Mayor Zohran Mamdani's campaign promise to destroy the NYPD by eliminating the Strategic Response Group and scrubbing the gang database was back-burnered as he got his sea legs, but recent statements signal that he is still on track to neuter our Finest.
As part of his effort to turn the NYPD into a passive "community safety" agency, Mamdani dispatched a fact-finding team to Columbus, Ohio, (of all places) to learn how the police there manage crowds at protests.
You might think that New York, which has thousands of protests -- both planned and spontaneous -- every year, involving sometimes hundreds of thousands of people, would have adequate experience with crowd control.
Certainly more than Columbus, a city a tenth our size.
But Columbus has a supposedly innovative policy of "deploying officers skilled in dialogue and problem-solving" at protests in order to "foster legitimacy, trust, and mutual understanding."
These "Dialogue Officers" are backed up by riot control police kept at a distance.
But this is already what the NYPD does at protests. Per Commissioner Jessica Tisch, the SRG was deployed -- distantly -- at only 6% of 2025's 4,255 protests and made arrests at only a few dozen demonstrations.
It was only in 2023 that the city legally adopted a hands-off "tiered" approach to policing street protests, and agreed not to encircle protesters or otherwise disturb their "First Amendment Activity," which is how the left describes all protesting, even such blatantly illegal behavior as blocking traffic.
Gotham is already doing what Columbus does, but leftists are addicted to identifying "best practices" elsewhere to justify their own approach here.
We saw this when Mamdani's mayoral campaign cited the CAHOOTS program in Eugene, Ore., as a model for his plan to send social workers instead of cops to respond to emergencies when mentally ill people were committing violence.
This ignored the fact CAHOOTS had proved a failure, lost its funding and ceased.
No matter: Mamdani has moved ahead with his ballyhooed "Office of Community Safety," for now a shell office that can be filled with diverted NYPD funding as soon as the mayor has the political capital to start dismantling the force.
The recent machete attack on a Grand Central subway platform, where a madman calling himself Lucifer slashed three elderly straphangers before police took him down, ought to slam shut the door on the beloved myth that violent maniacs are just in need of a sympathetic ear.
The cops implored Anthony Griffin to drop his weapon, and only shot him when he moved to attack them.
But don't bother asking Mamdani or his public-safety policy expert Abdul Rad how social workers could've defused the situation; they'll just say that real public safety means intervention before the machete is picked up.
So far, the SRG is still operational, but Mamdani says he "remains steadfast" in his "commitment to disband" the unit, which on top of crowd control is the NYPD's frontline counter-terrorism contingent.
The mayor has been busy with his cheerful plans for building free day-care centers and subsidized grocery stores and his smirking about tax hikes.
But he remains the same radical police abolitionist who preposterously insists that the Israeli army laces the boots that the NYPD supposedly presses on your neck.
Watch out, New York -- Mamdani is preparing the ground for the demolition of our public safety architecture.