Zohran Mamdani Talks Public Safety

On Monday, Sept. 8, in the first of a series of sit-downs with New York City mayoral candidates, Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani took questions at a Vital City event co-sponsored by Columbia Journalism School. Mamdani was quizzed on his public safety philosophy and proposals by Errol Louis, Spectrum News NY1 political anchor and Vital City contributing writer. What follows is a complete, unedited transcript.

Transition planning and timeline

Errol Louis: I’m Errol Louis, the political anchor at Spectrum News NY1. I’m also a contributor to Vital City, and if you haven’t already subscribed, you should look at everything they’ve got going on on that website at vitalcitynyc.org. We have only a short amount of time, so I’d like to jump right into it by inviting today’s conversation partner, Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, to have a seat.

Let’s hop right into it. Good to see you. 

Zohran Mamdani: Good to see you, sir. 

Errol Louis: There are only 57 days between now and the election. I’m sure that might have occurred to you today. But then there are only 58 days after that between November 4 and January 1, so we’ve got 115 days. You won’t, if you are successful, won’t even have two months to organize a government if you should win. Even understanding that you’re still in the middle of a campaign and that’s your primary focus, I’d like to ask you about some of these questions about how you would plan to govern. Have you formed a transition committee?

Zohran Mamdani: No, we have not formed a transition committee as yet. That’ll be the first order of business after winning the general election.

Errol Louis: Okay. You’ve said publicly that no jobs have been promised to anyone. And does that include everybody? That includes your inner circle, all your close advisors?

Zohran Mamdani: Yes. I can tell you that the experience I have every day is reading an article about people that I’ve apparently promised a job to. And sometimes I learn their names just as soon as you do.

Errol Louis: Ha ha ha ha. But, no talk about who might be your chief of staff, your first deputy, your police commissioner, and so forth? 

Zohran Mamdani: No.

Errol Louis: Okay. What kind of transition process do you intend to have, then?

Zohran Mamdani: One that is rigorous and one that is actually focused on outcomes. The reason I say “actually” is that oftentimes, the transition is a period of performance, of ensuring that every specific person reflects every specific commitment. But are you actually preparing yourself for January 1st?

And one of the things that I’ve spoken about is my desire and the necessity of having a team that I surround myself that is characterized by a track record of excellence. And that means ensuring that you are not just surrounded by the people that are quickest to say yes, but rather people who will push you and be able to deliver on this agenda that we’ve laid forward.

What caused violence to spike in New York?

Errol Louis: Okay. Speaking of people who are willing to push you, there’s a bit of news that happened just as you were arriving. The NYPD commissioner, Jessica Tisch, spoke at the Citizens Budget Commission breakfast this morning, and apparently began by saying, and I’m quoting now, “in my opinion, crime went up as a result of the drastic changes being made in our criminal justice laws in New York State, not as a result of the pandemic.” So, a lot of journalists here, wanted to give you a chance to respond.

Zohran Mamdani: I have a different opinion. My opinion is, one, that looks at the spike in crime across the country, over the course of the pandemic and sees similar spikes regardless of what any of those one states pursued with regards to criminal legal reform.

And I think we’ve even seen with Raise the Age that we, there are fewer arrests of younger New Yorkers than there were prior to the implementation of that legislation. However, there continue to be issues with that implementation. I think chief among them is that about two-thirds of the amount of money that was allotted still remains unspent in Albany. And that is money that was critical to ensuring that these reforms are not just ones that are changed in the legal code, but they also felt and experienced in the investments that were intended to accompany them.

Errol Louis: Now you were elected to the assembly for the first time at the height of the pandemic in 2020. What’s your sense of kind of where society was and how that might have affected public safety?

Zohran Mamdani: It was a deeply unsettling time for many people. So much of what we had come to…I apologize, I should have poured you water…I thought it would take too long. 

It was a time when so much of what New Yorkers had come to rely on as the facts of their life were thrown into debate. And we even saw this with the larger conversation about shutting down schools. It wasn’t just that they were schools, it’s also that they were, for many New Yorkers, the primary place where they interacted with city government, almost a site of social services. And I think that I heard briefly in, in some of the introductory remarks about an allusion to the sense of unease that people felt at that moment and continue to feel to some degree now.

And when I ask New Yorkers where they feel that the most, or their heightened anxiety, they often speak about the subway system. And much of that unease is not actually captured in any statistic. It’s not captured in CompStat, and yet it is something that is present on the minds of New Yorkers.

And I can just tell you myself, as someone who grew up in this city, not too many blocks from where we are right now, that I have a few speeds when I take the train. One is my headphones are in and the music is on. The other is the headphones are in and there’s no music playing. And the other is I’m taking the headphones out of my ears.

And all of this is in relation to what I am seeing there on that subway car. And I know that for many New Yorkers, it is the same. It is the possibility that what could be banal could turn into something else.

Errol Louis: Have you ever been a victim of crime or faced a sort of a near encounter, a frightening encounter?

Zohran Mamdani: I have been held up at gunpoint once in my life. It was actually in Atlanta, not here in New York City.

What would be Mamdani’s enforcement priorities?

Errol Louis: What objective indicators — I mean, you know, whenever we talk about this, and Vital City has been great with a lot of the numbers, I’ve certainly seen a lot of this in some of our reporting at Spectrum News…

There are objective indicators. There’s, you know, the crime rate, there’s arrest rates, there’s shooting clearances, there’s emergency room assault visits and so forth. Then there’s, you know, vibes, there’s how people feel, some of which can actually be objectively captured, but much of which is not.

What objective indicators do you think New Yorkers should be paying attention to? And if you’re the mayor, which ones would you be looking at?

Zohran Mamdani: I often hear from New Yorkers their greatest concerns have to do with murders and shootings. And we can see that murders and shootings are down since 2019, and they are down even further since 2024. And yet we know that, as was said earlier, major crimes are up 30% since 2019. So my answer to you is, this is what I often hear of as the first thing, and yet, as we know, for most New Yorkers, it is not the most frequent version of crime that they interact with or they hear about. 

And so CompStat gives you a sense of crime as it is. And then there is also all of that which is not categorized. So to me, one of the most important things is, in our vision for public safety, is our plan to deploy teams of dedicated mental health outreach workers to the hundred subway stations with the highest levels of mental health crises and homelessness.

I say this in relation to your question because a lot of times for New Yorkers, what is experienced or understood as an example of social disorder is then tasked to the police as if it is their responsibility. And what we have ended up with is police officers responding to 200,000 mental health calls a year, and that cannot be separated from the fact that response times have increased by 20% over the last few years, where now the average time is closer to 16 minutes.

Errol Louis: Well, I want to come back to that in a minute, but I’m struck by, well, let’s talk for a minute about disorder or the perception of this disorder, its relationship to crime, that does not involve, say, the mentally ill. I saw you at the breakfast that preceded the West Indian American Day parade, about a week ago. It was a great morning, we had a great time.

By the time the sun went down, six people had been shot, one had been slashed, and it was a reminder that frankly, last year at the 2024 parade, five people were shot, one fatally, in broad daylight on Eastern Parkway. They still don’t even have a suspect in that case.

What I did see at the parade this year was tons of unlicensed vendors selling booze, beer, mixed drinks, all kinds of stuff. Totally illegal, so blatant that, in my opinion, it had to have been noticed or condoned frankly. 

What do you do about that? Because that’s something that doesn’t involve complicated new systems like what we’re gonna talk about when it comes to say seriously mentally ill people or people who are unhoused. But what do you do about that, your run-of-the-mill disorder? 

Zohran Mamdani: You know, I think first of all, I appreciated your hosting of that breakfast, and I tried to keep it to no politicking on that stage.

I think the city has to showcase its own competence in trying to create that social order. And what I mean by that is, you bring up vending — and one thing that I’ve been struck by is how the city under Mayor Adams’ leadership has simply refused to issue the permits that are now required by law, to the extent that we have a 4,000- or 5,000-person waiting lists, where a vendor will pay an intermediary who just happens to be a vendor who got lucky 20, 30 years ago, $20,000 for the right to sell chicken and rice. 

And I tell you this because if you want to tell someone that they cannot vend because they do not have a permit, and then in the same breath you’re uninterested in providing them with any avenue to actually procure a legal permit, then where do you leave people? You leave people with a diminishing faith in civil society and the ability for city government to actually deliver on any of this. So I do think there is a, there’s a necessity of competence and execution in so much of this. And from there, we ask New Yorkers to trust.

Errol Louis: So if you’re a mayor on January 1, 115 days from now, what will you do in that case?

Zohran Mamdani: The first thing is that I would stop the practice of what the Adams administration just did with the vetoing one of the bills that would help to actually cohere the system. And the second is that I would actually start to procure those licenses to eliminate that black market to, in the words of a number of vendors, actually reduce the price of chicken and rice from 10 bucks to 8 bucks, um, because they have told me that if they weren’t paying $20K for a vending fee, they would be able to charge a little less for their food. And it’s getting to the nuts and bolts of the competency that’s been missing some of this execution.

Mental health challenges and the Department of Community Safety

Errol Louis: Over the last 30 years, we’ve learned a lot about what reduces crime. We have not been great in New York and ensuring that we always follow the evidence. When push comes to shove, whether we have to decide whether to put it into a program or just assess what’s going on and maybe try and think it through, we kind of always defer or default to running the program.

Do you see an opportunity to maybe change the way that goes? To what extent are you going to be led by evidence as opposed to sort of looking at it and then making a different decision? 

Zohran Mamdani: Evidence and outcomes, they have to be the north star of our administration and frankly, of any administration. And I think what’s frustrating is that we have evidence of approaches that work, but they are not operating at the scale that they could be. You know, B-HEARD, for example, it’s a program that could respond to mental health crises in New York City. There were 35% of calls that B-HEARD was eligible for they did not respond to, and the police responded to.

And part of that is because it has been underfunded. Part of that is because it has been completely deprioritized. And our vision is not just to bring that which works elsewhere here, but also to scale that which works here. And to me, the vision of B-HEARD has to be one where we have it present in every single neighborhood, and in the 20 neighborhoods of the highest need, that we have two or three teams, and that we increase funding for it by about 150%.

That, coupled with looking at the models of, let’s say, CAHOOTS in Oregon, a program that diverted 20% of calls that were coming into a police department and was able to resolve 24,000 calls save for 311 without police assistance. It shows what could be possible.

And what I’ve found is that oftentimes when you speak about this, it’s seen as if it is a critique of police officers. And yet what has struck me is that it is often police officers, like the police chief in Olympia who described their Familiar Faces program, and the language of the need “to hug the cactus,” to embrace that which is uncomfortable actually makes the job easier. And I think that that would transform what policing looks like in New York City, if we say that no longer must police respond to every single failure of the social safety net.

Errol Louis: Well, when it comes to programs like B-HEARD, do you think it was, I mean, you know, it had limited hours, it had limited funding. As you said, they, they sort of passed on a lot of calls or insisted on sending cops on certain calls, where arguably, according to the model, they weren’t necessarily needed. Is this something that you would assign to the Police Department or is this for your new Department of Community Safety?

Zohran Mamdani: This would, this is currently not in the Police Department and, but part of the issue here is that like so many programs, it operates in a silo separated out from so much similar work. This would be an example of something that would come into the Department of Community Safety. 

And I think just, you know, it’s…When you are in the legislature, you have an idea for legislation, you work with a coalition, and let’s say that a bill is signed into law. We all know that it is then up to the executive’s interest in actually implementing that bill what determines its success or its failure. And what has been so frustrating is that we’ve seen the complete lack of will from this executive mean that so many of these kinds of programs have been prejudged to failure from the very beginning because they’ve never been given what they needed.

Errol Louis: Well, to a certain extent you could argue that many of the reforms that came out of the legislature, some of the analogous or even follow-up actions by the local prosecutors represent the will of the people. Right? You guys didn’t wander in off the street, you all got elected, implemented bail, some other reforms, Raise the Age and so forth, discovery reform. The district attorneys in particular ran on a promise to stop charging criminally certain low-level offenses and so forth, and they followed through on that. Is this a case of the populace, the voting public, maybe changing their minds? That like, “Hey, we didn’t expect this. This is what we thought we wanted, we are glad that you did this. Now we need a course correction.” 

Zohran Mamdani: I think…This goes back to the earlier conversation around Raise the Age. There was…the criminal legal reform package that was passed prior to my time in Albany. And yet my understanding since getting to Albany has been that the intent of it was to also be accompanied by significant investment and education as to what this legislation was.

Because I can tell you that the way in which people have also understood these pieces of legislation has not always been tied to what the legislation itself actually does. And part of that is a larger story around the void that Democrats often leave in the debate around any of these issues, we sometimes are almost embarrassed about our own ideals and our own convictions and our own legislation. And I think that this is a real moment to make clear what those convictions are, and explain why we actually have them. 

And, you know, I’ve been pushed on this question of the Department of Community Safety, and I’ve said time and time again, to your point about the evidence and the outcomes: When I started running this race for mayor, on average, about 200 officers were leaving the department each month. That number has now climbed above 300. And in writing around that development, there has been a real focus on this question of forced overtime. 

Now, there’s no question, there are a number of officers who want overtime. They willingly take overtime, and then there is another conversation around forced overtime. The question of officers who have three days off and then they’re told at the last minute that the second day, they have to be back. Do whatever they want for the first and the third. But that means the entire trip, the plan, whatever they’ve made, it’s gone, it’s done. And how this really reduces a sense of quality of life for many of these same officers. 

Now, that is often separated out from the conversation that we have around policing, where so many other candidates will just say, the only answer no matter what the question, is police. And that is actually even to the detriment of those officers themselves.

Errol Louis: You know, there’s a question I want to read to you. This is from Katlyn Ma, who’s a Columbia Journalism student. In your plans to fund a new Department of Community Safety, you say you’ll transfer $605 million from existing programs into this new department. What would you cut from is the question.

Zohran Mamdani: There would be no cuts to create this department, right. This is a department that would have a budget of about $1 billion. $605 million is existing programs, like B-HEARD, for example. Um, the other $400 million would be from New revenue. So if you look at our policy proposal, we put forward over the course of the primary a belief that the two most productive ways in which to raise that revenue would be: One, by raising the state’s top corporate tax rate to match that of New Jersey. And two, by raising New York City’s personal income tax rate on the top 1% by 2%. Those two things together raise $9 billion. There are a number of approaches we could take in city government that would raise an additional billion dollars. 

That $10 billion covers the cost of our major policy programs and starts to Trump-proof this city.

Errol Louis: So a billion dollars for the Department of Community Safety. What’s the personnel size, roughly?

Zohran Mamdani: The personnel size, a lot of that is still to be determined in terms of the scale. Much of this is to ensure that this is what it would take to start to put it together. And you know, about two-thirds of it is already existing, right? But it’s about cohering it. One third is, to be created, most especially in the dedicated teams of mental health outreach workers in the subway station.

Errol Louis: Yeah, walk us through that, a mental health crisis on a train platform. We’ve all seen it. You know, it might be acute or it might be, you know, kind of a passive in a way where someone is just falling apart in front of the rest of us. Walk us through the response. What would that look like?

Zohran Mamdani: So you would have teams of three, and in those teams you would have an EMT, you would have a peer, because we’ve also seen time and time again that having a peer present in these interactions is critically important. 

And I’ll give you an example of how this could work.

In Denver, they had a STAR program [Support Team Assisted Response]. This is a program that focuses on low-level crime. And in the neighborhoods where they focused, that crime went down by 34%. Over the period of a number of years, they had 12,000 clinical interactions. Of those, only 3% required a medical hold. I say this because oftentimes in this conversation around subway safety and the conversation around mental health, there also comes a question of involuntary commitment.

And what I have said, time and again is: It’s outcomes, it’s evidence. And in reading some of the research around involuntary commitment, not being fully convinced that this actually has the outcomes that we hope that it would in terms of remedying this, but saying that this would be a last resort. However, the first resort has to be actually engaging and interacting. 

And the goal here is not just to respond to someone in a crisis or in need. The goal is also to bring them out of the subway system. You know, in Philadelphia, they have a Hub for Hope program where they transformed some vacant spaces within the SEPTA system, and they were able to connect more than 300 previously homeless individuals to housing.

My goal here is: How do we ensure that our approach to this, these crises, is not just one of shifting people out of view, but actually connecting them with services? And I remember, I think it was in THE CITY, there was an article that came out that showed this absurdity that we had nearly the same number of vacant supportive housing units as we did homeless New Yorkers. And how through this mix of bureaucracy, incompetence, and a lack of interest, there was a complete inability to match anywhere near half of those same New Yorkers with those services to the extent that I think three of them died waiting to hear back on their application.

Errol Louis: Sure. Would you agree with me that while it might seem simple and it’s certainly frustrating and you know, sort of morally unacceptable, it’s also hard, right? I mean, you’ve got all these different agencies involved. There’s the MTA and there’s the Department of Homeless Services. There might be this new Department of Community safety, all involved. Making it work is, is kind of the whole trick, right? 

Zohran Mamdani: Absolutely. This is not, none of this is simple. None of it is going to be easy. But what has been so frustrating is, it has seemed for many years as if there are many who are not even trying. They are simply at peace with a status quo that we know is broken for so many.

And I am confident in our ability to actually deliver a new chapter. And, you know, I am running, once again, against Andrew Cuomo. And in this conversation around homelessness, we also can’t forget, this is a man who, in his cutting of the Advantage plan, that was a decision that led to a skyrocketing of homelessness here in New York City.

So some of this is difficult, it’s bureaucracy, it’s, you know, it’s managing these multiple agencies. Some of this is also the result of funding decisions that have been made that cut state funding. And then by doing so, cut matching federal funding and left us in a position where we have come to accept homelessness as a fact of life in New York City.

Service hubs for the homeless in the subways?

Errol Louis: You’ve talked about using vacant subway retail space, I guess modeled on what they’re doing in Philadelphia as a place for drop-in hubs, crisis centers, and so forth. Would you be concerned that that might draw more of that population into the system when making the system primarily or almost exclusively about transit is considered one of the paths to just making it livable and usable?

Zohran Mamdani: Absolutely. The intent of those, of the repurposing of the 75% of commercial units that are vacant within the subway system, is, one, to connect people to outside the subway system. And I think of it, it’s not, it’s geared to each and every New Yorker who may have a medical emergency, a place that they can actually just go and be connected with services out of the subway system.

The system itself is a system to get people around New York City. And what we have to ensure, however, is that we are prepared and ready for the questions, the interactions, the experiences that New Yorkers have, because too often we pretend, we are still surprised when we have the only person that a tourist can ask about which exit to use is a police officer stationed in that same subway system. And that’s why I think that we should have transit ambassadors scaled up throughout our subway system so that those same officers can actually focus on serious crimes. And these are the individuals who can answer the questions of which elevator is broken, which line is delayed, which exit to take.

Errol Louis: Are you opposed to coercive medical treatment? I mean, this has reached the point where it’s been talked about both as policy and as legislation that in some of the encounters that we’re discussing — involuntary commitment, treatment or removal.

Zohran Mamdani: You know, I’m skeptical about its efficacy, as I was saying, with some of the research that I’ve read. But I do think it is, it is a last resort. It is something that if nothing else can work, then it’s there.

Errol Louis: The 911 system, which is really the front door for most emergency services, that often gets the cops involved, was supposed to be, at least supplemented and in some cases displaced by a 988 system, where you call if it’s not necessarily appropriate to bring in the cops. How has that worked in your opinion, and would that be folded into your Department of Community Safety? 

Zohran Mamdani: It’s, I don’t think it has worked all that well. I think that there’s an issue of inoperability between the two numbers. I think also there are still too many New Yorkers who do not know about 988. And today, if you call 911, you cannot actually order a, you cannot ask for a, emergency response that is not the police to, to any crisis that you call them with for a mental health crisis. And we need to ensure that there’s mass education, of which I know there’s some. You know, at Steinway Street, my subway station, there is a faded 988 poster right there on the platform.

But still, many New Yorkers do not know. And the second is we actually have to ensure that we are providing guidance as to what can be diverted where. You know, this example of B-HEARD of the 35% of calls that even after all of that were still determined eligible, and still not taken up, I think it speaks to this question of execution.

You know, I think often about, I was saying, it’s the executive’s will oftentimes. You know, in the end of 2021, we had passed significant amount of rent relief that was to be distributed. And when Governor Cuomo was the governor, that relief was, it was stuck. It was not moving. And one of the most impressive things that Governor Hochul has done is how quickly she transformed that program that, you know, moving at the speed of molasses, into one that was actually releasing the funds. And I just view that as, do you actually want these things to succeed? Because if you do, we can see that what is often described as an ocean liner can go as quickly as a speedboat.

NYPD resistance and morale

Errol Louis: Well, one of the things you’d be up against, of course, is the big blue machine, the NYPD itself, right? The unions, the leadership, frankly, even the rank-and-file are often resistant to change. You know, it’s gonna be tricky to navigate. If you run into the kind of resistance that led in a prior administration, say, the cops to turn their backs on the mayor in a public sign of disrespect or lack of confidence, what do you do about that?

Zohran Mamdani: I think the first thing you do is you take every opportunity you can to build a relationship such that the disagreements that are inevitable, ones that already exist, ones that may come in the future, are understood to still be accompanied with a respect for the work that is being done.

And I say that because behind every headline, behind every caricature, I found is a New Yorker just trying to do their best. And when Detective Islam was killed and I met his family, I got to understand the man that he was when he put that uniform on and when he took it off. And I know those same stories are the stories of so many across the department.

And I’ve actually found support for this vision of the DCS, of this idea of the removal of mental health crisis from the NYPD’s set of responsibilities. I was recently endorsed by a number of police officers in Jamaica, Queens. And at that event, as the chair of the organization was walking up, he dropped a one-pager on the table I was seated at, and it was a delineation of 911 calls and all of the different kinds of calls that they received. And his point was, look at how many calls we have to deal with that actually have nothing to do with us. And I think that this comes back to the heart of, how do we make sure this is a job that is possible to do? Part of it is by ensuring that we give a set of responsibilities that are actually the ones that people signed up for.

Errol Louis: On the campaign trail, you’ve acknowledged that contrary to your earlier position, you no longer embrace the phrase “defund the police.” Do you support reducing the budget today? You put out some numbers a minute ago while we were talking, but are there specific areas where you think there’s room to cut or to change the budget?

Zohran Mamdani: You know, I have spoken about, as it pertains to headcount, sustaining the number of officers that we have on the NYPD, and trying to fight this crisis of retention that we’re seeing. And I appreciated, I think it was John Hall in Vital City who wrote a piece around interrogating this question of headcount and the relationship to crime from like 2001, 2011, and actually said that our proposal was one that was sound. And I’ve seen, you know, one of the things that I’ve admired about Commissioner Tisch is not just the uprooting of corruption at the highest levels of the NYPD, but also some of the decisions that were being made from a place of: Does this deliver public safety? 

Does the NYPD having a more than 80-person communications team deliver public safety? No. That relationship is minimal. And she made the decision of cutting it down to about 40 or so. That’s something that I was calling for early in this campaign, and I think that it always has to come back to, is this actually delivering that?

Errol Louis: Let me ask you about a bunch of different policies just to kind of get your thinking out there. If City Council legislation to abolish the NYPD gang database were to pass, would you support and sign that?

Zohran Mamdani: I have supported that proposal, it’s one that I’ve supported because of, the vast dragnet has meant the inclusion of New Yorkers on the basis of whether they go out late, photos they put on social media, so much of the facts of life of being a young New Yorker. And yet it then becomes a mark of suspicion. And it is concern of mine that we do not live up to, of all people, Eric Adams’ words in 2021, who said that New Yorkers need not choose between safety and justice.

There’s no question that we have to take gangs extremely seriously. And yet I find that a database that includes New Yorkers on such bases is one that that doesn’t actually do exactly that. 

Violence interrupters

Errol Louis: In the past decade, the city has invested in violence interrupter programs, the Cure Violence model. By the way, a lot of their vans were out there at the parade the other day. And I remember thinking, that’s not the model I remember researching and reporting on over the years. That it was much more subtle. It was personal, it was one-on-one. It wasn’t like big sprinter vans spray-painted on the side with logos and stuff.

But putting that aside, have the Cure Violence efforts been effective, and how would you, support, change or even abolish them?

Zohran Mamdani: You know, Baltimore has been in the news quite a bit, with President Trump especially, and one thing I’ve admired about the mayor of Baltimore is that when he came into office, he did a full investigation and they found that 2% of Baltimore residents were responsible for more than…up to 75% of homicides and shootings. And there had been attempts in Baltimore of a Cure Violence approach of violence interruption, but it had never been done at a systemic scale in the manner that you had alluded to of being able to work across agencies having buy-in. And he created this. And we have seen that they are now on track for the lowest number of homicides in recorded history, and I think more than a 20% decline in shootings. 

And we’ve seen here in New York City, we have the crisis management system, CMS. It’s been proven to be effective at reducing shootings by up to 40%. Yet it’s only in operation in, I think, 28 of the more than 70 police precincts. And oftentimes where it is in operation, it’s not being fully funded.

And this past week, I was in the Bronx at Lincoln Hospital. I met the head of Guns Down, Life Up, this incredible organization that does this exact kind of work. And as he was explaining what the work is, he was telling me, unlike many, they’re embedded in the hospital. They’re immediately notified when a victim of gun violence comes into the hospital. They go immediately to the bedside. And there was actually a young man next to me when he was telling me the story. That young man, this was his story. He had been attacked, he had gone to the hospital. And as he was starting to think about retaliation and how he would respond, he was instead met by this program.

And he happened to be homeless at the time. He was living in a shelter. They got him out of the shelter, they got him housing, they got him a job. He now works at that organization. And so to me, it shows the multifaceted approach that’s necessary in tackling the scourge of gun violence. 

And so what I would do is, is support a Cure Violence approach. The CMS system, we’ve talked about increasing funding by 275% as one part of the way in which we deliver public safety.

Errol Louis: And that, would that too be under your Department of Community Safety? 

Zohran Mamdani: Yes. 

Surveillance of political or religious groups

Errol Louis: Under what circumstances, if any, should the NYPD be allowed to conduct surveillance of political or religious organizations?

Zohran Mamdani: I have many concerns about the history of surveillance we’ve seen in this city. You know, I represent Steinway Street in Astoria, and the NYPD had a unit, the Demographics Unit, which was tasked with surveilling Muslim New Yorkers doing the most banal things: the barbershop, the travel agent, hookah bar. There were even reports of when Muslims would play soccer at Astoria Park — and they could have asked me, I would’ve said, “every day.” And I think it has shown that there have too often been instances where just identity in and of itself is the basis of suspicion and the basis of surveillance. And I went to high school with someone who was pressured into becoming an informant. 

So these kinds of approaches to surveillance have been ones that have truly torn at the fabrics of civic society. You know, part of the reason I’m sitting before you as the Democratic nominee is because of an increase in Muslim voter turnout, unlike anything we’ve ever seen in the history of this city. And the reason that was so difficult, the reason it’s taken so long, one of those reasons is that there are many whose experiences in the post-9/11 era, whose experiences of a Demographics Unit, whose experiences of the N-SEERS [National Security Entry-Exit Registration System] program have been experiences that have taught them that the safest place to be is in the shadows, and that the best thing you can do is to engage as little as possible with government around you. And I have deep concerns about the possibility of extending that era.

Errol Louis: At the same time, would you acknowledge that it’s an issue, and it’s a challenge, that if there are people who mean to do harm and they are hiding in the shadows, somebody’s gotta go and find them?

Zohran Mamdani: If there is actual intent, right? If there is actual, if there are those who mean to do harm, that is absolutely, to me, a different conversation. What I am concerned about is the many ways in which it was, the stories of entrapment, and the desire to surveil not on the basis of suspicion of that meaning, but rather that identity itself is a pretext for that.

Errol Louis: I wanna give you a hypothetical. Imagine an otherwise peaceful protest, supporting, say a Gaza ceasefire, and they’re blocking a thoroughfare. They’re doing things that would possibly make them eligible or subject to arrest. What are the limits of acceptable protest in your mind, and at what point should the police intervene?

Zohran Mamdani: You know, I think we have a proud history of exercising the First Amendment in the city, and it’s one that should be protected. And much of this conversation around protest has also been a question of which police would respond to that protest. You know, I’ve been critical of the Strategic Response Group, a group that was founded in the mid 2010s with the intent of being a counterterrorism force that has now become the primary response to acts of protest.

And I think that to say that we must separate the police presence at an act of, you know, the First Amendment versus, um, countering terrorism, is not to say that we should not have any presence. It is to say that we should learn from the models of cities around the country, around the world. I think one that’s been of interest to me is in Columbus and the way in which they’ve approached some of these questions of how to have a police presence at these larger kinds of demonstrations.

Errol Louis: Your platform calls for increasing resources for hate crimes enforcement. Does that mean more police involvement, or are you talking about other agencies? 

Zohran Mamdani: My platform within the Department of Community Safety is focused on hate crime prevention programs. And that is, we are talking about programs that have to do with education, that have to do with training, that have to also do with questions of, larger questions of curricula as well.

And that is critically important because we’ve seen hate crimes continue across New York City, and we know that these are hate crimes where it’s not just the impact it has on one person’s life, but also the impact it has on entire communities, of the lesson that it leaves them with about whether they have a place in public life.

And I’ve heard from, from many Jewish New Yorkers and many Muslim New Yorkers about the fears that they’re left with whenever an incident like this takes place. And this program is in tandem with ensuring that you have police that are actually able to respond to that.

School safety

Errol Louis: What’s your stance on school policing and the presence of armed officers in or around the public schools?

Zohran Mamdani: You know, I think it is an indication of this broken status quo that we have many schools where they will have a school safety agent, but they will not have a nurse, they will not have a social worker in that same school. And we find that time and time and time and time again. And I’ve been critical of that kind of an approach to our education system, and also the ways in which we view discipline, the only ways that we can actually impart and enforce discipline versus us learning from many models that we’ve seen even be more effective at promoting, getting people back in compliance with those rules as opposed to just punishing them for violating.

Errol Louis: Do you support the use of metal detectors and I guess more to the point ,who should make the call on whether or not to use them?

Zohran Mamdani: I think there has to be a real role for the schools chancellor in being a part of that conversation. You know, I have heard from a number of New Yorkers whose children have to go through those metal detectors of the feeling it leaves them with of being less than a student at another school.

And I also know that this is not an easy and simple conversation and that there are real questions of safety, but I have a skepticism about whether this is the way in which we can actually create that safety. Is it through the application of metal detectors at a few schools across an entire system?

Rikers Island and the four borough-based jails

Errol Louis: Let’s talk for a minute about Rikers Island, and reform of the jails. Under the Adams administration, I believe the number’s up to 42 people who have died while in custody or shortly after being released. What would be your strategy, including sort of timeline changes, alternative sentencing, diversion programs? How do you turn that place around?

Zohran Mamdani: You know, I’ve visited Rikers a few times, and one of the last times I went there was an incarcerated New Yorker that tried to take their own life in front of one of my colleagues in that cell. The despair on Rikers Island has been well known to many of us for quite some time, and yet it is despair that has only been heightened under this current mayoral administration.

You know, you mentioned more than 40 New Yorkers have been killed on Rikers Island, five in the last two weeks. And the jail population of Rikers has increased since Eric Adams has come into office, by more than a thousand additional incarcerated New Yorkers. And what is quite staggering to me is that we know that we can reduce that jail population to less than 4,000. I mean, Vital City had an article about a number of different proposals that could reduce it to 3,700. And some of this also just has to look at: The average stay on Rikers in the 1990s was 50 days. Now it’s more than a hundred. There are more than 1,500 people on Rikers who have been held there for more than a year.

So I do think many of the reforms that have to be made are also reforms around the court system and ensuring that people are actually having speedy trials. But I also think other reforms. You know, we often talk about the revolving door and how do we actually address and deal with the revolving door, and a big part of it is that we ensure that we are in actually equipping people with what they need to not just come straight back to Rikers Island. But this administration has cut funding for much of those very services on Rikers Island. And so I think that this is part of my frustration, where, you know, we have had a mayor who has made it effectively impossible to follow the law of closing Rikers by 2027.

My commitment will be to do everything in my power from the very beginning to follow that law and to ensure that we are reducing the jail population and following the example we’ve seen in the past where you can do so while also reducing crime and understanding that no longer can we just be at ease with Rikers Island being the largest mental health facility in New York City, second largest in the country, where 40% of all the population is, is diagnosed as having SMI, serious mental illness.

Errol Louis: Um, Jack Jaworski, who’s a journalism student here at Columbia, picks up on that, saying that the mayor of the current administration has made it “functionally impossible,” those are your words, to close Rikers by 2027 as required by law. And his question is, what would you do to get the closure and the required borough jails back on track? 

Zohran Mamdani: Is Jack here? Zack. Zack. I feel like we have seen each other at a number of events. You’ve finally got me. You’ve finally got me. Thank you for your question. And I hope, I hope the other person who asked is also here. 

Um, you know, I think there’s a question of will. Do you actually want to do this? Do you actually want to take this on? Are you just pushing the can down the road? And to me it’s also how you approach not just Rikers but also the relationship with the state. Right now, for New Yorkers who were released out of state jails, 40% immediately enter into New York City shelters. There’s not much thought as to what will they do next? What is their pathway beyond that? And you had brought this up of a few different proposals of alternatives to incarceration that have been proven to be effective, and these are also alternatives that actually reduce the likelihood of recidivism. Because as soon as you step foot in a jail, your likelihood of recidivism increases.

And we need to be guided by these outcomes, by this evidence, because so often as it pertains to jails and prisons and crime, we are only willing to speak about this in the discourse that we’ve had politically for the last few years, as opposed to what works, what doesn’t work, and how can we ensure that…These statistics, they are both horrifying, and these were the statistics, you know, these have been, the statistics we have become inured to over the last few years. I mean, going to Rikers…the peak of the crisis, you know, when I first came in, it was in my first year in 2021, and going there and having to fight to even visit and trying to be convinced by anyone who had any power that I shouldn’t go, that we shouldn’t organize this.

And then going and knowing that whatever we were seeing was a sanitized version of what actually existed because everyone knew that we were coming. And yet even amidst that sanitized version, seeing the despair amongst so many, and the fact that, I mean, you have people who have waited two years for a trial. How does that make any sense? And it’s not a question of fiscal imperatives because it costs the city more than $500,000 a year to keep someone on Rikers Island. 

And if you have such a large population of New Yorkers with SMI on Rikers Island, you then have to ask what’s the best way of actually engaging in dealing with SMI. And I have been quite taken by the clubhouse model by Fountain House that we have here in New York City, I think there are about 16 clubhouses. They are centers, peer-led rehabilitative centers for New Yorkers with SMI. They have been proven to reduce hospitalization by up to 45%, increase employment rates by 50%, decrease loneliness by 56%, and actually reduce the cost of Medicaid, when used for those members by more than 20%. And the cost of an entire year’s worth of service is $4,000. That is three days on Rikers Island. 

How does it make sense? In that we are willing to invest in this, but we are not willing to invest in this. And some of this is a question of funding, but even in the bureaucracy, you know, Mayor Adams put forward restrictions in an RFP that made it difficult for a smaller-size clubhouse to even be possible. It’s a lack of interest and a lack of will at both the bureaucratic, the technical, and also the questions of funding.

Errol Louis: Well, also at the political level, right? I mean, when a Fountain House or a similar proposal comes up in a neighborhood and folks want to march in the streets, go to court, call the mayor names, say, you’re destroying our quality of life, what are you gonna say to those people?

Zohran Mamdani: Well, I will tell them that I have been called many names in this campaign, and some of them are by my opponents who just can’t seem to say my real name. But you know, part of this is you have to be willing to have, you have to be willing to fight for these policies.

You know, it is not going to be easy to build the number of protected bike lanes, bus lanes, busways that I’ve spoken about. It means you have to be able to actually stand up and understand that there will be opposition, and yet that oftentimes that is a magnified opposition. That in terms of sound and impact, it dwarfs the sentiments of the more than million New Yorkers who ride that bus traveling at an average speed of eight miles an hour.

I mean, look at the Fordham bus lane, you know that you would have the mayor taking phone calls from the Botanical Garden to say that we don’t want this, but not thinking about the thousands of New Yorkers who sit in, on those buses that are suffocated by traffic. I think that these are the kinds of fights. They are different topics, they’re different policies. But they do require a common thing, which is political will.

Errol Louis: How willing are you to say no or to disappoint even some of your strongest political supporters?

Zohran Mamdani: That has been a part of this campaign is putting forward our agenda and knowing that there will be disagreement with those that I share much agreement, those that I share little agreement, but the disagreement will be a part of being in a coalition, that tension. You have to be able and willing to say no, as long as what it is in service of is saying yes to the agenda that you actually ran on.

What if Trump sends the National Guard?

Errol Louis: Some of what you just described requires a lot of coordination with other government agencies, like you mentioned basically the State Department of Corrections, DOCCS, they’re sending people here after they’re incarcerated. You’ve got all kinds of federal funding streams. You’ve got the district attorneys and the court system, which frankly will determine how fast people get processed and maybe get out of Rikers Island, that sort of thing. 

But let me ask you about the extreme example that is on everybody’s minds, which is a federal government that has talked openly about sending troops here or nationalizing the National Guard and placing them on the streets of New York.

Zohran Mamdani: You know, I agree with Commissioner Tisch’s response to this, which is that we do not need the National Guard here in New York City, and we know that no matter the context within which it is described, this has nothing to do with questions of crime and safety. If it was questions of crime and safety, then you would see the deployment of the National Guard in the eight of the 10 states that have the highest levels of crime in the country, which are Republican-led.

It is not about that. It is an attempt to insert Donald Trump, his agenda, his vision into the hearts of municipalities that showcase an alternative style of politics that is actually for people, that has an affirmative vision of what’s possible for them. And I think of a few things. One is the necessity of partnership working alongside elected officials at every level. You look at California, it was the mayor of L.A., it was the governor of the state, it was the attorney general together. That they worked together, they filed a lawsuit. A federal judge recently found in their favor that the deployment was illegal. And through the attorney general of California, the steps that they have taken for every dollar they’ve spent on a lawsuit, they’ve won more than $33,000 in federal funding that they’ve, that that has been returned to them. I can’t quite imagine Andrew Cuomo working with Tish James and Kathy Hochul to fight back against the deployment of the National Guard. And I have appreciated here that we have an incredible attorney general whose support I’m so proud to have who has been on the front lines of this. And in Governor Hochul, someone who has shown that it is possible to actually fight back against Trump.

You think about this, you think about the battle around congestion pricing. You don’t hear about it much anymore. And part of that is because it’s been successful, but for it to be successful, it needed to be defended. And the governor’s forceful pushback of that is part of what allowed the time, the space, the oxygen for it to become an issue such that the federal administration wouldn’t even want to tackle it anymore.

Errol Louis: Okay. That brings us to the end of our time. Thank you so much. I learned a lot. Great talking with you.

Zohran Mamdani: Thank you. Jelani, if I could, if I could just add one thing, we just jumped straight into the conversation, but I just really want to say thank you for having us here, for having this conversation. Errol, thank you for the moderation and thank you for the questions from all of you. It’s really been a joy to be here, and thank you for finally cornering me for that question. I knew you’d get me. I thought I could outrun you.