New York City's new mayor just took office, facing a multibillion-dollar deficit, and decided the problem was too many cops. Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who succeeded the indicted Eric Adams, canceled thousands of planned NYPD hires and proposed roughly $22 million in cuts to the department's budget as part of a sprawling $127 billion spending plan unveiled Tuesday.
Under Adams' hiring roadmap, the NYPD was set to add 300 officers in July 2026, scale up to 2,500 by July 2027, and eventually bring on 5,000 additional officers annually by July 2028. That trajectory would have put approximately 40,000 officers on New York's streets. Mamdani's plan caps the force near its current level of around 35,000.
All of it is gone with a stroke of a pen. The mayor canceled all orders Adams issued after his September 2024 indictment, and the NYPD expansion was among the casualties.
According to Breitbart, Mamdani framed the budget as a moment of reckoning, telling reporters his administration "inherited a historic budget gap." He tried to preempt the obvious criticism that this is just another round of New York City fiscal theater:
"I know that for those who have watched budget after budget, it is tempting to assume that we are engaging in the same dance as our predecessors. Let me assure you, nothing about this is typical. That's why our solutions won't be either."
He's right that it isn't typical. Most predecessors didn't respond to a crime-weary city by gutting police hiring while simultaneously shopping for tax increases.
Mamdani laid out two paths for closing the deficit. The first, and his preferred route, involves raising taxes on wealthy New Yorkers and profitable corporations. That requires Albany's blessing, meaning Governor Kathy Hochul would have to sign off. Hochul, a moderate Democrat seeking re-election, has been steadfastly opposed to any kind of tax hikes. That alliance seems unlikely despite the two reportedly finding common ground on expanding child care.
The second path is the quiet threat. Mamdani warned that without state-level tax authority, the city would be forced to raise property taxes and raid its reserves:
"And if we do not go down the first path, the city will be forced down a second, more harmful path. Faced with no other choice, the city would have to exercise the only revenue lever fully within our own control. We would have to raise property taxes."
Translation: give me the power to tax the rich, or I'll tax homeowners instead. It's a hostage negotiation dressed up as fiscal responsibility.
What Mamdani is proposing isn't a budget. It's a prioritization exercise, and the priorities tell you everything. The city has a spending problem large enough to require the word "multibillion" in front of "deficit," and the first place the new mayor looks for savings is law enforcement. Not the bloated bureaucracy. Not the programs that have turned city government into a jobs program for activists and consultants. The cops.
This is the democratic socialist governing philosophy in practice. The theory holds that policing is overinvested and social services are underinvested. The result, everywhere it's been tried, is the same: neighborhoods that needed more officers get fewer, and the people who bear the cost are the ones least able to leave.
New York City residents who lived through the crime surges of recent years watched Adams promise a return to public safety through manpower. Whatever else Adams got wrong, and the indictment suggests he got plenty wrong, the instinct to put more officers on the street reflected what voters actually wanted. Mamdani scrapped that commitment within weeks of taking office.
The revenue side of this proposal deserves its own scrutiny. Mamdani presented his preferred path as "the most sustainable and the fairest," calling for an end to what he described as "the drain on our city" by taxing the wealthy and corporations.
New York already competes with states like Florida and Texas that charge no state income tax at all. Every year, high earners and the businesses that employ thousands of New Yorkers weigh whether the city is worth the cost. Mamdani's answer to the question "why are people leaving?" is apparently "let's give them another reason."
And if Hochul refuses to play along, property taxes go up. That doesn't hit hedge fund managers. It hits the retired couple in Queens who bought their house in 1987. It hits the small landlord whose margins are already razor-thin. Mamdani frames this as the unfortunate backup plan, but the structure of his proposal ensures that someone pays more no matter which path Albany chooses.
Cut policing. Raise taxes. Frame it as justice. This is not a New York innovation. It's the same formula that hollowed out city after city over the past decade. The rhetoric always sounds compassionate. The results never are.
Mamdani told reporters the city "can and will overcome" its budget crisis. Maybe so. But five thousand officers who were supposed to be walking beats, answering calls, and keeping subway platforms safe won't be there to help. New Yorkers will overcome their budget crisis the way they overcome everything else: on their own, with fewer police between them and whatever comes next.
