A fallen police officer, a mayoral candidate and the changing face of policing in New York City
Two New Yorkers of South Asian Muslim descent have been on the city’s mind of late. One, Didarul Islam, 36, was a first-generation Bangladeshi immigrant who joined the NYPD as a traffic agent and worked his way up to police officer. While working a city-managed security detail in his police uniform, he was killed this week by a crazed gunman in a Park Avenue office building as his pregnant wife and two children waited for him to come home. The other, Zohran Mamdani, 33, is the son of a prominent anthropologist and a famous filmmaker, both born in India. He is the frontrunner in the city’s next mayoral election, which would make him a Democratic Socialist responsible for both the NYPD and the city’s public safety writ large. One man saw the NYPD as a way to make a life in one of America’s great cities, the other helped build his political career by declaring the NYPD racist and in need of defunding. It’s harder to find two people who more clearly illustrate the visceral cleave between many New Yorkers at this moment as the city decides its direction in the coming years.
When people ask me about the evolution of policing in New York City, one of my talking points is that South Asian Muslims are among the fastest-growing demographics in the NYPD. This is something I learned at headquarters shortly before I retired from the force in 2015, and it made sense: As each new wave of immigrants arrives, many seek the best city job they qualify for as a ticket to the middle class and a key to the city itself. These days, traffic enforcement and school safety agent positions provide such pathways into civil service. Once they have a stable footing, many immigrants then vie to become police officers. For others, their children are the ones who climb the ladder to the NYPD. In this tradition, an NYPD badge is an immense source of pride for new Americans. My father immigrated from Cuba, and sometimes I think it barely registers with him that I racked up two Ivy League degrees as the family’s first college graduate. The first thing he tells everyone about his son is that I was a New York City cop.
It excites me that this demographic of Muslims is appearing in ever greater numbers on the beat, because it means that an important cultural part of New York City and its police endures.
A protective institution
These new officers become part of an institution that fiercely protects them. Many will remember that when Police Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were executed by an assassin as they sat in their police car in Bed-Stuy in December 2014, vast parts of the rank and file were furious at then-Mayor Bill de Blasio. They turned their backs on him by the thousands, literally, from the hospital to the officers’ funerals. It wasn’t that he was responsible for the killings, but rather that his apparent disdain for the NYPD and its officers was more than they could bear at a funeral. Many officers saw their about-face as a way to honor the dignity of the fallen son of Chinese immigrants and a Latino who had begun his service as a school safety agent.
As the world watched de Blasio feebly speak to the backs of an ocean of officers, there is little doubt he saw his political career flash before his eyes. This was not only because the police make up powerful municipal labor unions with tremendous influence over the media and public opinion. Police officers have families who love them and neighbors who respect them, forming a network of relationships that extend to every corner of the city except, perhaps, certain enclaves of hipsters and the very rich. When you love your child, are innately proud of them having chosen this calling and worry about them coming home safe, and the mayor who leads your city seems to disdain their professional identity and by extension your pride in it, you are likely to assume there is something irredeemably wrong with your mayor. It is a hard hole for a politician to climb out of.
De Blasio was able to avoid political catastrophe in no small part because he had shrewdly appointed the veteran police executive Bill Bratton as his police commissioner. After the deaths of Ramos and Liu, he gave Bratton a wide berth to run the police department as he saw fit, as well as to hand-pick his senior team. This allowed Bratton — who had not only run the NYPD before, but spent seven years leading the Los Angeles Police Department as well — to reassure officers that City Hall had put the department in the hands of a leader who understood and respected cops. What it cost, however, was the momentum of the police reform agenda de Blasio had campaigned on. Apart from enacting the extensive reforms mandated by the landmark stop-and-frisk civil rights case the prior administration lost, only small pieces of de Blasio’s vision of reimagined policing ever came to fruition or endured.
The NYPD will bury Police Officer Islam with Muslim rites, and, consistent with tradition for police officers killed by gunfire, we can expect he will be posthumously promoted to detective first grade. His wife, children, and the child he never met will have their healthcare provided by the city. Officer Islam’s survivors’ benefits will provide them with an income. The children will get college scholarships. Police officers will drive the family to holiday parties and memorial events for years, doing for them what they do every day, in other ways, as a basic feature of their role: serve and protect people they hardly know. Imagine how it must feel to come to America as a brown-skinned Muslim fleeing poverty and oppression and be adopted into this civic institution a few years later. It is hard to find anything else like it in the world.
A challenge for Zohran Mamdani
If the oddsmakers are right, Zohran Mamdani will be the city’s next mayor. He, too, has an ambitious police reform agenda. Strategists have no doubt advised him to speak reverently about fallen officers, and to disown his tweets from 2020 that were full of unambiguous scorn and mockery toward police. He has since asserted police perform an indispensable function, and he will surely seek out a police commissioner who is willing to enact change but brings enough bona fides to prevent the NYPD from actively working against him.
These moves are all indicators of political savvy, but Mamdani should consider something else. He attended Bowdoin, the elite liberal arts college in Maine. For the son of an intellectual and an artist, it’s not a ticket to anything, it’s just a pro forma place to go to school. But the year Mamdani graduated Bowdoin, there was a sophomore there named Justin. Justin’s father never made it to his son’s graduation, because Justin’s father was Rafael Ramos, the NYPD police officer murdered in the police car in Bed Stuy in 2014. Imagine how proud Officer Ramos would have been to see his son get his diploma, for his family to go from beat cop to Bowdoin graduate in one generation.
There are things Mamdani can learn from his Bowdoin classmate, who considers his slain father his hero. Until Mamdani truly understands this New York City, the one full of immigrants born without silver spoons who join the NYPD to live a decent life and protect their neighbors so their children can be the first in their families to go to liberal arts colleges where they dorm with the progeny of professors and artists, until he convinces voters that despite the NYPD’s flaws, he understands there is much more to the city’s police than his 2020 tweets suggest, there are millions of New Yorkers who won’t trust him because they’ll worry he doesn’t understand their lives or what they value. It will make for a very rough four years.