{"id":14248,"date":"2025-09-26T00:33:50","date_gmt":"2025-09-26T04:33:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/?p=14248"},"modified":"2025-10-07T18:59:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-07T22:59:10","slug":"the-mamdani-campaign-left-horizons-and-the-defund-the-police-question","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2025\/09\/the-mamdani-campaign-left-horizons-and-the-defund-the-police-question\/","title":{"rendered":"The Mamdani campaign, left horizons, and the \u201cdefund the police\u201d question"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u2013a young, immigrant, Muslim member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)\u2013has given hope to many that \u201ca better New York is possible<\/a>.\u201d Mamdani\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Mamdani\u2019s 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\u2019s singular focus on an \u201ceconomic populist<\/a>\u201d message, viz., making the city \u201cmore affordable<\/a>\u201d by taxing the rich.<\/p>\n

Simultaneously, Mamdani has attempted to meticulously avoid association with political slogans or movements deemed too radical, too off-message, or too unpopular. Palestine<\/a> has been<\/a> a notable exception<\/a> to this rule (at least partially<\/a>), which further underscores the conspicuousness of the pattern vis-\u00e0-vis other social issues. New York Times<\/em> columnist Lydia Polgreen<\/a> observed, \u201cIt is striking how absent so-called culture war issues and identity politics were in Mamdani\u2019s [primary] campaign. To the extent they existed at all, it was by imposition, not choice.\u201d Historian Vincent Cannato<\/a> has likewise noticed, \u201cOn the trail, Mamdani made \u2018woke\u2019 cultural politics secondary to a left-wing populist economic message.\u201d California congressional representative Sydney Kamlager-Dove<\/a> 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 \u201cnot being distracted by the culture wars.\u201d<\/p>\n

To be sure, there is much to like in Mamdani\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2013or openly dismissed\u2013the glaring import of his decidedly unradical stance on this issue.<\/p>\n

Among some of Mamdani\u2019s most vociferous and public surrogates, there seems to be a consensus that his \u201csavvy<\/a>\u201d disavowal of specifically the \u201cDefund the Police\u201d movement has been both felicitous<\/a> and critical to his success<\/a>. The demand to \u201cDefund the Police,\u201d of course, was originally thrust into national prominence amidst the 2020 George Floyd and Black Lives Matter uprising (or what Robin D. G. Kelley<\/a> has called the \u201cBlack Spring\u201d rebellion), which was the largest protest movement in US history<\/a>. At the time, during the height of the uprising, the demand was taken up by much of the socialist left<\/a>. In 2021, DSA even adopted the demand into its national \u201cPolitical Platform<\/a>.\u201d And much to his campaign\u2019s present chagrin, evidence of Mamdani speaking in favor of \u201cDefund\u201d<\/a> during this time has been widely propagandized by right-wing media.<\/p>\n

However, as the movement ebbed<\/a>, so too did support for \u201cDefund\u201d among the socialist left, to say nothing of the broader liberal and Democratic Party establishment<\/a>. Now, the demand is considered a form of \u201cmaximalist far left rhetoric likely to confuse or unsettle voters,\u201d as Jacobin<\/em> writer Nick French<\/a> describes it. For French and many others, Mamdani\u2019s rejection of the \u201clanguage of \u2018defund\u2019 and \u2018abolition\u2019\u201d is a cause for celebration.<\/p>\n

Throughout the campaign, Mamdani has taken great pains to declare at every opportunity that he is against \u201cdefunding the police,\u201d<\/a> and on the contrary, he believes that \u201cpolice have a critical role to play in creating public safety<\/a>.\u201d Indeed, he has conspicuously gone out of his way to speak publicly about the NYPD<\/a> in only the most positive light, obsequiously praising<\/a> them and studiously avoiding<\/a> 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 \u2018lower orders\u2019 of society.<\/p>\n

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 \u201claser focused<\/a>\u201d on \u201ceconomic populism<\/a>,\u201d i.e., the question of \u2018affordability,\u2019 to the exclusion of anything redolent of \u201cwokeness<\/a>.\u201d But in preemptively deflecting accusations of the latter, his campaign risks flirting with simple opportunism.<\/p>\n

When asked by media about resurfaced social media posts from 2020, in which he referred to the NYPD as \u201cracist,\u201d \u201ca major threat to public safety,\u201d and \u201cwicked & corrupt,\u201d Mamdani has either evaded and deflected or, more recently, flatly \u201capologized<\/a>\u201d for the past comments, stating that those views are \u201cclearly out of step<\/a>\u201d with his current view of policing and his campaign platform. Mamdani\u2019s main pivot around these questions is to reiterate his script<\/a> that \u201cpolice are critical to creating public safety across the city,\u201d and \u201crank and file\u201d cops need to be unburdened of \u201cplaying the role of mental health professionals,\u201d which will allow them to \u201cfocus on the jobs that they signed up for<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is true that Mamdani was the only candidate in the primary election to refrain from calling for an increase<\/em><\/a> 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<\/a> and Zellnor Myrie<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Close friend and advisor to Mamdani, Ross Barkan (whose 2018 campaign for State Senate was managed by Mamdani), meanwhile, suggests<\/a> that, far from \u201cdefunding,\u201d the best thing Mamdani can do is try to \u201cbuy the NYPD\u2019s support,\u201d with lavish raises, such as \u201cprogressive\u201d 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 \u201clarge base of supporters and the Democratic Socialists of America.\u201d<\/p>\n

It would certainly be a rather odd \u201csocialist\u201d candidate for mayor that prioritizes being a \u201cfriend of law enforcement\u201d 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\u2019s advice: be prepared to independently contest and struggle against any moves the Mamdani administration makes to habilitate the NYPD.<\/p>\n

Mamdani\u2019s campaign platform on \u201cPublic Safety<\/a>\u201d 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 \u201cprevent violence before it happens by taking a public health approach to safety,\u201d which largely means focusing on issues such as \u201cmental health,\u201d \u201chomelessness,\u201d and \u201cgun violence.\u201d The campaign platform reads: \u201cPolice have a critical role to play. But right now, we\u2019re relying on them to deal with our frayed social safety net \u2014 which prevents them from doing their actual jobs\u2026. The DCS will coordinate across city agencies, including with the NYPD.\u201d Mamdani has stressed<\/a> that the $1 billion for DCS does not constitute a \u2018diversion\u2019 of NYPD budgetary funds, but rather the \u201ccohering\u201d of other existing budgeted programs alongside an estimated $400 million in \u201cnew revenue\u201d obtained through increased state and city taxes on the wealthiest 1 percent.<\/p>\n

\u201cDefund the Police\u201d<\/h4>\n

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 \u201cpublic safety\u201d and criminality is both unfair to those with mental health needs and unlikely to address the actual social problem of \u2018criminality\u2019 itself. (It also potentially furthers enduring dynamics of harm<\/a> wrought by the entanglement of the carceral state and supposedly \u2018diversionary\u2019 mental health initiatives, which are rife throughout New York City\u2019s criminal-legal-psychiatric-immiseration human-management apparatuses).<\/p>\n

The potential for the DCS gambit to go awry, focusing more on the simple public \u201cremoval<\/a>\u201d of the unhoused and mentally ill than on their care and resourcing, is vastly increased by the probability that Mamdani\u2019s 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 \u201cchecks and balances<\/a>\u201d 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.<\/p>\n