Zohran Mamdani Panics, Attempts To Walk Back Radical Policy

Zohran Mamdani, the pro-communist New York City mayoral candidate who recently clinched the Democratic Party nomination, is attempting to walk back one of his most radical policy platforms after a recent Manhattan shooting.

Earlier this week, a gunman barged into a Manhattan office building and killed four New Yorkers, including a Blackstone executive and an NYPD officer. The gunman was allegedly looking for an NFL executive and got off the elevator on the wrong floor when he carried out the killings.

In the wake of the shooting, Mamdani has been under fire due to his past support for “defunding” the police. “In the last budget, the City Council tried to make the NYPD reduce its overtime budget by half. They simply refused. There is no negotiating with an institution this wicked & corrupt,” Mamdani posted on December 7, 2020.

“Defund it. Dismantle it. End the cycle of violence,” the post continued, which was one of many he shared on the topic in 2020. “Our police: threatening the physical safety of politicians who oppose their agenda. Our prosecutors: turning their own offices into super-spreader events because of all their COVID truthers. The entire carceral system is an unreformable public health hazard. Defund & dismantle,” the pro-communist candidate wrote in another.

On Wednesday, Mamdani emerged for a highly anticipated press conference in which he attempted to walk back his past statements in support of the radical policy.“I am not running to defund the police,” he said.

He did, however, state that he is still planning to disband the police department’s Strategic Response Group (SRG), the elite NYPD unit that responded to the massacre. “There is a need to ensure that every act we take is one that is actually delivering public safety,” he said. “And what we see right now, especially with regards to how we respond to protests, is not in line.”

According to a report from the New York Post, the SRG has also been tapped to respond to protests in the past. Mamdani argues that the unit is complicit in “human rights abuses” and should be disbanded.

After meeting with the family of slain NYPD officer Didarul Islam, Mamdani claimed that his past posts in support of defunding the police weren’t reflective of his campaign’s stance that the police plays an integral role in public safety. He then argued that he is not in favor of using police resources to respond to all incidents before arguing that social workers should be sent to certain calls, including mental health disturbances and domestic violence reports.

“My statements in 2020 were made amidst a frustration that many New Yorkers held at the murder of George Floyd,” he said. After meeting with the family for an hour, Mamdani immediately headed to the press conference, where he repeatedly tried to deflect away from his posts.

“It is beyond me that politicians are looking to use these days to score such cynical political points, on the very day that I held the father of Officer Islam in my arms and he could not utter a single word,” he said before taking a shot at former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, his primary rival in the race. “For the former governor to spend an entire day speaking almost exclusively about me and barely about the New Yorkers who have been killed is indicative of the very politics New Yorkers want to leave in the past.”