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Zohran Mamdani, Assembly member from Queens and current candidate for mayor of New York City, wants to give New Yorkers the city they deserve. He wants their homes to be affordable and he wants their transportation and childcare, in many cases, to be free. He even wants them to be able to buy groceries without being price-gouged.
He also wants them to be safe.
In what has partly been a reaction to anti-cop sentiment from the Left, a lot of people out there have wanted to show that they are behind the police by throwing endless amounts of money at them (doing the opposite of “defunding the police”), hiring 5,000 new cops as disgraced resigned New York governor and mayoral wannabe Andrew Cuomo wants to do, insinuating that those who think spending a billion on overtime for the NYPD is a tad excessive just hate cops and don’t want them to be happy, and arguing that cops should be the ones responding to mental health crises instead of mental health professionals.
Yet, as Mamdani pointed out in the debate last week in response to Cuomo’s repeated insistence that he wants to defund the police, the cops themselves do not want to do this. Instead of just assuming what they wanted, he actually went and spoke to them and learned that they want to focus on serious crime, not do the work of mental health professionals and social workers.
Also, while cops probably want more money, because everyone wants more money — as Mamdani said in a recent interview on The Breakfast Club, they have been quitting in droves due to mandatory overtime policies. Many of them, he says, would prefer focusing on solving crimes rather than being first responders for mental health crises, letting mental health professionals to handle those issues instead.
Is that because they have a tendency to kill people looking for help during a mental health crisis? We can probably assume that’s not the case. They likely have other reasons for not wanting to deal with those issues — but either way, they shouldn’t be.
People with mental health issues are, of course, far more likely to be victims of violent crimes than perpetrators of them — but when someone calls 911 because they or someone else is having a mental health crisis and the people who show up are armed police officers instead of mental health professionals with experience in deescalation, things can go very, very wrong.
We also don’t want police officers to be overtired from being forced to take mandatory overtime shifts, because that’s when deadly mistakes happen. There have been multiple studies demonstrating the connection between police officers being exhausted and use of excessive force.
I work in a 12-officer agency. My REGULAR schedule, not affected by other officers taking a sick day or holiday or overtime/court requirements, has me working AT LEAST 2 different shifts in the SAME week.
“Double backs,” with only 8 hours scheduled off between shifts (e.g., working an evening shift until midnight then having to be back at work at 8 AM) are the rule for every officer’s schedule. Given report time, commute time, getting ready for bed, sleeping, getting up and ready for work, that translates to about 4 hours of actual sleep.
A TYPICAL schedule for me is midnight, double back to an evening shift, another midnight, then double back again to another evening, then double back yet again to a day shift: All 3 shifts in 1 week, with 3 double backs and MAYBE 12 hours of total sleep–assuming your body isn’t so confused by the constantly variable schedule that you CAN sleep–and you’re so damn tired you can hardly think straight.
That seems bad, no?
Is this a lot of what we talk about when we talk about “defunding the police”? It is! However, there is something to be said for understanding that the phrase “defunding the police” freaks people — including, clearly, many Democrats — the fuck out. What Mamdani is doing is focusing on the aspects of that goal that are things both police and police reformers want to see happen. There is a middle ground to tread here.
I am, you may have noticed, largely not a fan of middle grounds or baby steps or “incrementalism” — not because I’m a “spoiled brat” and “want what I want when I want it,” or even because I think that injustices should be corrected as immediately as possible, without having to coddle ignorant people or hold their hands. Rather, it’s because I really do believe that half-assing things is frequently so much more painful/confusing/expensive than the current status quo that it heavily decreases the likelihood that anyone will ever go for whole-assing them.
However! A recent conversation helped me realize that when people are scared, feeling safe can often be more of a priority than actually being safe.
A few weeks ago, a Baby Boomer-aged gentleman who identified as a Democrat lectured me for over an hour about how eliminating cash bail was the reason why a man with a lengthy history of mental health issues and arrests hit a woman in the head with a log he stole from a Starbucks Christmas display while she was walking down the Mag Mile in Chicago. Was he currently awaiting trial for anything? He was not. Did most of the man’s crimes occur in Ohio, where they do have cash bail? They did. Yet, all this guy was thinking was “He wouldn’t have been able to do that if he had been locked up.”
I’m not saying this to say “Oh, this guy was stupid” — I’m saying it because it’s clear to me that people who are scared, who think there is a reasonable possibility that someone could come up and hit them in the head and cause them brain damage for the rest of their lives, have no interest in hearing that crime rates have actually decreased over the years, or that long sentences don’t actually make us safe, that keeping people in jail who have not been convicted of a crime can actually make crime worse by causing them to lose their jobs and their ability to take care of their families.
So, if we want to do the things that will actually make people safe in the long run, while eliminating injustices, it’s probably not a great idea to double down on advocating for measures that scare the shit out of them. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter if you’re “right” if no one will let you get a word out edgewise.
Part of the problem we’re always going to face is that there is an enormous chasm between what most people believe would keep them safe and what would, actually, make things more safe for them and everyone. When many Americans are scared, they want balls-to-the-wall, “tough-on-crime” recklessness, they want medieval, Game of Thrones-style criminal justice, they want to become Singapore, because that seems like the most effective way to get things under control. Much of this country has a deep-seated belief that “tough love” is the only true solution to any problem, and that is not something that is easy to shake. Especially because when it doesn’t work, the explanation can always be that it wasn’t tough enough.
Mamdani’s approach is a workable one, because it is a way to move towards more effective ideas in a way that is more manageable for people to accept. If we can actually make them feel more safe with some measures that are smart and targeted, we have a much better chance of convincing them of others in the long run.
OPEN THREAD.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
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