New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani never quite promised to reform the police.
He promised to eliminate some of the most notorious of the New York Police Department’s institutions — a widely criticized gang database and infamous Strategic Response Group, which responds to protests and whose officers have histories of higher complaint rates. Mamdani outlined an ambitious vision to divert police away from responding to mental health crises, proposing an Office of Community Safety.
New data on how much the New York City is spending to pay for police misconduct, however, has heightened concerns among advocates that paltry rate of changes to policing under Mamdani could lead to even higher payouts in coming years. The first six months of the Mamdani administration saw $53 million in police misconduct settlements, according to an analysis of NYPD data by the public defense group Legal Aid Society.
If the figures continue to grow at that rate under Mamdani, it will make 2026 the fourth year in a row that police misconduct settlements top $100 million.
Settlements tend to take a long time (years) to litigate before reaching the point of a settlement.
The settlements represent the kinds of abuses of aggressive enforcement of “quality of life” policing and the deployment of specialized units like the Strategic Response Group that characterized the Adams administration, Sisitzky added.
“Those have yet to really be reined in under the Mamdani administration,” he said. “So, while he can’t be held directly responsible for all of the numbers reflected in this first tranche of data in terms of settlements payouts, we’re going to continue to see large volumes of complaints being filed, of settlements being reached, unless we see a change in tactics and a shift away from the kind of policing policies that drove these settlements in the first place.”
In order to get erstwhile sympathetic leaders like Mamdani to take a firmer stance with police misconduct, there has to be more messaging to voters about defunding the police - because defunding is the only thing local governments can threaten them with, and you’ll have to be ready to play hardball to beat police unions. They’re effectively paramilitary juntas in every jurisdiction, killing with impunity.
Yet even when the defund movement was at its peak, the polling numbers weren’t strong enough to get support for it. The message still has not reached the average voter that cops are unnecessary, bad, and need to go. Mamdani didn’t run on being anti-cop, so it’s weird to judge him by that yardstick anyway, but we have heard him be sympathetic towards anti-cop movements - and his political opponents have used that as a cudgel against him. I think we would be able to expect more action from leaders like him if polling data said a lot more people were in favor of defunding.
