1-on-1 with Zohran Mamdani, Rep. Mike Lawler | Politics Unusual
In this episode of Politics Unusual after an unusual upset in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary, FOX 5 NY’s Morgan McKay speaks one-on-one with Zohran Mamdani on his promises, campaign rivals and non-endorsements from New York Democratic leadership. Plus, she gets the GOP take from Rep. Mike Lawler, who is still weighing a run for New York governor. Also, we checked in on New Jersey sports betting.
New York, New York – New York City’s Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has been walking back comments he previously made about defunding the police.
What did Mamdani mean when he tweeted #DefundThePolice? And if this no longer holds true, how would he run the NYPD as mayor? Here’s what we know:
Mamdani’s tweets from 2020
The backstory:
On Tuesday night at a National Night Out Against Crime event, Mamdani told reporters that tweets that resurfaced last week “are out of step” with his positions as a candidate.
The tweets he’s referring to were from 2020, at the height of the Defund the Police movement that sprung out of the murder of George Floyd. He made repeated calls to slash the NYPD budget at the time.
“We don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety. What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD,” he wrote on X that year.
“There is no negotiating with an institution this wicked & corrupt,” he wrote, referencing city budget negotiations that were happening at the time around proposed cuts to the NYPD. “Defund it. Dismantle it. End the cycle of violence.”
Mamdani additionally wrote that a “socialist city council” is needed to defund the police, as well as said that doing so would lead to “queer liberation.” He also called for the “dismantling” of the police that year.
Mamdani’s policies now
Mamdani faced intense backlash for these comments following the 345 Park Avenue shooting in Manhattan, which killed NYPD Officer Didarul Islam, as well as four others.
“I’ve said that since the beginning of the campaign, it is my belief, and whenever there have been tweets that have been cited from many years ago before I was an elected official, I’ve made very clear, as I said last week, that those are out of step with my positions as a candidate,” he told reporters at the National Night Out event.
New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani speaks during a press conference outside the Jacob K. Javits federal building Thursday, Aug. 7, 2025, in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)
Plus, hours after his return from an 11-day vacation in Uganda, Mamdani joined groups representing victims of the tragedy while fielding questions about his absence and prior police comments.
“I am not defunding the police; I am not running to defund the police,” Mamdani told reporters on July 30. “Over the course of this race, I’ve been very clear about my view of public safety and the critical role that the police have in creating that public safety.”
How Mamdani would run the NYPD
Big picture view:
On the campaign trail, Mamdani has delivered a different message on law enforcement, stating that he plans to keep the NYPD headcount the same, but slash the department’s overtime spending. He says he also plans to create a Department of Community Safety, which would be tasked with responding to mental health crises and combating homelessness. This will cost roughly $1 billion, reportedly.
During a press conference with Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Monday, Mamdani reiterated his stance saying that “forced overtime” is a main contributor to officers leaving the department, and that he wants “to empower police officers to respond to serious crime and hire mental health professionals to respond to mental health calls.”
He touched on this sentiment during the National Night Out event as well, stating that “if we want our officers to be able to respond to the serious crimes that they signed up to join the department to address, then we must stop asking them to respond to nearly every single failure of the social safety net.”
Mamdani has, however, defended his Dec. 2024 call to disband the New York Police Department’s Strategic Response Group (SRG), one of the force’s special operations units. According to the force’s website, this unit specializes in crime suppression, crowd control, disorder response, and “responds to citywide mobilizations, civil disorders, and major events with highly trained personnel and specialized equipment.”
The website also says that SRG personnel are “deployed to areas requiring an increased police presence due to increased crime or other conditions” and “mobilizes for shootings, bank robberies, missing persons, demonstrations, or other significant incidents.”
Mamdani has pledged that as mayor, he will “disband the SRG, which has cost taxpayers millions in lawsuit settlements + brutalized countless New Yorkers exercising their first amendment rights.”
The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) has led a campaign to get rid of this unit, citing aggressive tactics.
“The SRG has a history of racial bias, misconduct, and violence against protesters,” the NYCLU said in a press release earlier this year where the organization pledged its support for the Communities United to Reject Brutality Act. The legislation would stop the NYPD from deploying the SRG to protests and other “First Amendment-protected activity.”
The Source: Information in this article was provided by multiple sources, linked above.