New York City survived Mayor Bill de Blasio; can Zohran Mamdani really be that much worse?
Sadly, the answer is a clear YES.
De Blasio’s impact on public safety was awful, but largely delayed: Crucially, he took office certain he couldn’t let the bottom fall out after 20 years of falling crime and hired Bill Bratton, an architect of the city’s early-1990s policing turnaround, as his police commissioner — and even got the City Council to support enlarging the NYPD’s ranks in the early years.
Yes, Blas’ relations with cops were rocky, since he’d won the Democratic nomination with ads that treated the NYPD as racist and he rapidly settled dubious court cases with agreements that restricted key policing powers and installed a federal monitor over the department.
As the years went on, he backed decriminalizing various quality-of-life offenses, such as public urination, and in his final year went along with the increasingly radical City Council’s move to end qualified immunity for city police officers — leaving every cop at risk of being bankrupted if something goes wrong on the job through no fault of his or her own.
Nor did de Blasio fight the Legislature’s deadly criminal-justice “reforms” or the lunatic drive to close the Rikers Island jails.
In short, Blas’ watch was mostly peaceful but laid the groundwork for the crime explosion that started in 2020 and has yet to be fully contained.
But Mamdani would take over determined to immediately undo the progress of recent months under Commissioner Jessica Tisch — with priorities that would make it impossible for her to stay on.
After all, he’s a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America, a hard left anti-policing group that celebrates cop killers.
Just two years ago Mamdani combined his hatred of cops and Israel by proclaiming, “When the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF.”
Mamdani is on record advising people to talk their way out of scary confrontations instead of calling the police, whom he has labeled as racist and violent.
He effectively wants to defund the police by carving out a new agency run by social workers to (supposedly) handle the hundreds of thousands of 911 calls to deal with meltdowns by violent, mentally ill people.
De Blasio at first also took care to not radicalize the city Department of Education, choosing as his first chancellor Carmen Fariña, a veteran educrat unlikely to rock the boat; when she left, he actually tried to hire a decent replacement — who backed out at the last minute, prompting Blas to fall back on the horrific woke hack Richard Carranza.
Again, Blas gradually did longterm damage — pandering to the teachers union, warring on charter schools, launching lunatic social-engineering schemes in the name of racial “equity.”
But he fought to retain mayoral control; Mamdani wants to ditch that power and leave no clear accountability for the DOE’s inevitable decline.
The contrast is strongest when it comes to antisemitism: Blas built solid relations with most Jewish communities in his time in Brooklyn politics; Mamdani’s only positive relations on this front are with ultraprogressive Jews who are more prone to criticize Israel than defend it.
The other huge contrast comes when you look at potential checks on a mayor’s worst ambitions: Then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo practically obsessed with frustrating (or sometime stealing) de Blasio’s agenda items; Gov. Kathy Hochul’s stance on Mamdani remains to be seen, but for his first year she’ll be eager to please him in hopes it boosts her own 2026 re-election hopes.
No one ever mistook this page for Blas fans, but a Mamdani mayoralty promises to make de Blasio’s reign look a lot less awful.