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For New York City to “work,” it needs to be, and feel, safe. Absent the confidence of both residents and tourists that the streets of America’s largest city will be secure and orderly, the Big Apple risks losing more of its luster. This is a reality that New York City’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani — once known for saying “nature is healing” — began at least pretending to appreciate after NYPD Detective Didarul Islam was shot and killed in the line of duty last summer. But a recent announcement calls the mayor’s sincerity into question.
Last week, Mayor Mamdani announced that the city would need to address a budget shortfall in part by canceling the planned hiring of 5,000 additional officers over the next two years. The decision will undoubtedly harm public safety by exacerbating a pre-existing recruitment and retention crisis that has already led to slower response times and limited the NYPD’s ability to bring overall crime back down to pre-2020 levels.
While the number of uniformed officers in the department rose to about 34,300 by January of this year, the next two years will see thousands of officers who joined the department during the hiring blitz of 2006-’07 become eligible for retirement as they hit their 20-year marks. When that time comes, New Yorkers will understand just how much they need the 5,000 hires Mamdani plans to halt.
Things are already bad. Comparing the final week of 2025 with the last week of 2018 shows that response times for critical, serious and noncritical calls for service were all up more than 50%. But what else can one expect from a department that dwindled by about 3,000 officers during that time frame? The need for police hasn’t declined with the size of the department. When a smaller force faces the same — or higher — levels of demand, something has to give.
Defenders of Mamdani’s decision to cut NYPD funding for new hires will likely point to recent declines in shootings and homicides over the last two years, suggesting that the city is nowhere near a public safety crisis. Those declines are real and worthy of celebration insofar as they represent the hard work of the men and women of the NYPD despite the forces working against them. But beyond those two measures, much more work remains to be done.
Compared to 2018, 2025 saw 14.2% more rapes, 16.7% more robberies, 47.7% more felony assaults, 9.5% more burglaries, 10.3% more grand larcenies and a whopping 149.1% more car thefts. Even with the recent decline in murders — which remained above the city’s 2017 low at the end of last year — the seven major crimes tracked by the city were up 26.9% overall in 2025 compared to 2018. This is despite reductions in opportunities for criminals driven by:
a sizeable decline in the city’s populationthe fact that more New Yorkers (like other Americans) are spending more time at home in the post-pandemic erathe decline in alcohol consumption and, by extension, the frequenting of bars and nightclubssubway ridership still being at only 85% of pre-pandemic levels
The truth is that the NYPD has been both literally and figuratively working overtime to keep crime at bay. Despite being understaffed, 2024 saw the NYPD make more felony and narcotics arrests, as well as sharp upticks in summonses for quality-of-life violations such as public drinking and urination, along with violations in the transit system. Last year, the department also made significantly more vehicle stops — much to the chagrin of Mamdani’s allies on the far left.
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But New York will not see crime return to where it was less than 10 years ago without closing the gap between the number of police officers it has and the number it needs.
Doing more with less is a math problem that simply cannot be solved in the NYPD’s favor.
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The plan to hire 5,000 additional cops over the next two years would have provided much-needed relief to a department that has spent the first half of this decade fighting an uphill battle to keep crime at bay — not only bleeding more officers and investigators than it wanted to, but also being unable to backfill vacancies without lowering hiring standards.
The overwhelming consensus in the criminological literature is that investments in hiring more police reduce crime. The decision to cancel the planned hires belongs in a recipe book titled “Disasters,” yet the move will not come as much of a surprise to those familiar with the mayor’s history of anti-cop activism. While it’s true that candidate Mamdani assured New Yorkers that this history was “out of step” with his campaign, he didn’t make much of an effort to convince skeptics of his newfound respect for law enforcement. If he follows through on this proposal to cut the NYPD, it will reiterate an important lesson New Yorkers would have done well to remember in the lead-up to last November: When someone tells you who they are, believe them.
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