Zohran Mamdani on Crime NY State Rep and 2025 NYC Mayoral candidate

The NYPD will address public safety, not federal troops

MAYOR-ELECT ZOHRAN MAMDANI: Public safety is critically important to me. I'm looking forward to working with the NYPD to deliver on that.

Q: Did you get any assurances in your meeting that President Trump will not send troops into New York?

MAMDANI: He told me that he cared deeply about public safety. I said I cared deeply about the same. What separates New York City from anywhere else in the country is we have the NYPD. And I trust the NYPD to deliver public safety. And to me, that is something that I know that they can do, that they have done, and they will continue to do under my leadership.

Q: So he didn't rule it out, in your meeting?

MAMDANI: I made it very clear what we wanted to do was to deliver public safety and affordability, and the NYPD would be the ones to do so.

Create a Department of Community Safety to relieve police

MAYOR-ELECT ZOHRAN MAMDANI: I think the number we have had budgeted of 35,000 officers is a sufficient number. What we have to do, however, is allow those officers to focus on policing. And what I mean by that is that in 2020 the response time for the NYPD was less than 11 minutes. Today it's closer to 16 minutes. Large part of that is because officers are now having to deal with 200,000 mental health calls a year. And so our proposal is create a department of community safety, task it with the mental health crisis, the homelessness crisis, and allow officers to focus on serious crimes so we can get back to the work of delivering on this as opposed to being trapped in a political discourse without addressing the systemic crisis.