{"id":3903,"date":"2025-09-06T15:17:34","date_gmt":"2025-09-06T15:17:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gunowner-news.com\/?p=3903"},"modified":"2025-09-06T15:17:34","modified_gmt":"2025-09-06T15:17:34","slug":"mamdani-wont-defund-the-police-the-movement-can-grow-with-him-anyway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gunowner-news.com\/?p=3903","title":{"rendered":"Mamdani Won\u2019t Defund the Police. The Movement Can Grow With Him Anyway."},"content":{"rendered":"


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\n Zohran Mamdani arrives outside the Jacob K. Javitz Federal Building in New York City on August 07, 2025.<\/span>\u00a0Photo: Michael M. Santiago\/Getty Images<\/span> <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Mychal Denzel Smith is the author of Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream<\/a>, winner of the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cI am not<\/span> running to defund the police,\u201d\u00a0Zohran Mamdani\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0in late July,\u00a0after visiting with the family of the slain police officer Didarul Islam.\u00a0It was consistent with the stance he\u2019s maintained throughout the New York City mayoral race. His campaign has remained focused on his signature issue\u2014the city\u2019s affordability crisis\u2014and he has not run, in either his successful Democratic primary or the upcoming general election, on a platform of\u00a0defunding the police<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This fact has not stopped Mamdani\u2019s opponents, chiefly former Governor Andrew Cuomo (whom Mamdani defeated in the primary) and incumbent Mayor Eric Adams (for whom the Trump administration has reportedly dangled job opportunities as incentives to leave the race) from dredging up his past support for the defund movement. In 2020, at the height of the nationwide protests that erupted after the murder of George Floyd, Mamdani posted to social media that the NYPD was\u00a0\u201cracist, anti-queer and a major threat to public safety<\/a>,<\/a>\u201d and that we needed to \u201c#DefundtheNYPD.\u201d At the time, he was running for his current seat in the New York State Assembly.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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That he no longer supports defunding the police is not surprising; it has never been a popular position. Even in 2020, when the fervor around Floyd\u2019s murder was its highest, support for reducing police funding\u00a0only stood at twenty-five percent of the public nationwide<\/a>; that dropped to fifteen percent\u00a0by the next year. It would not be savvy to run on such a platform at this time.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mamdani\u2019s opponents understand that defund is toxic, which is why they want to tie the mayoral frontrunner to his previous stance. As the Cuomo and Adams campaigns struggle to gain momentum,\u00a0while Mamdani continues to max out his campaign contributions<\/a>, they need Mamdani to appear too extreme for the general public. Cuomo has called Mamdani\u2019s previously expressed views around policing \u201cdangerous, literally dangerous.\u201d Mamdani, backing away from those views, has called himself \u201ca candidate who is not fixed in time.\u201d<\/p>\n

It would be easy to become cynical about Mamdani\u2019s backtracking, to see it as simply another example of a U.S. politician muting voices of dissent to gain foothold within electoral politics. And it is that. Mamdani should not have to back off from his previous \u2014\u00a0and well-founded \u2014 position to make himself electable. Police budgets are the only consistent growth areas in many local budgets, and their constant inflation does siphon resources from other important areas of civic life, while also creating a police state that terrorizes non-white, poor, and queer citizens. Reducing police budgets and allocating those dollars elsewhere is a modest request. Mamdani should be free to say as much.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He is not, though, if his goal is to be elected mayor, since there is still no wide-reaching support for defunding the police as a policy. But if you look at his actual platform (not what Cuomo and Adams would have you believe is his platform), you\u2019ll find that his goals for public safety still align with the goals of defunding the police\u2014just without the defund part. <\/p>\n

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Reducing police budgets and allocating those dollars elsewhere is a modest request. Mamdani should be free to say as much.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n

While his detailed platform does say \u201cPolice have a critical role to play\u201d with respect to public safety, his proposals do not mention much of a role. There are sections on mental health, gun violence, hate violence, and victims\u2019 services that outline things like violence interrupters, restorative justice models in schools, creating crisis residences, and other interventions that do not involve the police at all. The need to bolster those resources has been a major part of the message of the defund movement from the start: police are tasked with solving social problems that they are not equipped to handle, so instead of increasing their budgets and the purview of their duties, allocate those resources to more effective ideas. This model has shown significant results in places like Baltimore and Chicago, which have in the past year experienced historic drops in violent crime. It\u2019s also been conveniently overlooked by the defund movement\u2019s critics.<\/p>\n

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The rhetoric may not be there, but the substance of what the defund the police movement is after is alive in the Mamdani campaign. It would be nice if he were in position to run explicitly on that message, but he\u2019s not in the world as currently constructed. However, even on this, I\u2019m not ready to give myself fully over to cynicism. Think of one of Mamdani\u2019s other controversial positions\u2014his unwavering support of Palestinians, and an end to the genocide and apartheid to which Israel has subjected them for nearly eighty years. Even five years ago, holding such a position publicly might have barred him from getting elected to any office; now, it is a major factor in his appeal.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That would not have happened without the decades of movement building that preceded this moment, and that is the main takeaway here for the defund movement: Present Mamdani may not be able to run a successful campaign now by calling for defunding the police, but push hard enough, and a future Mamdani absolutely will.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n


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Zohran Mamdani arrives outside the Jacob K. Javitz Federal Building in New York City on August 07, 2025.\u00a0Photo: Michael M. Santiago\/Getty Images Mychal Denzel Smith is the author of Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream, winner of the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction. \u201cI am not running to defund the police,\u201d\u00a0Zohran Mamdani\u00a0said\u00a0in late July,\u00a0after […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3904,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3903","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-usa-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gunowner-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gunowner-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gunowner-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gunowner-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gunowner-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3903"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gunowner-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3903\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gunowner-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3904"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gunowner-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gunowner-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gunowner-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}