New York’s socialist mayoral candidate’s ideas threaten to bring back the post-George Floyd riots surge in crime.
Of all the terrible policies 33-year-old New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has embraced over the last five years, none threaten New York City more than his ideas about the police and law and order. To a certain extent, the New York assemblyman’s socialist ramblings about economics are less threatening because New York taxing and spending policies are handled by the Assembly and they are already both extremely high.
Mamdani’s government-run grocery stores will likely just end up being a taxpayer-funded joke rather than being truly disastrous. In a sea of other, almost certainly more functional privately-run businesses, I’m guessing New Yorkers will generally avoid the government option.
Where Mamdani will have a great deal of power to do damage is with his ideas about the police. Though he’s tried to soften his position about defunding the police a bit in recent days, Mamdani has made it clear on social media over the years that he’s hostile to traditional policing.
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The Daily Signal contacted Mamdani’s office about his past social media posts. It has yet to respond.
Taking money from the NYPD and giving it to social workers is defunding the police whether Mamdani admits it or not. A similar program was tried under former New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and it amounted to a gargantuan scam that did nothing to improve public safety.
Not only was de Blasio’s 2015 program a colossal failure, but it turns out that police officers are quite competent at handling “mental health emergencies.”
“In 2023, officers responded to nearly 175,000 emotionally disturbed person calls,” wrote Carolyn Gorman at City Journal. “They used force in less than 1% of those encounters. The NYPD has years of experience successfully responding to crisis calls.”
NYPD is understandably getting nervous about the possibility that Mamdani might become mayor and implement his absurd agenda.
“The city would be totally unsafe for people who live here,” said Scott Munro, president of the NYPD Detectives’ Endowment Association, according to the New York Post. “I go to bed and worry about the phone ringing. I’m worried about my members getting killed. I don’t want to plan any funerals.”
According to the New York Post, top officials at NYPD are worried they will see an exodus of police officers if Mamdani wins his election.
I will say, as a resident of New York, my greatest worry is that by essentially returning to the dumb anti-police ideas of the Great Awokening there will be another big crime spike in the city. New York has only now begun to recover from the 2020 crime surge, though many crime rates to start the year remain much higher than they were in 2019.
And common street crime is only part of the equation. What can be expected from a mayor who refuses to denounce the phrase “globalize the intifada”? Will he deploy NYPD when protesters get out of control as they have at Columbia University?
Now, some of Mamdani’s opponents — typically non-New Yorkers — have argued that it may be good for New York City to elect a socialist mayor. The leftist denizens of the city will get what they want good and hard, including high crime, and it will serve as an example to the nation of what not to do.
I disagree, and not just because I live in the city.
The world has endless examples of Mamdani-style policies failing, spectacularly.
It’s not like this would be the only time that real socialism has been tried. It’s an experiment that gets tried time and time again and damages societies for generations. Just look at the example of the social workers instead of cops program that cost New York over a billion dollars. That program was launched a decade ago, failed, and now it’s being proposed again.
Globalist elites, like Mamdani and his parents, won’t really suffer the consequences of these actions. They just move in, make a mess, then move on to somewhere else when things don’t work out.
Instead, what will happen is the Left will see Mamdani as an effective option to gain power and will try to float similar candidates elsewhere. And a lot of innocent people will be hurt, not just the “billionaires” who Mamdani has created as a phony punching bag.
Originally published at The Daily Signal.
Jarrett Stepman is a contributor to The Daily Signal and co-host of The Right Side of History podcast. He is also the author of the book The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past.
