Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani says he not needs to “defund the police,” however his picks for his transition staff positive ship the other message.
Take Alex Vitale, tapped for the “group security” committee.
The Brooklyn School prof doesn’t wish to simply “defund” the police; he needs to do away with them altogether: He even wrote a guide titled “The Finish of Policing.”
“The issue isn’t police coaching, police variety, or police strategies,” runs one description of the guide. “The issue is policing itself.”
Vitale revealed that in 2017, three years earlier than George Floyd’s loss of life in police custody.
Naturally, he’s a specific peeved at broken-windows policing — the follow of cracking down on small offenses and quality-of-life violations to discourage far worse crimes, an strategy that was central to the town’s quarter-century of success in boosting public security.
And he’s slurred NYPD cops, claiming they’ve focused minorities.
In fact, just some 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 (form of) for that through the marketing campaign in a bid to guarantee voters.
Neither is Vitale the one anti-cop chief on Mamdani’s transition staff.
He named Invoice de Blasio adviser Elana Leopold as its govt 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 reduce within the NYPD’s funds.
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 Assist Society, New York Civil Liberties Union, Make the Highway New York and the Democratic Socialists of America.
Not a crowd that’s prone to ask awkward questions on Mamdani’s plan to shift NYPD cash to a brand new Division of Group 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 “consultants” dependably assist greater college 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 youngsters now attends a constitution college, however you gained’t discover a single consultant from the constitution group among the many 400 people on this staff.
Sure, the transition people 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 could have a much bigger downside on her fingers than she imagined.
So would possibly the entire metropolis.
