{"id":208437,"date":"2026-04-24T15:47:17","date_gmt":"2026-04-24T15:47:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/208437\/"},"modified":"2026-04-24T15:47:17","modified_gmt":"2026-04-24T15:47:17","slug":"how-mamdani-can-stop-street-mobs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/208437\/","title":{"rendered":"How Mamdani Can Stop Street Mobs"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Tuesday, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani unveiled<\/a> yet another proposed street improvement: a redesign of a stretch of Linden Boulevard, a ten-lane corridor through Brooklyn and Queens that his staff says<\/a> encourages \u201cfrequent speeding\u201d and \u201creckless driving.\u201d Bad drivers on Linden have claimed nine lives<\/a> since 2021, including two people on this segment of the road. \u201cRedesigning this historically dangerous corridor will make it safer,\u201d Mamdani said. \u201cWe\u2019re making a clear choice about the kind of city we want to be.\u201d<\/p>\n

The mayor\u2019s attention to the danger posed by bad drivers makes a sharp contrast with his response to a similar crisis last Saturday, when a reckless mob took over<\/a> an intersection on a comparable roadway in Maspeth, Queens. Mamdani hasn\u2019t used this criminal seizure of a public city thoroughfare to set a tone directly from City Hall.<\/p>\n

Finally, a reason to check your email.<\/p>\n

Sign up for our free newsletter today.<\/p>\n

Just before 2 a.m. on Saturday, the 911 calls commenced<\/a>: dozens of masked drivers, many driving turbocharged vehicles and one flying the Palestinian flag, had congregated around Eliot Avenue and 69th Street. In a roadbed between two gas stations, someone poured lighter fluid in a circle and struck a match, creating a ring of fire. Drivers drag-raced, and at least one<\/a> sped around in donuts, skidding out of control and nearly hitting the crowd. In July 2020, a 16-year-old driver performing similar stunts in Brooklyn killed<\/a> two fellow teens and an 11-year-old child.<\/p>\n

The social-media videos of the street takeover recall the summers of 2020 and 2021, when, under then-Mayor Bill de Blasio, New York City\u2014like many American cities\u2014lost even a pretense of control over its public spaces. Masked mobs regularly took over these areas and tormented people who live near parks<\/a> with illegal all-night parties<\/a> featuring drug use and staged fights. The breakdown of public order was dangerous, not only incubating traditional violent crime\u2014the city\u2019s murder rate<\/a> rose by 53 percent between 2019 and 2021\u2014but pushing up traffic deaths, too. Between the periods 2017\u20132019 and 2020\u20132021, traffic fatalities soared<\/a> from an average 215 annually to 261, a 21 percent increase. The worst escalation was in the deaths of motor-vehicle drivers or passengers<\/a>, whose fatality level rose by 40.6 percent.<\/p>\n

In 2021, voters chose Eric Adams, a former police captain, to succeed de Blasio, pausing New York City\u2019s era of progressive anarchy. Just as it took until 2025 for murders to fall back<\/a> to near pre-2020 record lows, traffic fatalities required<\/a> a similar amount of time to return to lower levels. Last year, at 208, they finally approximated the low of 206 reached in 2018.<\/p>\n

Now, after Adams restored a semblance of order\u2014even as he alienated voters amid corruption allegations<\/a>\u2014New York has a democratic socialist mayor with a historical antipathy toward the police.<\/p>\n

How Mamdani intends to keep Gotham safe remains unknown. He won last year in part by discarding<\/a> his previous \u201cdefund the police\u201d mantra during the campaign, and by promising to keep Adams\u2019s police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, a proponent of preventative policing. The mayor understands that the city can\u2019t fall apart on his watch: he stood with Tisch earlier this month at police headquarters to tout still-falling crime rates. \u201cOur approach to public safety is working,\u201d he said<\/a>. \u201cCrime continues to decrease in New York City.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet crime keeps falling only because he discarded his own campaign promise\u2014to relieve police officers of many of their duties\u2014and stuck with Tisch\u2019s system. \u201cSo far this year, we have shut down 61 incidents\u201d of mass-scale street takeovers, \u201cmaking 51 arrests and seizing 62 cars,\u201d the NYPD said this<\/a> week. Indeed, on Saturday night in Queens, police intelligence analysts were already tracking social media and providing information that miscreants were planning a street takeover. Officers deployed to that site to disrupt it, but a group of drivers peeled off and moved to 69th and Eliot. Officers thus found themselves reacting to, not preventing, the second takeover. Even so, they were on the scene two minutes after the first 911 call, only to have two masked attackers<\/a> stomp on a police vehicle, cracking the windshield.<\/p>\n

Police seized two vehicles involved<\/a> and issued bulletins<\/a> for eight suspects, with charges ranging from reckless endangerment to criminal mischief<\/a>. (So far, one suspect has been arrested<\/a>, with another person of interest in custody.) The Queens prosecutor, Melinda Katz, is no progressive, and precedent exists for assertive prosecution of such infractions rather than plea-bargaining to traffic violations: in 2014, then-Manhattan district attorney Cy Vance secured a jury verdict for reckless endangerment<\/a> against a perpetrator who filmed himself speeding a loop around the central borough.<\/p>\n

In other words, the system is working. Now if only the mayor himself would be more unequivocal in expressing a zero-tolerance policy for such lawlessness. Despite an eclectic schedule that has included a singalong<\/a> with former President Barack Obama at a childcare center and an Earth Day appearance<\/a> at a Queens public-housing development<\/a> to promise new (and unpaid-for) heat pumps, he made no comment of his own on the violent mob scene. Asked about the incident on Tuesday, the mayor said<\/a> only that it was \u201cunacceptable for drivers to be acting in this manner\u201d and stressed the importance of \u201censur[ing] that this isn\u2019t something that is becoming normal in our city.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why not hold a press conference at the site and explain to residents how the NYPD prevents street takeovers, and what they\u2019ve learned from this episode to do better? Why not convince the city\u2019s five independent district attorneys to appear together and make clear that anyone else caught engaging in such behavior will face felony charges<\/a>\u2014and lose his, or his family\u2019s, vehicle? For non-U.S. citizens, conviction on such a charge could also result in deportation\u2014another reason to stay far away from this kind of trouble. Yet Mamdani didn\u2019t consider this flash-mob aggression worthy of even a social-media post. He did, however, have time to call the staged arrest<\/a> of a city councilman protesting alleged deed theft \u201cconcerning.\u201d<\/p>\n

The mayor has other law-enforcement matters to think more about, too. The police are stretched thin, near their lowest headcount<\/a> in decades. Mamdani should consider reviving Adams\u2019s 2025 proposal<\/a> to add 5,000 new officers<\/a>, which Tisch originally supported. Already, with the World Cup coming to the region in June, the NYPD is denying<\/a> permits to some park events because of limited police resources to ensure security. What happens if large gatherings proceed anyway, without permits?<\/p>\n

Finally, Mamdani must go further in supporting preventative rather than merely reactive policing, even if his base grows frustrated with him. It\u2019s true that both automation and physical redesigns can prevent<\/a> some crime and disorder. Mamdani\u2019s proposals to redesign major thoroughfares\u2014including, one hopes, Eliot Avenue\u2014could make wide roads less enticing to lawbreakers. Speed and red-light cameras also help. One of the vehicles involved in Saturday\u2019s mob scene had racked up four<\/a> speed-camera tickets in just a few months, fitting a familiar pattern: vehicles driven by recidivist speed violators often become involved in fatal or injurious crashes. The mayor rightly supports<\/a> a bill, pending in Albany, to require the owners of vehicles with 16 or more<\/a> tickets to install speed-limiting technology.<\/p>\n

But design and automated enforcement can only do so much. More people are evading the cameras by using fake plates or no plates. At least two of the vehicles involved<\/a> in Saturday\u2019s mob action had fake plates, and two had no plates. As the city reported<\/a> last year, speed cameras could not issue a valid ticket for more than 3 million infractions in 2023\u201445 percent of the total. In about two-thirds of those cases, drivers \u201cattempt[ed] to evade automated enforcement and toll cameras by defacing or covering their license plates, using fake license plates, or having no plates at all.\u201d Only human enforcement conducted by police officers can punish and deter these \u201cextreme evaders.\u201d Even the most ambitious streetscape-redesign plan can\u2019t fix every road within the next few years. Moreover, such redesigns absent enforcement will only push lawbreakers onto parkways and highways.<\/p>\n

The mayor needs to embrace the critical role of police in keeping the streets clear of danger and disorder. Soon, hordes of World Cup fans will descend on the city, especially for the final match at MetLife Stadium in July. If they get a message that anything goes, we\u2019ll be back in 2020 again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Tuesday, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani unveiled yet another proposed street improvement: a redesign of a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":208438,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[9,24,55,54,56],"class_list":{"0":"post-208437","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york-city","8":"tag-new-york","9":"tag-new-york-city","10":"tag-new-york-city-headlines","11":"tag-new-york-city-news","12":"tag-ny"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=208437"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208437\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/208438"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}