NYC-DSA chides Mamdani for increasing NYPD headcount

The New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America made its strongest criticism of Mayor Zohran Mamdani to date on Friday, when it signed on to a statement criticizing the mayor’s plan to increase the New York City Police Department’s headcount.

“(Mamdani’s mayoral) platform also promised to keep the New York City Police Department (NYPD) headcount flat. … Yet he has recently committed to increasing the NYPD headcount by 580 officers – an increase which will require at least $70 million in the city budget. This runs counter to the values of the socialist and working-class movement that elected him,” the statement reads.

In addition to NYC-DSA, the mayor’s political home, the statement was signed by progressive groups Desis Rising Up & Moving, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, New York Communities for Change, VOCAL-NY and Justice Committee. These represent some of Mamdani’s strongest supporters; NYC-DSA, NYCC and DRUM’s sister group DRUM Beats were some of the first organizations to endorse Mamdani’s mayoral campaign back in October 2024.

“We are calling on Mayor Mamdani to reverse this proposed expansion of the NYPD and invest the money in community safety programs instead,” the groups wrote in the statement.

City Hall declined to respond directly to the criticism from NYC-DSA and other groups.

The current headcount of the NYPD is 33,861, according to the Mamdani administration, which recently announced that it would increase the budgeted headcount of the NYPD to 35,370 for Fiscal Year 2027. Although the actual NYPD headcount is unlikely to exceed 35,000 until 2028 at the earliest, this represents a small but significant shift away from his campaign promise to cap the NYPD’s budgeted headcount at 35,000.  

During his mayoral campaign, Mamdani also called for the elimination of the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group and its gang database. Since taking office, Mamdani has repeatedly said that he still plans to eventually abolish the Strategic Response Group, though he has not actually done so. His position on the gang database has shifted; he has praised the NYPD for implementing reforms to the database and no longer says the NYPD must stop using it. The statement from NYC-DSA, DRUM and other groups calls on Mamdani to follow through on his campaign promise to eliminate the Strategic Response Group and gang database.

It also calls on Mamdani to accelerate the creation of a new Department of Community Safety to deploy civilians and social workers to many of the mental health and homelessness calls typically handled by police. As mayor, Mamdani launched a watered-down Office of Community Safety. Mamdani has said that he hopes to turn the office into a full department by the end of his first term.

Although the statement from NYC-DSA and other groups praises Mamdani’s overall vision for public safety, it still represents a remarkable shift in NYC-DSA’s public rhetoric toward the mayor. NYC-DSA’s leaders are in regular contact with Mamdani, and the socialist organization has carefully avoided criticizing him in public, preferring to communicate any concerns privately.

While individual DSA members and internal DSA caucuses have not shied away from criticizing the mayor, particularly over his policies toward the police, NYC-DSA itself has never signed onto such statements previously – not even at 4 p.m. on a summer Friday. 

In November, the internal DSA caucuses Emerge and Marxist Unity Group called on Mamdani to fire NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch. But those caucuses have relatively little influence within the leadership of NYC-DSA, which is largely controlled by the more pragmatic and elections-focused Socialist Majority Caucus and Groundwork caucus. On Monday, following Mamdani’s announcement of the NYPD expansion, Emerge released another statement criticizing the mayor and calling him to fire Tisch and abolish the Strategic Response Group and gang database.

The dissent within Mamdani’s base over his relationship with the NYPD comes as the left struggles to articulate its vision for public safety. During the George Floyd protests in 2020, DSA and Mamdani loudly called for defunding the police, with Mamdani calling the NYPD “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety.” But in the wake of a conservative backlash against the idea of defunding the police, DSA largely stopped talking about it and Mamdani even publicly apologized to NYPD officers for his earlier views.

Recently, many in DSA have argued that support for the NYPD is fundamentally incompatible with socialist politics. Earlier this month, DSA’s National Political Committee approved a revised national platform for the organization, which includes an explicit call to (eventually) abolish the police: “Demilitarize police departments, disempower police unions, and redirect police and prison funding to public services as steps towards abolishing the carceral forces of the capitalist state.”