His promises haven’t yet been fulfilled.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s democratic socialism has been felt in all kinds of ways since he took office in January. He’s proven to be a strong ally of the tenant class, bolstering the office that handles their complaints and freezing the rent on rent-stabilized apartments for one- and two-year leases. He’s secured funding to launch the first phase of a universal childcare program that might, one day, cover all children before they enter pre-K. He’s fought for higher taxes on the wealthy, and won a new tax on luxury second homes.
If the progressive left, largely, has gotten what they wanted from Mamdani—he’s a popular mayor, closely aligned with DSA, and has a great deal of momentum heading into next year—there’s one policy area where, for now, they have had to accept an uncomfortable compromise. Serious criminal justice reform, of the like that one would expect from a democratic socialist mayor, has not yet come to pass. Some of this is a product of the short amount of time Mamdani has actually spent in office—he’s barely passed the half-year mark—and some of it has been decision-making that has quietly frustrated some allies on the left.
(Disclosure: In 2018, when I ran for office, Mamdani was my campaign manager.)
The greatest obstacle to reform remains his police commissioner, Jessica Tisch. The pairing is, at best, incongruous. Tisch was Eric Adams’s police commissioner, inherited when Mamdani took office in January. She’s a billionaire heiress, a proud Zionist, and fairly conservative when it comes to her views on policing. Under Adams, she loudly opposed various criminal justice reforms passed in Albany, like the reduction of cash bail and the reform of the discovery process. Like Bill Bratton, the police commissioner for Rudy Giuliani and Bill de Blasio, she can be described as a “law-and-order” commissioner who believes, fundamentally, in cracking down on quality-of-life offenses and maintaining a highly militarized department.
Under Tisch, the NYPD has been flooding summer street festivals and parades in growing numbers. During the Knicks’ championship run, Tisch shut down the area around Madison Square Garden and created multiple “frozen zones” for the team’s parade, limiting the number of spectators. Meanwhile, progressive organizations like the Legal Aid Society, VOCAL-NY, and the Drug Policy Alliance have accused the Mamdani/Tisch NYPD of maintaining elevated rates of low-level arrests. Data from the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice shows that the total number of arrests from January to June 2026 exceeded 130,000, which is a 50 percent increase from the first six months of 2022.
These arrests, more often than not, are of non-white, working-class New Yorkers.
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Why has Mamdani retained Tisch? In part, it was because of the enormous pressure applied upon him last year, right after he won the primary. He was a 33-year-old leftist insurgent trying to unite the Democratic Party and keep the peace with a wide variety of political actors, including the governor, Kathy Hochul. Hochul remains a staunch Tisch supporter and helped install her as NYPD commissioner after Adams’s prior commissioner departed under a scandal cloud. To achieve much of his policy agenda, Mamdani needs state support, and that means keeping a strong relationship with the governor.
Another element was the opposition from his right. When Mamdani won the general election, he had to contend with extraordinary spending against him and a candidate in Andrew Cuomo who, as an independent, broke 40 percent. The corporate and real estate elites who backed Cuomo in the primary were deeply wary of Mamdani. Keeping Tisch represented the path of least resistance: defang some of the opposition by showing moderate voters that, on public safety, there would be some continuity from prior administrations. At the same time, Tisch had won praise from the mainstream media, conservative and liberal alike, for tackling corruption in the police department she inherited. During the campaign, Mamdani endured repeated attacks from Cuomo and his super PACs that he planned, as mayor, to defund the police.
He didn’t. And once he vowed, during a televised debate, to make Tisch commissioner, those attacks were neutralized.
The question, however, is how long the relationship can last. Bratton, who was much more conservative than de Blasio, remained commissioner for a little more than two years before departing. Bratton was, stylistically, a very different top cop, a celebrity in his own right who delighted in gabbing with the media. He seemed, at times, to even enjoy undercutting his boss. Tisch is far more understated; she and Mamdani, publicly, have been cordial because he’s permitted her, largely, to do much of what she wanted.
As a candidate, Mamdani promised a stand-alone Department of Community Safety that would limit the role of police in answering 911 calls that were not about crimes. The idea was to prevent tragedies in which police shot mentally unstable individuals who may have just required trained mental health workers instead. As mayor, Mamdani settled for a cheaper, less potent version of his campaign idea: the Mayoral Office of Community Safety. Tisch wasn’t necessarily a staunch opponent of a full-fledged department, but she was hardly supportive. With a different commissioner advocating for Mamdani’s vision, the City Council may have been more likely to consider it and pass a bill making the department a reality.
There are other campaign pledges Mamdani has yet to implement. So far, he has failed to disband the Strategic Response Group, a special unit formed a decade ago for counterterrorism purposes. The SRG is notorious for its militarized, aggressive policing of protests and marches, and first burst into public view in 2020 when police menaced and brutalized New Yorkers marchers in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Mamdani has said he will, eventually, end the SRG, but so far the unit remains because Tisch actively supports it. Mamdani also hasn’t shut down a database of suspected gang members. Tisch backs the database, even as it has faced withering criticism for surveilling innocent young men of color.
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Supporters of Tisch often act like Mamdani made the correct and only choice. How else could crime in New York be kept low? Arguments for Tisch always elide that the crime decline, half a decade after the pandemic, has been nationwide in scope. Many cities have seen plunging murder rates. Mamdani really did have other options. Tisch has never walked the beat; the new mayor could have chosen a reform-oriented commissioner who had. One option was Rodney K. Harrison, a former Suffolk County police commissioner who also held high-ranking roles in the NYPD. Harrison served on Mamdani’s transition committee. Or the mayor could have recruited from across the nation, looking to cities with experienced police commissioners who have successfully implemented department reforms.
It should be duly noted that Mamdani has not entirely neglected the project of criminal justice reform. There’s hope that Stanley Richards, the new commissioner of the Department of Correction, can overhaul the city’s notorious jails system. Richards, the former president and CEO of the Fortune Society, was once an inmate on Rikers Island, the infamous jail that is slated for closure next year. The recent appointment of Jennifer Jones Austin, a well-regarded lawyer and civic leader who served as vice chair of the National Action Network, to head up the Civilian Complaint Review Board has been cheered by many reformers and civil rights activists. The Rev. Al Sharpton, in a statement, called Austin an “unwavering advocate for justice,” and Donna Lieberman, the longtime NYCLU executive director, said she was a “strong” chair. The CCRB, the watchdog that investigates NYPD abuses, has been relatively toothless under past mayors, and there’s a belief that if Tisch is going to remain as powerful as she is, the Jones Austin CCRB will at least be an effective counterweight.
For now, reformers will wait and see what comes next out of the Mamdani administration. Opposition, for a little while longer at least, will be muted. How long that can last—a Mamdani-Tisch partnership and peace with criminal justice reformers—isn’t yet known. History suggests, at least, that unrest is inevitable.
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