Mayor Zohran Mamdani, now on the job, keeping NYPD policies he once challenged

Quietly, new Mayor Zohran Mamdani stood inside police headquarters behind the incumbent police commissioner, Jessica Tisch — one of the few top-level agency leaders he kept on from the Adams administration — as she hailed NYPD policies he had long assailed as a candidate.

Tisch, answering questions in their first joint news conference at headquarters, praised the NYPD’s gang database as "a tool that has helped us." Candidate Mamdani, in September, had called the database a "vast dragnet" that sometimes ensnares minority youths with loose, threadbare, or zero connections to gangs, because of social media posts.

Quality-of-life policing by the NYPD — some of which Mamdani has suggested would shift into a new $1.1 billion police-supplementing Department of Community Safety — is enforcement "New Yorkers were begging us for," she added.

Her remarks came after Mamdani insisted "we are fully aligned" that "we need to see genuine public safety across the city."

Fully aligned on public safety

Mamdani included no money for the Department of Community Safety in his proposed budget for the forthcoming fiscal year, which begins in a few months, although he is expected to fund the department as the budget process proceeds.

The remarks by Tisch came on Day 6 of Mamdani’s tenure, which began with an inaugural address in which he promised to govern "expansively and audaciously."

Now in month three of his mayoralty, Mamdani has maintained, at least so far, several controversial NYPD policies that he once promised to change.

Mamdani campaigned on a platform to transform municipal government. Now, he's facing the headwinds of governing an inert, complex bureaucracy with conflicting interests and juggling tradeoffs with far-reaching and unexpected consequences.

"There’s something political scientists call path dependence, which is just a fancy way of saying that if there’s a groove, things tend to keep going into that groove," said Nicholas Tampio, a professor of political science at Fordham University. "There’s a lot of moving pieces in city government, and so it’s very hard to just move one piece, because the organism will adjust to keep things where they are."

Sam Raskin, a Mamdani spokesperson, suggested changes were coming "in the weeks ahead," although Raskin wasn't specific. 

"The Mamdani administration is committed to advancing meaningful public safety reforms that keep New Yorkers safe while strengthening trust in our institutions. That work is already underway, and we are continuing to move it forward in close collaboration with the NYPD and other partners," Raskin said. "Our administration is focused on getting these reforms right, and the mayor will have more to share in the weeks ahead."

Collateral consequences

There are collateral consequences that must be considered when changing a certain policy, experts said.

Take the controversy over how the police should deal with cyclists who  break traffic laws.

As a candidate, Mamdani said he would reverse a policy implemented last year under Mayor Eric Adams and Tisch to issue criminal summonses — instead of the simple traffic tickets motor-vehicle drivers receive — to cyclists who speed, run a stop sign or commit other violations.

Tisch’s directive came after complaints that some cyclists, particularly reckless ones, ignore traffic tickets, and there’s no meaningful way to compel compliance, since cyclists do not need to be licensed as do drivers.

Critics have argued that it’s unfair to more harshly penalize cyclists, who are less dangerous than drivers, for identical law-breaking, and that issuing criminal summonses subjects those who are immigrants to potential deportation.

"I've been clear that I don't think it should be a criminal summons," Mamdani told Newsday on Jan. 5, but he refused to say whether the policy was still in place. 

For weeks afterward, he refused to say whether the criminal summons policy still existed and did so only after reporters observed cyclists receiving summons and kept confronting him. Over a month after first being asked, Mamdani said the topic was the subject of "internal communications.

"We will have an update on that very soon as to what the new policy will be," he said.

His promise was made over a month ago.

Campaigning versus governing

Another issue on which the poetry of campaigning has clashed with the prose of governing can be seen with the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group, which Mamdani long criticized for abusive tactics when policing political protests; Tisch has said the unit is "really expert" in policing such protests.

Last year, Mamdani said he wanted to divide the SRG’s duties policing protests and another key responsibility, combating unrest such as terrorist attacks. Last year, Mamdani posted the unit had been sent out "to harass + arrest" strikers, "has cost taxpayers millions in lawsuit settlements + brutalized countless New Yorkers exercising their first amendment rights." 

Earlier this year, the SRG was dispatched to disrupt an anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protest in Manhattan. Mamdani said he was briefed in advance that SRG would be used.

And last month, Mamdani said "we are hard at work" figuring out how to split the duties in a manner that is "operational."

Adams has said he considers it dangerous to make the changes Mamdani wants. 

Citing recent attacks  outside Gracie Mansion and another, a ramming of a synagogue on Thursday  in Michigan, Adams wrote in a message to Newsday: "I hope the Mayor finally recognizes the critical role the SRG plays in combating terrorism and protecting New Yorkers, and acknowledges that perhaps Eric Adams may have been right after all." 

It would not be tenable for Mamdani to follow the lead of President Donald Trump, experts said, who began to remake the federal government within weeks of taking office.

To the delight of supporters and horror of critics, Trump has taken a more aggressive approach to wrangling the federal bureaucracy: installing loyalists, gutting decades-old programs, functionally closing entire agencies, including one Cabinet department, and getting rid of hundreds of thousands of employees.

But actions by a mayor, such as in New York City, are felt far more immediately and deeply than what happens in Washington, D.C., at the federal level, says Kenn Vance, an adjunct lecturer at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

"You hit them so fast that the people of the city, the constituency, can see those effects right away," said Vance, who teaches about the city government and its future. "It’s just harder to hide the real effects of what a wrecking ball is gonna do to programs people rely on."