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He clearly still believes in police reform. In some places that includes reducing police budgets in favor of more effective public safety programs. That's what "defund the police" means. Not "abolish", reduce funding. In NYC he's running on maintaining police funding at current levels and adding additional nonviolent peacekeeping capacity. He may personally believe that ultimately funding can be redirected further, but that's not what he's running on.
Criminal justice is majorly fucked in the US broadly. We incarcerate non-dangerous people with minor offenses way too long, and we let dangerous repeat offenders walk free. The answer isn't so simple as "lock more people up" or "let everyone go", we're in a trickier bind than a straightforward over incarceration or over lenient set of policies. Mamdani talks a lot about reducing penalties for minor nonviolent offenders, and for increasing rehabilitative capacity, but he does retreat to rehabilitation too readily (from a rhetorical efficacy perspective) when questioned about how to handle repeat offenders.
I don't think he's actually changed his values at all, he's just polished his phrasing and set more achievable near-term goals.
Yeah, I understand that's what people are saying to rationalize it. And like I said: we'll find out! But see my reply to the sibling comment, where I link directly to his words:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45820126
He's well-documented, saying many times, in many different variations, in many different places, that he wants to eliminate prisons, "dismantle" the police, and so on. One or two comments you might be able to brush aside, but this is a consistent pattern.
"We'll find out" haha, you think he's going to shut down the nypd? They have an operating budget of what, $6 billion dollars annually?
He's not going to shut them down, you can't just stop a $6b organization. You can, however, defund it. Maybe they could do just fine with $5 billion. If the city has an extra billion to spend on building housing or improving transit or providing health care or services to the homeless... a billion dollars a year buys a lot of things.
It becomes very hard to assume good faith in such situations.
You have to be trying really hard to interpret that in the way you’re trying to do it, “my guy.” I’m just reading his words and taking him seriously.
Suddenly there will be far less crime.
Less, much less, but not zero. You'll always have the odd person who ends up a problem even under optimal circumstances. The range of trait expression in humans is very broad, and there are a lot of humans. You can't run away from that, but you can be compassionate about it. Insisting that your socialist utopia will simply render all humans happy and harmless, and as such there will be no need for forceful law enforcement is obviously wrong and harmful to your movement.
Yes. He did. Because the law[0] (the passage of which he was not involved) says Riker's Island needs to be closed by 2027 -- something Eric "how much will you pay to play?" Adams slow-walked on purpose.
The rest of your diatribe is a bunch of bullshit that doesn't pass the sniff test.
> “I think we have to ask ourselves that … I think a lot of people who defend the carceral state, that defend the idea of it and the way it makes them feel, they’re not defending the reality of it and the practices that are part and parcel of it,” he continued.
> “Because if you actually break it down … how many people come out the prison system better than they went into the prison system?”
From the New York Post so presumably this is the worst they could find on the topic.
My response is "looks good to me. Accepted". if police aren't protecting the people they shouldn't be funded by taxpayers. All for police reform.
And yes, if we aren't jailing everyone for being homeless or smoking weed, we'd need less prisons. If prisons were about reform, we'd nedd less prisons. These all make sense.
But I guess if detractors just want to take soundbites, remove all subtlety, and blast it out to twitter's 280 character limit, then their plan worked. It's just a same these same people would try to downplay 90% of the stuff Trump said in 2024 that he is doing in 2025 to the letter.