The NYPD is None of Our Concern

Recently in Geese, Anders J. Lee has argued that Zohran Mamdani must fire NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, replacing her with Edwin Raymond, NYPD veteran and author of An Inconvenient Cop. Also recently, on Sirius XM, Mayor Mamdani states plainly that “Especially when it comes to public safety, I've been very clear that we have our police force, we have prisons, we have jails. The purpose of these is also to ensure we are delivering safety & justice,” when asked where he differs from DSA’s national platform. Taken together, we see an unmistakable contradiction between one of the Left’s core demands on Mamdani with regard to policing and the nature of prisons and policing itself. 

A few short years ago, many of us wouldn’t begin to suggest that any kind of dialogue with the mayor of New York City about the leadership of the NYPD had anything to do with us. And yet, the shifting political landscape in the city and the nation has introduced new political possibilities. In what follows, I will argue that any demand by socialists about the leadership, or even the policy, of the NYPD is essentially reparative of the relation between the left and the police. To engage in this kind of reparative politics is to betray not only the George Floyd Uprising but also the people of Gaza by extension. 

Lee’s essay is well argued and rigorous, and it shows thorough engagement with the history of progressive mayors and their efforts to reform the police forces of major cities. In the context of the underlying theory of change displayed by the Mamdani administration, Lee’s thesis is cogent. However, I believe that he is mistaken, and that the argument that the Left should make it our business to influence Mamdani’s decisions on policing or involve ourselves in the administration of “public safety” whatsoever is in error. To move into the administration of policing and jails is, to put it simply, to surrender the lessons of the George Floyd Uprising and Jordan Neely protests as well as those of the Gaza solidarity encampments, where the NYPD brutalized students for the crime of protesting a genocide. In addition, it would be a strategic misstep, which I add for the benefit of readers who can stomach the idea of “progressive police” and require further elaboration.

Jails and precincts are not systems and machinery which can be repurposed for socialist ends. This is obvious to their primary targets, but sometimes escapes socialists, who primarily experience neoliberalism as an assault on their living standards and dignity as professionals as opposed to as a violent threat against their lives. Notice, for example, how DSA candidates focus on the displacement of knowledge labor by AI but delete “defund the police” tweets. Not an especially complicated equation. Of course, the flaw in “defund” was always the basic reality that policing cannot be tweaked or reformed via electioneering. Indeed, the police enforce the threshold of “civil society”, and neither can accommodate socialism. 

Indeed, Lee acknowledges the inability of past NYC mayors to meaningfully restrain the police, tacitly acknowledging that carceral power is unaccountable to any form of democracy. Similarly, calls for Mamdani to replace Tisch emanate not from the belief that a different NYPD commissioner would change the fundamental relation between the police and the city’s dispossessed. The NYPD will kill, brutalize, and confine our neighbors no matter who is at the helm. Retaining Tisch, who is a symbol of unimaginable wealth, New York City’s complicity in the genocide in Palestine, and the NYPD’s impunity, brings into stark relief Mamdani’s inability to restrain the machineries of death that power New York City’s political life. Her leadership of the NYPD is of little consequence in concrete terms, but it does serve as an embarrassment for the Left and a reminder of the ruling class’s impunity. We deserve to be embarrassed. 

Removing Tisch would smooth out these contradictions and calm our nerves, but who are we to demand a gentler face at the head of NYPD’s machinery of death, just so we can feel at peace with the state of things? Do we deserve this? Objectively, we do not. 

The genocide in Gaza (from which Mamdani and the current wave of left populist candidates derived their moral authority) continues unabated. The NYPD continues to stalk the city; people continue to die on Rikers; migrants continue to die in Delaney Hall mere miles away. We, the socialists, have done nothing to move the line between life and death. Fundamentally, we deserve to be reminded of such for as long as remains necessary. This is a matter of basic principle which cannot be elided. Before we even step into the realm of “strategy”, “analysis”, and other bedtime stories we tell each other, we must face the shame we feel in the face of our inability to more directly confront the systems which designate larger and larger swaths of humanity as threats simply because they insist on drawing breath. Failure to recognize these basic truths is a failure to recognize the state of play. Israeli genocidaires march in Manhattan, taunting us with their exuberance. However, I understand that “people” (socialists) need “hope” (to be unburdened by their guilt when they see a child selling candy on the F train), so let us move on to the strategic element of the discussion. 

The strategic reasoning here is simple: whatever we attempt to administer, we also take responsibility for. If we assume responsibility for the killer jails, we become jailers. If we administer the killer NYPD, we become the left wing of those who administer the killer NYPD.

Housing and similar realms of organized human life, on the other hand, can and should be directed by socialists because they are necessary for human existence. The New York Police Department should not, because it is not only unnecessary for organized human life but is also an impediment to such. The basic contradiction between the combined lethal force of the NYPD and New York City’s poor Black and Brown residents cannot be resolved through any form of administration, as the masses have taught us in a series of uprisings from 2015 to the George Floyd Uprising. How quickly we forget those lessons, and the lessons of the Gaza solidarity encampments! 

Indeed, the flaw of “defund” messaging in political campaigns was never that defunding the police is “unpopular with the working class”, but that the idea of legislating meaningful reform to the state’s mechanism for creating the line between life and death was always a farce. Police cannot be reformed via participation in politics: they are themselves the gatekeepers of the political world, as any protester knows. Thus, the masses teach us: anti-police protests are more sympathetic than “carceral minimalism” because the former are materially impactful and the latter is a technocratic fantasy. 

Such fantasies are popular in Zohran Mamdani’s administration and among his advisors, but it is important to note which ones he entertains versus which ones he retreats from even rhetorically. The best example is his promise to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu. Of course, it was never within his power legally or materially. However, he maintained the fantasy until the last moment because the illusion that he could defend universal human values and international law was necessary to give his political narrative coherence. Conversely, he embraced the police before the primary was even over, because his base is more horrified by the symbolism of Zionist genocidaires receiving warm welcomes from their political representatives than they are by the killer NYPD and the horrors of Rikers Island. Why? 

They see the former; the latter are hidden from view unless the refusal of the dispossessed forces the contradiction into full view. In our group chats, the refrain is constant: Palestine is very popular with voters but the working class and “normal people” hate abolition. What nobody wants to admit is that the occupation of Palestine is here, not in our representatives’ failure to “fund health care” because they’re sending all the money to “another country” but in the drones, razor wire, Flock cameras, armored police trucks, and killer jails which confine the dispossessed of our cities. There is no free Palestine while a prison complex dots our landscape. On the walls of Palestine we find murals of George Floyd, not portraits of fully funded American hospitals. 

When Mamdani falters, we recognize the limitations of his office and the ways that the “realities of politics” impose finite options on his decisions. This is a tacit recognition that Mamdani can use his office to move things in the right direction, but that, ultimately, his job is to run the city. At best, he can show the masses that the Left can competently run a city, building their trust in us that we can wield power on a bigger and more consequential scale. This is not the case with the NYPD, because the NYPD, fundamentally, can do nothing other than what it does: kill, brutalize, and confine poor New Yorkers, mentally ill and disabled New Yorkers, Black and Brown New Yorkers, gender outlaws in New York, and everyone else on the wrong side of the line of life and death. The purpose of the NYPD is to do what it does: maintain the line between life and death in New York City.

For this reason, the NYPD will kill again. 

And the dispossessed of New York City will rise again. Neither the action nor its opposite (and maybe this time greater) reaction requires the permission of socialists. The dispossessed of New York City, if we are at the steering wheel of the police, will rightfully conclude that we are their enemies and merely want a bigger slice of the pie for ourselves. This will be demonstrated by our willingness to put a kinder and gentler face on the system designed to kill and jail them. It will be clear all along that we were willing to enjoy the slight bump in our living standards that comes with turning them over to the city’s killer cops and killer jails. Of course, deep down, we all recognize in our hearts that it doesn’t have to be like this in the end. We have a choice. 

The line of life and death runs not only through New York’s murderous prisons but the globe as well, finding its crux in Gaza, the beating heart of the world. Once again, the line will move. The barricades will come down, powerless before the exuberance of resistance, the thrill of multitudes becoming fully human in their confrontation with organized inhumanity. Light will creep in and thousands of flowers will bloom from the fertile earth of refusal. Where will we be? Either in the street, sniveling online about “strategy” and “safety”, or the worst option: sitting in an office debating how big a taste of freedom the wretched can enjoy before we turn the violence on. At best, we will confront the same dilemmas again, face the same fears, see the same truncheons beating the face of humanity, faceless uniformed SRG phalanxes that Mamdani did not dissolve because we would never be allowed to vote for anybody who would do that. We will teach each other the same lies about “green roles”. It will not matter who the NYPD commissioner is because the cop in front of you is always the same cop. The LRAD is always the same LRAD. Most importantly, it is always the same video. 

Like the unions used to say, which side are you on? But too many of them have chosen the wrong one. 

The next uprising is coming, it will be a hotter summer than we’ve ever seen. The question is not what every individual person must do, because forever there is more work than we could ever do and a role for everyone, big or small. The focus on the individual as the locus of politics, as always, obscures the deeper political question of what we must do.

The Left must pick a side, not try to ease the contradictions between the machinery of killing and our city’s life and breath, the elders, children, men, women, and gender outlaws of NYCHA, the killer jails, and the abandoned zones. Let those in the business of death manage the mechanisms of death. 

The NYPD is none of our business.