Mamdani, Cuomo, Sliwa have differing takes on NYPD's Strategic Response Group

While a lone gunman who had just killed four people and shot a fifth was still roaming a crowded midtown skyscraper last week, the NYPD sent in officers from its militarized Strategic Response Group to do a floor-by-floor search.

That's an assignment that Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, supports the police doing — just not as the SRG, as the group is abbreviated.

Citing allegations of brutality related to the SRG's other duties — policing political demonstrations — Mamdani has, since before he became the nominee, called for abolishing the SRG.

And on Wednesday, at a news conference with a brother of one of the shooting victims, Mamdani nodded yes when asked whether he would disband the unit and replace it with another emergency response team.

"I think what we saw on Monday was an example of how we would want a response to look like to an emergency," he said. "What we also see, however, in this city is the treatment of protest as if it requires the same."

The SRG has been a controversial unit since it was established about a decade ago, touted as an agile force to reply rapidly to terrorism and other extreme violence. But in the years since — in 2020, during the Black Lives Matter protests, the SRG was deployed and accused of excessive and disproportionate force, including against nonviolent demonstrators. Letitia James, the state attorney general, along with civil rights groups, sued the NYPD and later secured a settlement restricting the force that could be used.

The SRG has come under criticism again, in the aftermath of local protests over Israel's war in Gaza following the attacks by Hamas and other groups of Oct. 7, 2023.

Mamdani, who has himself been arrested during pro-Palestinian protests, in December criticized the deployment of SRG "to harass + arrest" striking Teamsters.

"As Mayor, I will disband the SRG, which has cost taxpayers millions in lawsuit settlements + brutalized countless New Yorkers exercising their first amendment rights," he posted on X.

Mamdani's potential opponents have a different view of the unit.

During a eulogy Thursday at the funeral for Didarul Islam, the off-duty NYPD officer whom the gunman fatally wounded in the mass shooting while Islam was doing building security, Mayor Eric Adams praised, by name, the Strategic Response Group for having done the floor-by-floor search while the shooter was still alive.

His praise for the unit came as Mamdani was seated in the front of the mosque with Islam's family.

"I want to say thank you to the men and women of the New York City Police Department in general, but specifically to the men and women of SRG," said Adams, who is seeking re-election on an independent party line. "They wanted to ensure that everyone in that building would have come out safely."

Another mayoral hopeful, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, would keep the Strategic Response Group in the NYPD, according to his spokesman Rich Azzopardi.

"Not disband it. If they're specific valid issues, the brass will address them, but this is the elite group that runs into the fire to protect New Yorkers as we saw this week," Azzopardi texted on Friday.

He didn't respond to follow-up questions asking whether under a Mayor Cuomo the Strategic Response Group would continue to police protesters or whether Cuomo sees any specific issues with the group.

Nor would the campaign of the Republican nominee, Curtis Sliwa, whose spokeswoman Maria Sliwa emailed a statement:

"The NYPD, renowned for its world-class training, and the SRG, a truly elite specialized unit, are indispensable in special circumstances. In a Sliwa Administration, they will continue to operate with the necessary safeguards, ensuring they remain the best at what they do. The SRG's heroic response to Monday's tragedy underscores their crucial role in ensuring public safety," the statement said.

Ralph Cilento, a retired NYPD lieutenant commander of detectives and adjunct professor of police science at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said that however Mamdani decides to reorganize the NYPD, there will still need to be units dedicated to policing protests, whatever the unit might be called.

"Police units are created and disbanded all the time," he said, adding: "If you disband it, it is going to resurface under another name."

For example, in 2020, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio disbanded the anti-crime unit, a group of plainclothes police officers who patrolled at night in the most high-crime areas but had been involved in controversial shootings. That unit itself had absorbed what remained of the plainclothes Street Crime Unit, which had been disbanded nearly two decades earlier following the mistaken shooting of an innocent man, according to The New York Times.

But two years after de Blasio disbanded the anti-crime unit, within months of becoming mayor, Adams created a similar unit — except officers wear modified uniforms. A federal monitor has criticized the unit for unlawful stops.

By Matthew Chayes

matthew.chayes@newsday.comchayesmatthew

Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.