The Mamdani campaign, left horizons, and the “defund the police” question

The 2025 New York City mayoral race is in many ways already unprecedented. By clinching the Democratic Party nomination for mayor in the primary election, Zohran Mamdani–a young, immigrant, Muslim member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)–has given hope to many that “a better New York is possible.” Mamdani’s success, fueled by an army of energized volunteers, grassroots support, and a disciplined message of economic populism, has been heralded as a potential breakthrough moment for socialism in U.S. electoral politics.

Mamdani’s campaign is reminiscent of Bernie Sanders’ presidential bids in the Democratic Party primaries in 2016 and 2020 in this respect. Alongside their shared dark horse character, Mamdani has deliberately emulated Sanders’s singular focus on an “economic populist” message, viz., making the city “more affordable” by taxing the rich.

Simultaneously, Mamdani has attempted to meticulously avoid association with political slogans or movements deemed too radical, too off-message, or too unpopular. Palestine has been a notable exception to this rule (at least partially), which further underscores the conspicuousness of the pattern vis-à-vis other social issues. New York Times columnist Lydia Polgreen observed, “It is striking how absent so-called culture war issues and identity politics were in Mamdani’s [primary] campaign. To the extent they existed at all, it was by imposition, not choice.” Historian Vincent Cannato has likewise noticed, “On the trail, Mamdani made ‘woke’ cultural politics secondary to a left-wing populist economic message.” California congressional representative Sydney Kamlager-Dove said her big takeaway from meeting with Mamdani in Washington, D.C., at a mid-July luncheon for Democrats organized by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was about “not being distracted by the culture wars.”

To be sure, there is much to like in Mamdani’s campaign platform, and on virtually every question he had better and more progressive policy positions than the entire rest of the field during the Democratic Party primary election. Nonetheless, one of the more curious aspects of Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, along the lines discussed above, has been his approach to the New York Police Department (NYPD) and the attendant question of anti-Black racial oppression. Or rather, the curiosity is that so many liberal, left, progressive, and socialist supporters of Mamdani have seemingly elided–or openly dismissed–the glaring import of his decidedly unradical stance on this issue.

Among some of Mamdani’s most vociferous and public surrogates, there seems to be a consensus that his “savvy” disavowal of specifically the “Defund the Police” movement has been both felicitous and critical to his success. The demand to “Defund the Police,” of course, was originally thrust into national prominence amidst the 2020 George Floyd and Black Lives Matter uprising (or what Robin D. G. Kelley has called the “Black Spring” rebellion), which was the largest protest movement in US history. At the time, during the height of the uprising, the demand was taken up by much of the socialist left. In 2021, DSA even adopted the demand into its national “Political Platform.” And much to his campaign’s present chagrin, evidence of Mamdani speaking in favor of “Defund” during this time has been widely propagandized by right-wing media.

However, as the movement ebbed, so too did support for “Defund” among the socialist left, to say nothing of the broader liberal and Democratic Party establishment. Now, the demand is considered a form of “maximalist far left rhetoric likely to confuse or unsettle voters,” as Jacobin writer Nick French describes it. For French and many others, Mamdani’s rejection of the “language of ‘defund’ and ‘abolition’” is a cause for celebration.

Throughout the campaign, Mamdani has taken great pains to declare at every opportunity that he is against “defunding the police,” and on the contrary, he believes that “police have a critical role to play in creating public safety.” Indeed, he has conspicuously gone out of his way to speak publicly about the NYPD in only the most positive light, obsequiously praising them and studiously avoiding saying anything that could come off as somehow suggesting that the actual function of the police in an unequal, hierarchal, racially-stratified capitalist municipality is essentially repressive, i.e., protective of the interests of the ruling class against that of the ‘lower orders’ of society.

Relatedly, Mamdani has evinced what might be described as a phobic evasion of addressing anything explicitly related to either anti-Black racism or racial justice. Perhaps this is a deliberate part of his campaign strategy of remaining “laser focused” on “economic populism,” i.e., the question of ‘affordability,’ to the exclusion of anything redolent of “wokeness.” But in preemptively deflecting accusations of the latter, his campaign risks flirting with simple opportunism.

When asked by media about resurfaced social media posts from 2020, in which he referred to the NYPD as “racist,” “a major threat to public safety,” and “wicked & corrupt,” Mamdani has either evaded and deflected or, more recently, flatly “apologized” for the past comments, stating that those views are “clearly out of step” with his current view of policing and his campaign platform. Mamdani’s main pivot around these questions is to reiterate his script that “police are critical to creating public safety across the city,” and “rank and file” cops need to be unburdened of “playing the role of mental health professionals,” which will allow them to “focus on the jobs that they signed up for.”

It is true that Mamdani was the only candidate in the primary election to refrain from calling for an increase in the size of the police force. On the other hand, since the primary election win, Mamdani has brought onto his own campaign staff precisely the campaign managers of those opponents who called for adding 3-5,000 police to the NYPD, such as Brad Lander and Zellnor Myrie.

Close friend and advisor to Mamdani, Ross Barkan (whose 2018 campaign for State Senate was managed by Mamdani), meanwhile, suggests that, far from “defunding,” the best thing Mamdani can do is try to “buy the NYPD’s support,” with lavish raises, such as “progressive” Mayor Michelle Wu did in her recent reelection bid. Barkan encourages this route but says that Mamdani must be prepared to quell the likely outrage of his “large base of supporters and the Democratic Socialists of America.”

It would certainly be a rather odd “socialist” candidate for mayor that prioritizes being a “friend of law enforcement” over the myriad victims of police repression who comprise his base. Mamdani supporters and those active in the movement against police oppression might thus do well to mind the obverse of Barkan’s advice: be prepared to independently contest and struggle against any moves the Mamdani administration makes to habilitate the NYPD.

Mamdani’s campaign platform on “Public Safety” consists mainly of keeping the NYPD at existing levels and creating a new Department of Community Safety (DCS), priced at $1 billion. The DCS will “prevent violence before it happens by taking a public health approach to safety,” which largely means focusing on issues such as “mental health,” “homelessness,” and “gun violence.” The campaign platform reads: “Police have a critical role to play. But right now, we’re relying on them to deal with our frayed social safety net — which prevents them from doing their actual jobs…. The DCS will coordinate across city agencies, including with the NYPD.” Mamdani has stressed that the $1 billion for DCS does not constitute a ‘diversion’ of NYPD budgetary funds, but rather the “cohering” of other existing budgeted programs alongside an estimated $400 million in “new revenue” obtained through increased state and city taxes on the wealthiest 1 percent.

“Defund the Police”

There are problems with the DCS formulation as it pertains to the relationship between mental health and criminality. To be sure, vastly increased spending, resourcing, and availability for public mental health care, the same as for general health care, is plainly meritorious. But to address mental health narrowly as a matter of “public safety” and criminality is both unfair to those with mental health needs and unlikely to address the actual social problem of ‘criminality’ itself. (It also potentially furthers enduring dynamics of harm wrought by the entanglement of the carceral state and supposedly ‘diversionary’ mental health initiatives, which are rife throughout New York City’s criminal-legal-psychiatric-immiseration human-management apparatuses).

The potential for the DCS gambit to go awry, focusing more on the simple public “removal” of the unhoused and mentally ill than on their care and resourcing, is vastly increased by the probability that Mamdani’s DCS will be underfunded owing to the widely-recognized fact that his power to levy higher taxes on the rich is severely circumscribed by the “checks and balances” of the State legislature, the Governor, and the judiciary. And of course, one obvious potential solution to this budgetary shortfall, viz. defunding and diverting the resources of the NYPD, has been summarily rejected by the Mamdani campaign.

However, the biggest problem with Mamdani’s approach to “public safety,” and the focus of this article, is that it represents a summary retreat from many of the political, material, and ideological advances wrought by the movements and uprisings against police oppression over the last decade. In particular, this pertains to the questions of “Defund the Police” and the very way we talk about the role of the police in a racial capitalist metropolis at the beating heart of a world empire.

To put the question of “Defund the Police” in context, the NYPD – with which the DCS will “coordinate” – is the largest and most expensive police force in the nation, not only in absolute terms but also in terms of cost per resident. It has an annual allotted budget of roughly $6 billion, and an actual end-of-year budget of approximately $11 billion. Since 1980, the NYPD budget has increased every single year, except for 2020-21 when, amidst the historic George Floyd uprising, the City Council voted to decrease the budget by $500 million. New York City has one of the highest rates of police per capita in the nation, and over the last three decades, the rate of increase of the city’s police force has been substantially greater than the rate of population increase.

Moreover, to anyone who is even the least bit familiar with the history of the NYPD and its widespread practice of targeting, harassing, incarcerating, injuring, and killing disproportionate numbers of Black people, people of color, and poor people generally, Mamdani’s talking points around the police are at best aloof and at worst mendacious. Indeed, while many contributors to Jacobin magazine, for instance, have praised Mamdani for jettisoning the “Defund” demand, specifically, and public criticisms of the police, generally, Mamdani has been questioned in a very different register on the campaign trail by some Black media outlets.

On the “Joy Reid Show,” for instance, the local independent journalist, Touré, posed this question to Mamdani: “I think a lot about the NYPD, and I am more concerned for my safety and my children’s safety from them [the police] than from the criminals. What do you plan to do to make the city a little safer from them?” On a guest visit to “The Breakfast Club” radio show, one misinformed interviewer asked Mamdani why he wants to cut the police budget. Mamdani responded according to his much-reiterated script, saying, “I want to be very clear, we are not defunding the police,” but rather “enabling” the police to “do their jobs” better by creating teams of mental health professionals to deal with certain “mental health crises.” At this point, the show’s controversial personality, Charlemagne the God, interrupted Mamdani and said, “I can’t tell you how to say things, but you need to tell people that the NYPD got a budget of $10.8 billion; does all of that really need to go the police? Why not take some of that money and invest it into other alternatives?”

One of the main arguments adduced against the “Defund the Police” demand is that, in the words of Nick French, “proposals to defund or abolish the police are very unpopular.” Although the 2022 opinion survey that French cites on the popularity of “Defund” is not broken down according to race, which matters (see below), it reveals that support for the demands to “abolish,” “defund,” and “reform” the police were 23 percent, 34 percent, and 66 percent, respectively. These numbers are down from what they were during 2020-21, in the immediate wake of the George Floyd uprising, when support specifically for the demand to “defund the police and divert those resources to social services” was relatively popular generally, and very popular among Black people in particular. Other more recent studies have shown that support for “Defund” has suffered a large dip in support among white people, but has remained quite strong among Black people, and especially younger Black people (and to a lesser extent, younger white people, too).

It’s important to remember the scale and promise of the political moment during the 2020 George Floyd uprising. Not only did the uprising itself lead to hundreds of immediate material reforms and challenges to policing nationwide, it had a truly radicalizing effect on popular consciousness. One Gallup poll from 2020 revealed that a majority of all Americans (including Blacks, Hispanics, and whites) supported the elimination of police unions; a majority supported eliminating police enforcement of nonviolent crimes (72 percent among Blacks, 44 percent among whites); and 47 percent supported shifting (“defunding”) money away from police to social programs (70 percent among Blacks, 80 percent among Asian Americans, and 41 percent among whites). A 2021 ballot initiative in Minneapolis to disband and replace the Police Department almost won, polling 44 percent support.

But the backlash against “Defund” from top figures within the Democratic Party, as well as some within social-democratic spaces, such as DSA, developed almost immediately. In his 2022 State of the Union address, then-President Biden explicitly condemned the “Defund” demand and movement. Jasson Perez, cofounder of the Black Abolitionist Network, and at the time active in the Afrosocialists and Socialists of Color Caucus of DSA, spoke of his frustration with these developments in an early 2022 interview published in the book Defund: Conversations Toward Abolition:

I’m tired of arguing for bare minimums because I see how these conversations play out across various communities. In communities of color, concepts like defund are approached in a way of discussing “How are we going to do it?” versus some of these White so-called socialist collectives that ask, “Should we even have things like defund?” [W]e need to have conversations about these issues and remind folks that defund can be adopted by reformers [even though] mainstream folks back away from defund. For example, all the “progressive” Democrats and “the Squad” [group of US representatives], with the exception of Cori Bush, won’t say defund.

The anti-Defund arguments of liberals and social democrats were certainly dubious and potentially opportunistic in 2021-22. They remain so today. Even the assertion that Mamdani’s success in the primary election was explicitly premised upon his rejection of the “Defund the Police” demand is questionable. Confidence in the police as an institution remains near historic lows among “Democrats” (29 percent) and “independents” (37 percent). “Defund” has also continued to be relatively popular among Black people, even as it sank among whites (although polling data within the most recent years is unavailable). Moreover, given the vast wave of anti-Mamdani propaganda that saturated airwaves and mailboxes directly preceding the primary election, which asserted that Mamdani would, in fact, defund the police, it is probable that a significant percentage of people who voted for Mamdani did so either despite or because of precisely this misconception.

Studies have shown that some of the fear around “Defund” is that it is perceived as implying a net reduction in total resources available for communities to deal with issues of safety, violence, and social discord; but when the issue is explained as a reduction in the police budget combined with an increase in funding for “social services” (i.e., diversion of funds), then this policy receives a strong majority of support. In other words, the problem appears to entail a need for better communication that “Defund the Police” does not mean “Defund Communities,” but rather quite the opposite. Such a clarification is something any decent politician should be capable of articulating, provided they have the will to do so.

For it really does not require any great leap of imagination to conceive of a way to mount a principled and “pragmatic” counter to the notion that ‘police equals safety.’ After all, around the world, the places that are the safest, have the least amount of crime, and boast the highest quality of life, are not those that have the highest police per capita, the most colossal police forces, or the most aggressive police states. Rather, it is those communities and societies that have the least economic and social inequality, the least poverty, the most robust welfare systems, etc. Indeed, in these terms, the reduction of the police and the augmentation of welfare spending should be the measure and desideratum of any society seeking greater ‘public safety.’

This point is all the more salient given that so many of Mamdani’s proposed reforms are premised upon an influx of funds derived from higher taxes on the wealthy, which as already mentioned, is rather unlikely in the near-term owing to the peculiarly undemocratic constitution of U.S. and N.Y. civic structures. Thus, we face the very real ‘guns versus butter’ scenario in which billions of dollars are devoted to maintaining what is effectively one of the largest standing armies in the world while the working class and the poor of New York City face rising rates of homelessness, poverty, malnutrition, and financial ruination.

Since the mayor and the city council do possess the direct power to shift funds from the NYPD to social welfare programs that might address the foregoing crises, the choice to not do so needs to be constantly challenged. (It should be remembered that this precise dynamic played out under the De Blasio administration, who came under criticism from the left during his tenure for abandoning social welfare programs in favor of “tough-on-crime” policies).

The State of the Police

Mamdani’s apparent Damascene conversion on the police begs an obvious question: what accounts for his quintessentially politician-like ‘evolution’ here? Does he still see the police as an ultimately repressive instrument within the history of US racial capitalism; an apparatus for quelling the strikes, protests, uprisings, and rebellions of the working class and oppressed against the status quo? Or does he rather now genuinely believe that the police are fundamentally a neutral, or even beneficent, institution, capable of equally serving and protecting the interests of all classes, strata, and hierarchized groupings of society?

Bernie Sanders has long maintained the rather spurious claim that the police, no less than the library or post office, constitute a “socialist institution,” given its public character. Perhaps this is Mamdani’s view now, too? Is his recent “apology” to the police for previously referring to them as “racist” (a classification, it should be noted, that is eminently “evidence-based” and empirical) mere conservative pandering or authentic revisionism?

There is also a potential cautionary tale here in the fact that Mamdani touted the “Defund” demand during the height of the George Floyd uprising, only to abandon it once the movement ebbed. On the issue of Palestine, for instance, Mamdani has remained critical of Israel throughout the campaign, in no small part due to the recent strength of the Palestine solidarity movement. Should the movement ebb, however, Mamdani may very well follow a similar path of devolution, a fate at least potentially foreshadowed by his recent disavowal and “discouragement” of the phrase “intifada.”

Moreover, from the standpoint of activists involved in both socialist and abolitionist organizing against police oppression, there is a danger that, in associating “copaganda” with socialist governance, Mamdani will play a deleterious and, literally speaking, counter-insurgent role. In other words, the imperative to ‘successfully’ govern the city by demonstrating “efficient administration” and “mayoral competence,” which would preclude picking a fight with the police, hazards running athwart of aims to (re)build a multiracial and Black socialist movement premised upon abolitionism and racial justice.

Perhaps Mamdani thinks that by playing nice with the police and refraining from attacking them, they will be nice to him in turn and refrain from giving him the dreaded ‘De Blasio treatment.’ Or perhaps he truly has no conception of how to tackle the raw threat of immense violence that the police represent, which in the last resort is what subtends the prevailing social and class hierarchies immanent to the capitalist mode of society.

For the simple reality of power within the capitalist state and system of social relations is such that in the precise moment that a mayor-elect Mamdani ascends to “power,” he immediately becomes hostage to the very standing army that he supposedly now controls. If for no other reason, this is because police forces tend to be the repository of the more reactionary, chauvinistic, repressive, and ethnically supremacist elements of any society premised upon global empire and domestic hierarchy.

An abolitionist or revolutionary approach to the police, such as that articulated by brian bean in the new book, Their End Is Our Beginning, might start from the following premises. First, the repressive forces of the capitalist state will never be ‘neutral’ when it comes to real social contests over the class and racial character of society. As Sidney Harring argued in his classic text on urban policing, the role of the police in a class society is precisely to police the class structure of that society. Second, the only power that could plausibly mobilize both the desire and capacity to prevail over the police is that of the working class, oppressed, and Black masses united in organized rebellion (akin to but beyond that of the 2020 uprising).

Thus, it is not by praising the police, “buying” their support, or dissembling criticisms thereof that the former will be neutralized as a counter-insurgent and counter-emancipatory institution. Rather, it is only by encouraging and rebuilding the mass, organized, and politically conscious struggle to erode, diminish, defund, and dismantle the power of the police that the latter can be put on the defensive and overcome. In other words, it requires the rebellion of a people to become “ungovernable.”

But here again is the tension between the imperative of an oppressed people to effect change through ungovernability and the imperative of a municipal administrator to practice “good governance.” It will be Mamdani’s burden to manage this tension successfully. It will be the movement’s burden to push this tension to the point of maximal effectiveness.

A Multiracial Working-Class Agenda?

One additional contention raised by some social democrats against the “Defund the Police” demand is that it does not fit with a political agenda focused on “economic populist” and “universalist” working-class issues, such as that successfully employed by the Mamdani campaign. (Michael McCarthy and Mathieu Desan refer to this view as “class abstractionism”). However, there is an immanent critique that can be opposed to this argument.

A new report on “working-class social and economic attitudes” by the Center for Working-Class Politics and Jacobin magazine, released in July 2025, purports to illustrate how working-class ideas have shifted over recent decades and that “economic populism” is the “only realistic” hope for building a solid working-class voting base.

Our findings suggest that the Democratic Party would be wise to capitalize on the working class’s strong preference for policies that are economically egalitarian — particularly … policies that involve strengthening worker rights and leverage as well as existing universal social insurance and health care programs — while deemphasizing potentially divisive social policies.

Here is the rub, though. The data itself points to one glaring anomaly that the authors of the report fail to appreciate or expound. When it comes to divergences along class lines, working-class opinion on “sociocultural issues” (e.g., abortion, death penalty, LGBT, etc.) tends to be either “less progressive” or equivalent to middle- and upper-class opinion, save one category: the police.

Between the years 1960-2022, although only a minority of the working class have supported the statement, “We spend too much on law enforcement,” it is the only “sociocultural” category in which the working class has consistently demonstrated “more progressive preference” relative to the non-working class. Similarly, when isolated to the years 2020-22, the only “sociocultural” issue that receives more support among the working class than the non-working class (and by a truly large margin), pertains to the statement, “Police often use more force than necessary.”

This pattern of divergence between working-class and non-working-class opinions on the police even holds true when the demographic is restricted to “white respondents only.” In absolute numbers, the 2020-22 data shows that working-class people support the demand, “Defund the police,” at 42.4 percent, which hardly makes it “very unpopular,” and when disaggregated racially, comes out to 33.7 percent support among “white respondents only,” and thus 55 percent (or majority) support among non-white respondents only.

But the 42 percent support for “Defund the Police,” as posed, is still significant. Contextually, it means that “Defund” is actually more popular within the working class than a litany of other “sociocultural” issues, such as, “Against banning abortion after 20 weeks,” “Opposes death penalty,” and “Favors trans people in the military,” but also such “economic issues” as, “Increase mass-transit spending,” “Government-provided health insurance,” and “Increase welfare spending.”

Incidentally, it is worth noting that in addition to representing a significant class polarization in attitudes, the question of the police also represents an unparalleled racial polarization in attitudes. Polling indicates that a massive gap separates Black and white confidence ratings on the institution of the police, at 27 percent and 56 percent, respectively. This is by far the largest racial gap in confidence ratings of any other institution in society, with “small businesses” displaying the second-highest gap – 55 percent Black, 74 percent white – followed by the “military” – 57 percent Black, 73 percent white. Thus, the question of the police can be said to represent a uniquely distinct and overlapping working-class and racial justice issue.

Yet, there is a notable discrepancy in how the authors of the Working-Class Social and Economic Attitudes report discuss the “challenge” of confronting diminished working-class support for various policies. On the topic of policing, the report dispatches the importance of the issue itself by simply stating that working-class people “largely oppose strong progressive positions on policing and crime” (a questionable claim in itself). But on the topic of “working-class voters’ skepticism toward government and government spending,” the authors conclude that “careful persuasion” remains an “indispensable,” albeit “extraordinarily difficult,” task. Indeed, “if we have any hope of undercutting Trump’s savvy exploitation of populist resentment, it’s our only option.”

To the contrary, it seems self-evident that to truly undercut and defeat Trump’s (and even more so, J.D. Vance’s) version of right-wing ethno-nationalist “economic populism” – as well as the more centrist version of neoliberal capitalist “populism,” which actually feeds into the former – what is needed goes well beyond narrow economic populism. Although it may indeed be “extraordinarily difficult,” what remains “indispensable” is an empowered, socialist, working-class movement that is rooted in solidarity and anti-oppression. Moreover, this is a movement that must refuse both opportunism and the propagation of expedient falsehoods (or elisions) that have the effect of sowing political confusion among workers and oppressed people.

Economic Populism and Racial Justice?

While there are obvious electoral benefits to running an “economic populist” campaign that avoids challenging the police or even systemic anti-Black racism itself in an explicit manner, there are also real limitations. Although exact numbers remain contested, it is clear that Mamdani’s campaign has done relatively better among white people and relatively less so among Black people (African-American Studies scholar Brandon Terry describes Mamdani’s “Black support” as “pretty weak”); better among the middle-to-upper-income brackets (excluding the topmost) than the lowest brackets; and better among the “college educated” than the “non-college educated.” As Adam Tooze has concluded in agreement with others, after assiduously picking over the numbers, “it makes sense to describe Mamdani as having mobilized an essentially middle-class coalition.”

Of course, it is important to recognize, as Mychal Denzel Smith points out, that “there is no singular ‘Black vote’” and Mamdani polls higher among younger Black voters. Additionally, Tooze may be relying on too reductionist of an assumption about class, since those making, for instance, between $70-100,000 in New York City, may very well be working class in terms of their occupation and relationship to the production of wealth (and ‘means of production’).

Nonetheless, it is no secret that the Mamdani campaign, and the organized social democratic and socialist left generally, lag with working- and lower-class Black people. This despite polling which shows that Black people tend to distrust capitalism and favor socialism at greater rates than white people. It is not without justification that Rashida Tlaib, speaking at the most recent DSA national convention, charged the organization with “failing” to build “more diverse communities and leadership roles,” noting that there were only a “handful of our Black neighbors” among the 1,200 assembled delegates.

After all, while recent surveys reveal that many white people have ‘moved on’ from Black Lives Matter, George Floyd, and racial injustice generally, these things remain of pressing importance for Black people (though of course not exclusively to Black people). According to a 2025 Pew poll, 49 percent of white people say “too much” attention is paid to issues of racism, but 69 percent of Black people say “too little.” And while 44 percent of white people think America has satisfactorily “gone far enough on racial equality for Black people,” 82 percent of Black people think America has “not gone far enough.”

Surely, then, the fact that Mamdani’s campaign website and platform materials conspicuously have nothing to say explicitly about anti-Black racism and racial oppression in New York City is not helping with this problem.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the debate over Mamdani’s stance on policing is not simply about campaign strategy or rhetorical choices. If the horizons of socialists and the left are to encompass more than a promise of affordability and technocratic reform, it must grapple directly with the realities of racial capitalism, state violence, and the daily experience of policing in Black and working-class communities. We cannot sacrifice the importance of this struggle to the shibboleth of “pragmatism.” Rather than retreat from demands which directly challenge the police, we should undertake the “extraordinarily difficult” but “indispensable” work of building a mass, multiracial, working-class movement in which such demands are rendered both popular and feasible.