Mamdani planning announcement to disband controversial NYPD unit

NEW YORK — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is expected to unveil a plan for disbanding the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group as early as this week, according to three people with knowledge of the long-awaited announcement.

In dissolving the counterterrorism and protest-response unit, the democratic socialist mayor would fulfill a key 2025 campaign pledge with the aim of mollifying an increasingly restive base.

Mamdani’s plan is expected to involve nixing the SRG and potentially replacing it with a new civilian unit that would take the lead on responding to protests, said one of the people who spoke to POLITICO and, like others, was granted anonymity to discuss the announcement. Under the plan — which had not been finalized as of Thursday morning — the new civilian unit would be supported by NYPD officers, who would assemble nearby and could step in to conduct arrests if needed, said the person, noting that the civilian entity’s main goal would be deescalation.

The person said City Hall has been considering placing the civilian protest unit under the umbrella of Mamdani’s signature Office of Community Safety, which he launched earlier this year.

A City Hall spokesperson did not respond to specific questions about the plan but noted more generally that Mamdani has planned to make good on his campaign pledge since becoming mayor.

“As the Mayor has said, our administration will disband the Strategic Response Group and separate protest response from counterterrorism,” spokesperson Dora Pekec said in a statement. “We will have more to share soon.”

The SRG is a specialized unit within the police department that handles both counterterrorism and crowd control. NYPD brass has lauded the unit as highly trained experts capable of safely making arrests during large and chaotic protests.

Mamdani and his base, however, have long derided the SRG as too reliant on physical force and say its protest response functions must be decoupled from its counterterrorism duties. The mayor has specifically pointed to disproportionately high rates of misconduct claims against members of the SRG in his push for abolishing the entity.

“The SRG were created a little more than a decade ago with an intention first of dealing with threats, terroristic threats to the city,” Mamdani said during a September press conference. “And what it has eventually become is both dealing with counterterrorism and responses to exercising First Amendment rights. I do not believe that those purposes need to be dual purposes. I believe that we should have a focus on counterterrorism that is separate from our response to the use of First Amendment.”

The people who spoke with POLITICO said Mamdani’s SRG announcement could be memorialized in an executive order.

Mamdani had repeatedly pledged to disband the SRG on the campaign trail. His failure to do so for nearly his entire first year in office has led to mounting pressure from his leftist base.

This year, City Council member Chi Ossé, a fellow democratic socialist, reintroduced legislation he had been pushing in various forms since 2022 that would limit the unit’s involvement in protests and, in the latest iteration of his bill, would force the mayor’s hand in getting rid of it.

The timing of Mamdani’s announcement remains unclear, though one of the people with knowledge of it said it could come as early as Friday. Should Mamdani get the word out this week, he would preempt a major convention being held Saturday by the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which has made disbanding SRG one of its top issues and which Mamdani has described as his “political home.”

Whether Mamdani’s actions will prove enough to satisfy his allies remains to be seen.

While the mayor has broad discretion over the police department, Mamdani has given his police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, a wide berth to operate the NYPD as she sees fit. And the NYPD’s responses to protests, including how and when it deploys the SRG, is governed by a court settlement that stemmed from the unit’s response to protests following the murder of George Floyd and the killing of Breonna Taylor in 2020.

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The lunatics will be able to run wild for awhile. Soon they will annoy the intrests of Mamdani’s moneyed backers. Then the brutality of the suppression will be really something to see. Bottom line: Urban America is a rotten place to live or work.

Fortunately, democrats are idiots and incapable of thinking things through. Abolish police morons and you will be “abolishing” yourselves. The thin blue line is the only thing keeping you wasting air.

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