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These choices raise questions about Mamdani\u2019s real intentions. He has publicly distanced himself from his earlier support for \u201cdefunding the police\u201d and other 2020-vintage radicalisms. But his selected advisors suggest he may not have traveled as far from those positions as he now implies.<\/p>\n
Many believe that the government\u2019s primary responsibility in criminal-justice matters is to prevent and punish crime. Some on Mamdani\u2019s transition team seem to think otherwise. Brooklyn College professor Alex Vitale, the author of The End of Policing, has argued<\/a>, for example, that policing is \u201cfundamentally a tool of social control to facilitate our exploitation.\u201d He has also described<\/a> police as \u201cviolence workers,\u201d who should be turned to only as a \u201clast resort.\u201d<\/p>\n Fellow transition-team member Justine Olderman, a scholar at NYU Law\u2019s Center on Race, Equity and the Law, has made similar claims about policing\u2019s effects. In a 2022 interview, she described<\/a> how a single \u201ctouch-point\u201d with the criminal-justice system can trap people in \u201cvarious legal and non-legal . . . punitive systems.\u201d These consequences, she claims, can create<\/a> a chain of \u201cunbearable amounts of trauma\u201d passed down through generations.<\/p>\n Advocates like Vitale and Olderman often cast the criminal-justice system, and even America itself, as a villain. In doing so, they echo the worldview<\/a> of transition-team member and former Women\u2019s March leader Tamika Mallory, who said days after the death of George Floyd in 2020, \u201cWe are not responsible for the mental illness that has been inflicted upon our people by the American government institutions and those people who are in positions of power. Don\u2019t talk to us about looting. We learn violence from you.\u201d<\/p>\n Others on Mamdani\u2019s transition team want to reduce Gotham\u2019s jail population dramatically\u2014consistent with Mamdani\u2019s commitment to closing the Riker\u2019s Island jail complex. Meg Egan of the Women\u2019s Prison Association, for instance, helped design<\/a> the plan to close Rikers Island. She has envisioned<\/a> a future in which incarceration is \u201cobsolete,\u201d and argued<\/a> that the borough-based jails that replace Rikers should be \u201ccentered on care rather than security or control.\u201d<\/p>\n Similarly, committee member Janos Marton ran<\/a> for Manhattan DA on a platform that called for cutting the local jail population by 80 percent, virtually eliminating pretrial detention, capping sentences at 20 years, and \u201cending the war on drugs\u201d by abolishing New York City\u2019s Special Narcotics Prosecutor\u2019s Office.<\/p>\n Some of Mamdani\u2019s transition-team members have a Machiavellian streak. Marton, for example, argues<\/a> that cases of police misconduct present an opportunity to \u201cshrink the size of the police budget so that there\u2019s fewer police officers.\u201d Fewer cops means fewer retirees and families, he notes, which will shrink police officers\u2019 political influence. Every scandal becomes a lever to ratchet down the NYPD\u2019s headcount and move \u201cin the right direction towards abolition.\u201d<\/p>\n Dana Rachlin, another committee member, applies a similar approach to political organizing. In a 2020 radio interview<\/a>, she noted that her group, We Build the Block, hired young people<\/a> from \u201cimpacted blocks\u201d\u2014neighborhood blocks with high incarceration rates\u2014to \u201cregister the block to vote.\u201d Rachlin also claimed<\/a> that, at the time, there were \u201c40,000 names on the gang database,\u201d compared with \u201conly 36,000 members of service in the NYPD.\u201d \u201cThat\u2019s more votes,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Kassandra Frederique, head of the Drug Policy Alliance and another Mamdani committee member, has framed her advocacy in \u201cabolitionist<\/a>\u201d and revolutionary terms<\/a>. During a 2021 appearance on a web show, for example, she discussed<\/a> the prospect of black revolutionaries \u201ctak[ing] over the state.\u201d She also seemed to endorse drug use as a way for some advocates to embrace more radical positions. \u201cThere are some people in our movement that need to be high so that they can imagine the world that we can\u2019t see currently,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n This is not the language of conventional municipal administration. It is the expression of a movement that wants to embed itself inside the state and use state power to advance its revolutionary ambitions.<\/p>\n Some members of Mamdani\u2019s team have concrete plans. Take Max Markham, executive director of NYU\u2019s Policing Project. Markham has argued that the city should reduce police officers\u2019 involvement in certain emergency-response situations. In an interview with a nonprofit group last month, he claimed<\/a> that the city does not need to dispatch police to calls involving \u201canimal control, property theft, traffic accidents, and towing.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Alex-Vitale-in-2020.jpg\")
Alex Vitale in 2020 (Staff Photo by Shawn Patrick Ouellette\/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Tamika-Mallory-in-October.jpg\")
Tamika Mallory in October (Photo by Joy Malone\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Kassandra-Frederique-in-2024.jpg\")
Kassandra Frederique in 2024 (Photo by Erik McGregor\/LightRocket via Getty Images)<\/p>\n