Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani says he no longer wants to \u201cdefund the police,\u201d but his picks for his transition team sure send the opposite message.<\/p>\n
Take Alex Vitale, tapped for the \u201ccommunity safety\u201d committee.<\/p>\n
The Brooklyn College prof doesn\u2019t want to just \u201cdefund\u201d the police; he wants to get rid of them<\/a> altogether: He even wrote a book titled \u201cThe End of Policing.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe problem is not police training, police diversity, or police methods,\u201d runs one description of the book. \u201cThe problem is policing itself.\u201d<\/p>\n Vitale published that in 2017, three years before George Floyd\u2019s death in police custody.<\/p>\n \t\t\tMore From\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPost Editorial Board<\/p>\n Naturally, he\u2019s a particular peeved at broken-windows policing \u2014 the practice of cracking down on small offenses and quality-of-life violations to discourage far worse crimes, an approach that was central to the city\u2019s quarter-century of success in boosting public safety.<\/p>\n And he\u2019s slurred NYPD cops, claiming they\u2019ve targeted minorities.<\/p>\n Of course, just a few years back Mamdani himself smeared them as \u201cracist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety,\u201d not to mention \u201cwicked & corrupt.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n Yes, the mayor-elect apologized<\/a> (sort of) for that during the campaign in a bid to assure voters. <\/p>\n Nor is Vitale the only anti-cop leader on Mamdani\u2019s transition team.<\/p>\n He named<\/a> Bill de Blasio adviser Elana Leopold as its executive director, despite (or maybe because of?) the \u201copen letter\u201d she co-signed in 2020 demanding a \u201cradical change\u201d to policing \u2014 starting with a $1 billion cut in the NYPD\u2019s budget.<\/p>\n Other community-safety committee standouts:<\/p>\n Communities United for Police Reform Joo-Hyun Kang, an avid cop-defunder.<\/p>\n A CURP board member, Jose Lopez, who insists that policing fuels racism.<\/p>\n Dana Rachlin, who helped create the Brownsville Safety Alliance \u201cpolice-alternative\u201d zone.<\/p>\n And for his community-organizing committee, the incoming mayor tapped black nationalist Lumumba Bandele, of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, despite his ties to Black Liberation Army members convicted of killing cops.<\/p>\n Indeed, the 400 members of the transition braintrust include a whole host of soft-on-crime and anti-police advocates from lefty groups like the Legal Aid Society, New York Civil Liberties Union, Make the Road New York and the Democratic Socialists of America.<\/p>\n