Inside Mamdani’s fraught effort to rein in the NYPD unit he pledged to end

Por Chris Sommerfeldt — POLITICO – TOP Stories

NEW YORK — Mayor Zohran Mamdani suggested on Monday that he didn’t approve of the NYPD’s decision last week to deploy a controversial protest response unit to arrest scores of demonstrators, including several of his own political allies.

What Mamdani didn’t say: His office could have easily stopped the deployment.

Under a previously unreported directive issued by Mamdani in the early days of his administration, the NYPD must get City Hall’s permission before it sends the Strategic Response Group to conduct arrests at protests, a police department spokesperson confirmed to POLITICO.

The directive shows Mamdani sought to exert significant influence over a core function of the police department. Its existence also calls into question why the mayor hasn’t more frequently used that authority to stop the SRG from being deployed at protests — since he promised as a candidate to disband the specialized unit, which is primarily focused on responding to terrorist attacks and tumultuous protests.

The unit — which has long weathered criticism for its heavy-handed protest responses — just last week arrested activists protesting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s appearance at the United Nations General Assembly. Several politicians allied with Mamdani were among those put in handcuffs.

When asked about those arrests, the NYPD spokesperson revealed the pre-approval policy to POLITICO, confirming that the mayor’s office has the final say whenever the department wants to deploy SRG to detain protesters.

“We communicate with City Hall on this topic as we do on a host of things related to the department,” the spokesperson said.

The police spokesperson declined to comment on when exactly the mayor first instituted the SRG pre-clearance process. But a person familiar with the timing, who was granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive issue, said the policy was put in place during the first few months of Mamdani’s term.

The mayor signaled at a press conference Monday that he didn’t see a justification for using the SRG in last week’s arrests outside the U.N. “I’ve been clear that my vision is for the disbanding of the SRG,” he told reporters when asked if he thought it was an appropriate use of police resources.

A Mamdani spokesperson declined to comment Tuesday on why the mayor didn’t use his power to call back the SRG last week if he didn’t think its deployment was justified. The spokesperson also would not say if the mayor has ever used his authority to reject a request from the NYPD for SRG intervention.

Amanda Jack, The Legal Aid Society’s policy director for criminal law reform, laced into the Mamdani administration after being informed of the existing policy.

“It is deeply troubling that City Hall has the authority to stop SRG deployments, yet continues to approve them at demonstrations, including at the protests outside the United Nations last week where the mayor himself acknowledged that the deployment was an inappropriate use of police resources,” said Jack, whose group has long advocated for abolishing the SRG. “This further confirms that regulating SRG deployments isn’t the solution. City Hall must finally make good on Mayor Mamdani’s campaign promise to disband SRG for good.”

The future of the SRG is one of several sources of friction between Mamdani and Jessica Tisch, his politically moderate NYPD commissioner. It’s also an issue that the mayor risks disillusioning his leftist base with the longer he keeps dragging his feet on fulfilling his 2025 campaign pledge.

Tisch has defended use of the unit, saying it’s a key tool in the department’s network of crime-fighting strategies.

But Mamdani — a democratic socialist who, before launching his 2025 mayoral bid, supported calls to defund the NYPD — has long said the unit should be dismantled. Since taking office, he’s said he’s in active conversations with Tisch about finding a way to break up the unit, but those talks haven’t resulted in any tangible action nine months into his term.

Founded in 2015, the SRG was initially just tasked with counterterrorism work. The group’s responsibilities have since come to include responding to protests that turn chaotic or violent.

In arguing for abolishing the unit, Mamdani and other police reform advocates have pointed to SRG officers racking up disproportionately high rates of misconduct claims while responding to protests.

The SRG was subject to a court settlement in 2023 that put new guardrails around how the unit could be deployed during protests. But Mamdani and like-minded voices have contended that’s not enough and that the SRG should be broken up so it can return squarely to its original counterterrorism function.

In his remarks on Monday, Mamdani reaffirmed that view.

“I have made that promise, I will fulfill that promise,” he said. “The only question is the timeline of it.”

Fonte: POLITICO – TOP Stories