https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/nyregion/mamdani-police-apology-floyd.html
Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, said on Thursday that he intended to apologize for comments he made in 2020 calling the New York Police Department “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety.”
He said that the remarks, which he wrote in June 2020 in a social media post in support of the defund the police movement, were made after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis a month earlier.
The comments were made “at the height of frustration,” he said in an interview with The New York Times, and were not reflective of his current campaign or “my view of public safety and the fact that police will be critical partners in delivering public safety.”
He believes his left flank is unbreakable, so now he's trying to shore up his right.
Except that's not how it works. The left flank won't just sit idly while their candidate appeals to their right, usually when this happens it caused reformers to hemorrhage their left. Without a clear party line on rightist deviations it'll just make voters lose faith.
And then when they lose, the left will be the ones to blame: not the rat fucking happening in the elections, not the candidate making bonehead moves, but the voters somehow.
If the left flank will throw him out for saying "I'm sorry I called the police racist" then no wonder the Dems keep trying to win the center.
If even an inch of pragmatism is a step too far then even I would give up.
But it's only "pragmatic" because there are non-leftist voters who might throw him out for saying "cops are racist".
It's more pragmatic because the NYC police are a legal mafia. Be a shame if there was a "lapse" in his protection because some officers were a little upset at his bluntness.
That's not the calculus here. The problem is that the NYPD has a budget larger than the DPRK's entire military including their nuclear program. The NYPD is also a bunch of thugs, extortionists, rapists, assassins, kidnappers, and torturers
And that department runs the security detail for the mayor and the mayor's entire family. The mayor is required to be in their proximity at almost all times. They drive him around, they escort his vehicles, they manage crowds every day around him.
The pragmatism isn't limited to getting votes. It's life or death.
Downvoters better stop malding and start arguing
That's a really good point, and it sounds like it would be pragmatic to not rely on the cops for security. That's another place a Party would help, to provide security to candidates so they don't have to rely on domestic right-wing death squads.
This is why I am not all that excited for Zohran's tenure. I am excited that he got the votes, but the reality is he will not have the power to do what he intends to do because realpolitik drives NYC.
It also looks like he's also going to be coming into power at the start of a recession, and a mere mayor can't do a lot in those conditions.
No, it's pragmatic because frankly the police (even as corrupt and racist as they are) are necessary and making an enemy of them will undermine anything else he'd try to achieve.
How is anything supposed to get better if we’re expected to swallow our representatives denying the institutional racism present in our society, especially when we’re the ones targeted by the violence and selective law enforcement?