Mass shooting on Park Avenue shows how dangerous a Mayor Mamdani would be for NYC

New York Post

4 days ago

New Yorkers' collective sense of safety was bruised and rattled this week — a chilling wake-up call.
On Monday, a deranged gunman waltzed into a Park Avenue skyscraper toting an M4 rifle. There he killed four innocents, including 36-year-old NYPD Officer Didarul Islam.
The flood of frantic 9-1-1 calls reporting an active shooter drew an immediate and robust police response, led by officers in its specially trained Strategic Response Group, who arrived on the scene within six minutes.
Both Officer Islam's sacrifice and the selfless professionalism of the hundreds of officers who bravely rushed to the scene brought home a crucial reality: The NYPD is an institution the city simply cannot live without.
None of this is good for the victor of the Democratic mayoral primary, Zohran 'Nature Is Healing' Mamdani, who has a long and troubling history of statements deriding, taunting and calling to defund and dismantle the NYPD — whose officers are often the ones holding the very thin line between good and evil, order and chaos.
Perhaps sensing a vibe shift, the mayoral hopeful called a press conference Wednesday to do some damage control.
His performance struck me as contrived, insincere and deeply misguided.
The policy proposal at the center of Mamdani's prepared statement — stronger national gun controls and a nationwide assault weapons ban — was especially frustrating.
After all, how effective will additional gun controls be in a city with fewer police, and fewer opportunities to enforce those laws?
During his campaign, Mamdani declared his intention to get the NYPD out of traffic enforcement.
Yet more than 40% of the NYPD's gun arrests begin as traffic stops, as former NYPD executive John Hall explained in a 2021 Manhattan Institute report.
And what would a Mayor Mamdani propose be done with gun-toting lawbreakers who are caught in a city without the jail space to house them?
Seems like something he should think about, given his full-throated support for the plan to close the Rikers Island jail complex and replace it with a system whose maximum capacity is approximately half of the current jail population.
Mamdani on Wednesday repeatedly turned up his nose at opportunities to retract any of his many troubling anti-NYPD statements.
Rather than exhibiting sincere contrition for his anti-cop extremism, Mamdani chose deflection and indignation when reporters asked whether would explicitly disavow his prior calls to defund and dismantle the NYPD, or his smearing of its officers as racist.
In fact, Mamdani merely restated the idea undergirding many of the 2020 calls to defund the police: That other actors — like violence interrupters, social workers and, as Mamdani has proposed, community safety agents — are better suited to take over NYPD functions like traffic enforcement, mental health crisis response and even domestic violence calls.
He continued to defend his calls to dismantle the SRG unit, despite its admirable response Monday.
Worse yet, he actually thought it appropriate to reiterate criticisms of the unit for its handling of unruly protests, accusing officers of First Amendment suppression and excessive force.
Even in the wake of tragedy, Mamdani couldn't fully conceal his inner NYPD critic.
If Wednesday's event was meant to make Mamdani's candidacy more palatable to those who had reservations about his history of anti-police stances, it missed the mark. From beginning to end he was, in every way, the wrong man for the moment.
Cop-haters like Mamdani fail to acknowledge a fact the rest of us recognize: Our police are our protectors.
The work they do — whether it's arresting armed gang members, taking fire from mass shooters or enforcing the subway fare — shields us from the crime and disorder that once defined this city.
The calls coming from those Park Avenue offices on Monday were not asking for mediators, or social workers, or unarmed safety agents. They were pleading for armed police officers.
This attack reminds us that the public rarely has control over whether or when evil will darken our doorsteps. But we do have some control over who will be there to meet it when it does.
For that, those of us who live or work in the Big Apple will always owe the police our thanks and support.
But from Mamdani, they are owed an apology.
Rafael A. Mangual is the Nick Ohnell fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a contributing editor of City Journal, and author of the book 'Criminal (In)Justice.' All views expressed are those of the author and not the Manhattan Institute.