An NYPD Bomb Squad robot at the scene of an attempted bombing near Gracie Mansion on March 7, 2026.
Photo by Dean Moses
New York should count every blessing that the bombs thrown by two wannabe terrorists at protesters outside Gracie Mansion on Saturday did not detonate according to their wicked plan.
Had they done so, potentially dozens of people would have been maimed or killed — including the protesters and nonprotesters, police officers patrolling the event, and reporters and photographers covering it all, including our own Dean Moses.
Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said it best on Monday: “We were fortunate that the devices used this weekend did not cause the kind of harm that they were certainly capable of causing, but luck is never a strategy.”
The NYPD invests billions of dollars in, and assigns thousands of officers every year to its counterterrorism efforts — the most robust program of its kind in the country, and rightly so. We learned after 9/11 that New York would always be the prime target of evildoers, and our police need to be constantly vigilant against any threat that may come our way.
That sobering reality stands before us at a time when the nation has been hurled into an unofficial war with Iran. The extremist government of Iran has made international terrorism a prime export for decades. While the U.S. and Israel exchange missile attacks with Iran in the Middle East, the concern is that the unofficial war will not be confined there.
The best defense for New York City remains the NYPD. While it cannot catch every lone wolf plotting to do us harm, as Saturday’s incident demonstrated, it has responded to and foiled far more terror plots over the nearly 25 years since the 9/11 attacks. It has kept New Yorkers incredibly safe, and our city vibrant and prosperous.
To continue its essential mission in this city and country, the NYPD’s counterterrorism efforts must continue to be well-funded and well-staffed. Achieving this objective has become harder as the Mamdani administration grapples with a $5 billion budget gap that must be closed by June 30 — and the Trump administration has repeatedly sought to cut funding to the city over the past 14 months.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani has previously cut the hiring of 5,000 new officers by 2030 that his predecessor, Eric Adams, ordered late last year. Mamdani must reverse that decision and proceed with the recruitment and hiring of those officers to ensure the NYPD can handle any crisis that may come before this city.
Mamdani must also resist the temptation to impose draconian cuts to the NYPD to spare other programs in the city budget. Outside of better controlling overtime — which has been a constant problem for the department — this is no time to tighten its purse strings. Find other ways to cut or fund other city functions beyond taking resources away from the NYPD.
Luck is not a strategy, as Tisch reminded. But the city has made its own luck over the last quarter-century by being prepared for terrorism and confronting it head-on. Keeping that vigilance, we will carry on.