Democratic mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani and his comrades at the Democratic Socialists of America want to wipe out the enforcement of all misdemeanor offenses, The Post has learned.<\/p>\n
In its most recent platform, the group blasts policing and detention as \u201cinstruments of class war\u201d designed to \u201cguarantee the domination of the working class\u201d \u2014 and demands an end what it calls \u201cthe criminalization of working-class survival<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFor all of the working class to achieve collective liberation\u00a0we must constrain, diminish, and abolish the carceral forces of the state\u00a0\u2014 from prisons and police themselves, to their manifestations in all forms throughout society,\u201d according to the national party\u2019s latest platform, adopted in 2021.<\/p>\n Mamdani is a member of the NYC chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America and its endorsed mayoral candidate Matthew McDermott<\/p>\n On the campaign trail, Mamdani has repeatedly called for police to stop focusing on what he\u2019s referred to as \u201cnon serious crimes.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cPolice have a critical role to play but right now we\u2019re relying on them to deal with the failures of our social safety net, which is preventing them from doing their actual jobs,\u201d he said in a campaign video posted to X Wednesday<\/a>.<\/p>\n The DSA has also pushed to slash arrests, gut prosecutors\u2019 budgets, abolish cash bail and all forms of pre-trial detention, scrap electronic monitoring, and end imprisonment for parole violations.<\/p>\n Mamdani, a Queens assemblyman and member of the NYC chapter of the DSA and its endorsed mayoral candidate, has questioned the purpose of prisons<\/a> and repeatedly called to roll back punishment on so-called \u201cnon-violent offenses\u201d \u2013 both as an Albany lawmaker and in his Gotham mayoral campaign. <\/p>\n Theft and shoplifting under $1,000, called petit larceny, is a misdemeanor in New York state. William Miller<\/p>\n He doubled down on his longstanding push to legalize prostitution <\/a>this week.<\/p>\n On the campaign trail, Mamdani backtracked from his prior \u2018defund the police\u2019 views<\/a> in the wake of the Park Avenue massacre<\/a>, insisting he\u2019d keep the NYPD roughly at its current size and redirect officers to focus only on \u201cserious\u201d crimes.<\/p>\n Critics remain unconvinced he can lead law enforcement and tame NYC crime.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t buy for a second that he is moderated on any of these policing questions because he has yet to really articulate in any deep way why he\u2019s moderated or how he\u2019s moderated,\u201d said Rafael Mangual, a legal policy expert at the Manhattan Institute. \u201cAll he has really said is that he no longer wants to defund the police, even though police and prison and jail abolition are core tenets of the DSA party platform.\u201d<\/p>\n Residents of Manhattan\u2019s 6th Precinct say soft on crime policies created lawlessness in their neighborhoods. J.C. Rice<\/p>\n And Mamdani has even tried to challenge the definition of a violent offense.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat violent crime is \u2013 is defined by the state,\u201d he said at a 2021 protest<\/a> outside the Manhattan DA\u2019s office to nix cash bail and shut down Rikers \u2013 a promise he\u2019s still making. \u201d Violence is an artificial construction,\u201d he said at the time.<\/p>\n The misdemeanors the DSA wants to erase aren\u2019t minor slip-ups. In the Empire State, they include theft or shoplifting up to $1,000, drug possession, assault without a weapon and even driving while intoxicated.<\/p>\n The most serious misdemeanors currently carry a maximum penalty of one year in jail. Tam Nguyen \/ NYPost Design<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re driving the city into a hole that\u2019s never going to recover,\u201d said Susan Ginsburg, a resident of Greenwich Village, which has descended into a lawless drug den<\/a> since soft on crime policies created what neighbors have decried as a revolving door of justice<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople will break the law with impunity. There has to be deterrent for breaking the law,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s astonishing that we\u2019re even having this conversation,\u201d said Maria Danzilo, an Upper West Side resident who ran in the Democratic primary for state Senate in 2022 and founded the group One City Rising<\/a>.<\/p>\n In his campaign video for his \u201cdepartment of community safety,\u201d Mamdani claims he takes public safety seriously. Zohran Mamdani\/ X<\/p>\n After the Park Avenue shooting last month, Mamdani said he had changed his mind on defunding the police. John Angelillo\/UPI\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n \u201cEverybody is so sick and tired of this, and we just want to have a normal, functional, reasonable way of getting through our day without worrying about being hurt. This is exactly the opposite of what New Yorkers need right now.\u201d<\/p>\n To end misdemeanor arrests, Albany would have to pass a bill decriminalizing or downgrading those charges.<\/p>\n Gov. Hochul \u2013 who has yet to endorse her fellow Democrat<\/a> \u2013 doesn\u2019t back defunding the police.<\/p>\n Critics don\u2019t buy Mamdani, here tweeting in 2020, had a change of heart about defunding the police. Zohran Mamdani \/X<\/p>\n If elected mayor, Mamdani can\u2019t change state laws, but does have influence over how they\u2019re enforced. He could force the NYPD to deprioritize certain arrests or pressure district attorneys not to prosecute certain cases \u2013 much like Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg did<\/a> in his controversial\u00a0\u201cday one\u201d memo<\/a>\u00a0telling staff to go soft on armed robberies and drug dealing.<\/p>\n \u201cThat will create an EZ-Pass for criminals, enabling them to repeatedly commit misdemeanor crimes,\u201d lambasted Republican mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa. \u201cThis will make the police even less effective at enforcement. Ultimately, this will cause the quality of life to decline dramatically, leading to a breakdown of law and order and resulting in chaos and disorder.\u201d<\/p>\n Mamdani has challenged the definition of violent crime, calling violence an \u201cartificial construction.\u201d Christopher Sadowski<\/p>\n New Yorkers like Chelsea resident Alexander Kaplan are stunned by the pro-crime push.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s just difficult to imagine how adults in their right mind could come up with it. I\u2019m not exaggerating, I\u2019m completely serious,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re already suffering from terrible crime. This is going to make it a thousand times worse. And perception matters \u2013 just the notion of this would embolden criminals.\u201d<\/p>\n Under DA Alvin Bragg, prosecutions are already hitting record lows. Stephen Yang<\/p>\n Mamdani\u2019s campaign and the DSA did not respond to The Post\u2019s request for comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Democratic mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani and his comrades at the Democratic Socialists of America want to wipe out…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":171577,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,11307,4219,43560,5248,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,7207,67,586,132,5230,68,1154,2969,5301],"class_list":{"0":"post-171576","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-arrests","10":"tag-crime","11":"tag-criminal-justice-system","12":"tag-metro","13":"tag-new-york","14":"tag-new-york-city","15":"tag-newyork","16":"tag-newyorkcity","17":"tag-ny","18":"tag-nyc","19":"tag-police","20":"tag-united-states","21":"tag-united-states-of-america","22":"tag-unitedstates","23":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","24":"tag-us","25":"tag-us-news","26":"tag-usa","27":"tag-zohran-mamdani"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115083545343737801","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171576"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171576\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/171577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}