Zohran Mamdani’s radical-rich transition team – Latest News
Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani says he no longer desires to “defund the police,” however his picks for his transition team sure ship the alternative message.
Take Alex Vitale, tapped for the “community safety” committee.
The Brooklyn College prof doesn’t need to simply “defund” the police; he desires to get rid of them altogether: He even wrote a ebook titled “The End of Policing.”
“The problem is not police training, police diversity, or police methods,” runs one description of the ebook. “The problem is policing itself.”
Vitale printed that in 2017, three years earlier than George Floyd’s death in police custody.
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Naturally, he’s a specific peeved at broken-windows policing — the apply of cracking down on small offenses and quality-of-life violations to discourage far worse crimes, an strategy that was central to town’s quarter-century of success in boosting public security.
And he’s slurred NYPD cops, claiming they’ve focused minorities.
Of course, simply a few years back Mamdani himself smeared them as “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety,” to not point out “wicked & corrupt.”
Yes, the mayor-elect apologized (kind of) for that during the marketing campaign in a bid to guarantee voters.
Nor is Vitale the one anti-cop chief on Mamdani’s transition team.
He named Bill de Blasio adviser Elana Leopold as its government director, regardless of (or possibly as a result of of?) the “open letter” she co-signed in 2020 demanding a “radical change” to policing — beginning with a $1 billion cut within the NYPD’s finances.
Other community-safety committee standouts:
Communities United for Police Reform Joo-Hyun Kang, an avid cop-defunder.
A CURP board member, Jose Lopez, who insists that policing fuels racism.
Dana Rachlin, who helped create the Brownsville Safety Alliance “police-alternative” zone.
And for his community-organizing committee, the incoming mayor tapped black nationalist Lumumba Bandele, of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, regardless of his ties to Black Liberation Army members convicted of killing cops.
Indeed, the 400 members of the transition braintrust embody a entire host of soft-on-crime and anti-police advocates from lefty teams just like the Legal Aid Society, New York Civil Liberties Union, Make the Road New York and the Democratic Socialists of America.
Not a crowd that’s more likely to ask awkward questions on Mamdani’s plan to shift NYPD money to a new Department of Community Safety, scrap the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group and gang database and freeze the rank-and-file headcount — a de facto recipe for defunding NYC’s police.
Meanwhile, the transition crew’s training “experts” dependably help greater college spending and lefty indoctrination, with a conspicuous lack of voices demanding wonderful outcomes or supporting elevated scholar achievement.
Roughly one in seven New York City public-school youngsters now attends a constitution college, however you gained’t discover a single consultant from the constitution neighborhood among the many 400 people on this team.
Yes, the transition people are merely advisers; Mamdani may need tapped many purely as a symbolic recognition.
But the indicators are downright worrisome on points as essential as policing.
NYPD boss Jessica Tisch could have a greater drawback on her arms than she imagined.
So would possibly the entire metropolis.
