health insurance for all, and a whole cornucopia of far-left handouts. He has recently called for the NYPD to stop focusing on so-called “non-serious crimes.” 

“Police have a critical role to play, but right now we’re relying on them to deal with the failures of our social safety net, which is preventing them from doing their actual jobs,” he said in a campaign video posted to X last week. 

The DSA has proposed slashing arrests, gutting prosecutors’ budgets, abolishing cash bail and all forms of pre-trial detention, eliminating electronic monitoring, and ending imprisonment for violation of parole. 

The Post reports that Mamdani has questioned the purpose of prisons, and has, both as an Albany lawmaker and in his mayoral campaign, called to roll back punishment on so-called “non-violent offenses.”

In essence, Mandani would roll back the successes enjoyed by Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, where crime in the Big Apple hit historic lows. That was accomplished by using so-called “broken windows” policing, which had police enforcing low-level offenses that often lead to more serious crime. 

Mamdani has also called for decriminalizing prostitution, claiming it is a “victimless” crime.

Mamdani, ever a panderer, backed off on calls to defund the police after the mass shooting on Park Avenue earlier in August. He claimed he will keep the NYPD at “roughly” its current size while reallocating officers to more “serious” crimes. 

Critics, meanwhile, have little faith in Mamdani’s ability to get crime under control in New York, given his radical view of policing. 

“I don’t buy for a second that he is moderated on any of these policing questions because he has yet to really articulate any deep way why he’s moderated or how he’s moderated,” said Rafael Mangual, legal policy expert at the Manhattan Institute.

“All he has really said is that he no longer wants to defund the police, even though police and prison and jail abolition are core tenets of the DSA party platform.” 

Mamdani has gone so far as to try to change the definition of what a violent offense is. 

“What violent crime is–is defined by the state,” he said at a 2021 protest outside the Manhattan DA’s office seeking to end cash bail and shut down the jail at Rikers Island, which he is still pushing to do. “Violence is an artificial construction,” he said at the time. 

The laws Mamdani is seeking to erase include what many people would consider to be violent crimes. Those include 3rd-degree assault, menacing, DWI, forcible touching, sexual misconduct, 2nd-degree sexual misconduct, and 2nd-degree sexual abuse. It is likely the victims of assault or sexual crimes would feel differently about whether those crimes are violent or not. 

“They’re driving the city into a hole that’s never going to recover,” said Susan Ginsburg, a resident of Greenwich Village, which has spiraled into a “lawless drug den” due to soft-on-crime policies pushed by Soros-funded DA Alvin Bragg. Some have accused him of operating a “revolving door of justice.” 

“People will break the law with impunity,” Ginsburg said of Mamdani’s proposals. “There has to be [a] deterrent for breaking the law.” 

“It’s astonishing that we’re even having this conversation,” said Maria Danzilo, an Upper West Side resident who ran for the Democratic nomination for state senate in 2022 and founded the group One City Rising. 

“Everybody is so sick and tired of this, and we just want to have a normal, functional, reasonable way of getting through our day without worrying about being hurt. This is exactly the opposite of what New Yorkers need right now,” Danzilo said. 

Mamdani may just be dreaming about his crime proposals, since any such change in the law would have to be accomplished in Albany. And New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, who hasn’t yet endorsed Mamdani, doesn’t support defunding the police. 

That may prove little more than an annoyance for Mamdani, who, if elected mayor, can influence the NYPD’s response to specific offenses.

For example, he could direct the NYPD to “deprioritize” certain arrests or pressure DAs not to prosecute certain cases. Although, in the case of Manhattan, Bragg issued a “day one” memo instructing prosecutors to go light on armed robberies and drug dealing. 

“That will create an EZ-Pass for criminals, enabling them to repeatedly commit misdemeanor crimes,” New York mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa said. “This will make the police even less effective at enforcement. Ultimately, this will cause the quality of life to decline dramatically, leading to a breakdown of law and order and resulting in chaos and disorder.” 

Other residents are stunned by Mamdani’s proposal to gut the criminal justice system in New York. 

“It’s just difficult to imagine how adults in their right mind could come up with it. I’m not exaggerating, I’m completely serious,” he said. “We’re already suffering from terrible crime. This is going to make it a thousand times worse. And perception matters–just the notion of this would embolden criminals.” 

The Post reached out to Mamdani and the DSA, who didn’t respond to requests for comment.