Democratic New York mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani could have responded to the murder of a New York City Police officer in any number of ways. He chose to go the shameless route, pretending that he wasn’t using the death of a police officer to rewrite his history of hating the police.
Mamdani held a press conference on Wednesday after NYPD Officer Didarul Islam and three others were shot and killed. Mamdani said his anti-police posts were from way back in the year 2020, made “amidst a frustration that many New Yorkers held at the murder of George Floyd.” He also pointed out that he wasn’t even a New York assemblyman when he made them. He is not running to defund the police, he claimed, instead pretending that he cared deeply about police and policing. He even used his meeting with Islam’s grieving family as a cudgel to wield against his opponents.
There are several points of clarification to be made here. For one, in the far-off year of 2020, Mamdani was 28 years old, not a child, nor some naïve college student, but a full-grown adult. And, while it is true that he was not a New York assemblyman at the time, he began his campaign in October 2019. He won the Democratic primary in June 2020, just one month after Floyd’s death. His anti-police comments are undoubtedly tied to his political career.
Most importantly, though, is what Mamdani actually said at the time. Obviously, his repeated calls to “defund the police” get a lot of play, but it is his other comments that are far worse in this context. He called New York police officers a “major threat to public safety.” He said they were “racist.” When someone claimed to observe a police officer crying in his or her car, Mamdani celebrated it.
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Mamdani thinks New York police officers are racist and dangerous, and he enjoys it when they are heartbroken. Would it be a stretch to claim that Mamdani hates the police? Are we all expected to believe that he actually has a lot of respect for the police and has completely reversed his worldview from the age of 28 to 33, to the point that he doesn’t want anyone to talk about it and instead wants to attack his opponents for bringing up his past comments?
That is the argument that Mamdani went with on Wednesday. No apologies for his past comments, no acknowledgement that they were wrong or disrespectful. No explanation beyond being caught in the heat of the moment, for an entire year, of Floyd’s death. Mamdani has not changed his position on police or policing. He is the same despicable, anti-police communist he has been, shamelessly using the death of an NYPD officer to dismiss any questions about his past positions and strengthen his mayoral campaign.