Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani now says the NYPD should be responsible for responding to domestic violence incidents, backtracking Wednesday on his past controversial comments.
The socialist Queens assemblyman’s about-face came as he appeared publicly for the first time with his newly-announced Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who will stay on in her role in the incoming administration.
“That has not been part of the proposal we have put forward over the course of the campaign,” Mamdani said when asked by a reporter whether his proposed new Department of Community Safety would handle such 911 calls.
“What we did say is it’s untenable for officers to be asked to respond to 200,000 mental health calls that are received every year.”
Mamdani, 34, caught flak during the mayoral campaign over a resurfaced podcast interview from 2020 in which he said that cops shouldn’t respond to domestic violence reports out of fear of “escalation.”
“If somebody is surviving, going through domestic violence – there are so many different, different situations that would far better be handled by people trained to deal with those specific situations as opposed to an individual with a gun who has received quite a limited amount of training in general, but also in regards to these specific situations,” he said on the Immigrantly podcast.
The democratic socialist’s signature public safety campaign platform has been to create the Dept. of Community Safety that would overhaul how the city responds to homelessness and mental health issues by shifting away from cops being first responders on those calls.
He has proposed slashing the NYPD’s overtime budget to cover the tab for the agency. But the real-world rollout of the new $1.1 billion apparatus has been unclear, as has what resources, if any, would also be taken from the NYPD.
Mamdani’s reversal on domestic violence calls came after he appeared with Tisch, just hours after The Post broke news that the top cop would stay on the job despite the two being markedly opposed on a number of issues.
