New York City's new mayor wants 5,000 fewer cops than his predecessor planned for, and members of his own party are sounding the alarm.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani's preliminary budget, released last week, reversed former Mayor Eric Adams' proposal to boost NYPD headcount to 40,000, a level not seen in decades. Instead, Mamdani plans to hold the department at 35,000 officers, fulfilling a campaign promise to freeze hiring above that number. The reaction from City Council members on both sides of the aisle has been swift and blunt.
City Council Committee on Public Safety Chair Oswald Feliz, a Bronx Democrat, told The Post on Sunday what most New Yorkers already feel in their gut:
"This is not good."
According to the New York Post, Feliz didn't stop at three words. He warned that the freeze would compound problems the department already faces.
"Cutting police hiring will exacerbate problems related to excessive overtime, slow response times and crime."
He also pointed to gains the city has made, including what he described as record-low shootings, arguing that progress like that doesn't sustain itself on autopilot. Feliz added that moving forward with new hires would ensure precincts "have the tools to decrease crime and resolve complex challenges related to the safety of New Yorkers."
Council Speaker Julie Menin, a Manhattan Democrat, echoed those concerns on Fox 5, framing the staffing issue in terms that should be impossible to dismiss:
"We've got the same number of officers basically that we had on 9/11, yet the city has grown substantially."
Menin said city lawmakers were closely watching the crime numbers and wanted to ensure the NYPD had "the proper resources." That's polite elected-official language for: we think this is a problem.
Councilman Frank Morano, a Staten Island Republican, was more direct. He called halting the addition of more cops the "wrong decision at the wrong time" and offered a principle that conservatives have articulated for decades:
"When you weaken your police force, everything else suffers."
He's right. Policing isn't one policy vertical among many. It's the foundation. Schools don't function when students feel unsafe. Businesses don't invest in neighborhoods where crime festers. Transit ridership collapses when subway platforms feel lawless. You don't get to treat public safety as a line item to trim and expect every other city priority to hold steady.
Mamdani's defense of the freeze rests on an idea that, so far, has produced more press conference rhetoric than policy substance. At a Thursday press conference, he laid out his theory:
"We've seen an issue with retention in our department over the last few years, and I have said time and again that for too long, the city has added additional responsibilities onto the NYPD. We see, at this point, the NYPD responsible for responding to about 200,000 mental health calls a year, and part of our vision in establish a Department of Community Safety is to start to take that responsibility of mental health crises and task mental health responders with that work, and to ensure that police can focus on the work that they signed up to focus on, which is tackling violent crime across the city."
On paper, the argument has a certain logic. Police officers aren't social workers, and 200,000 mental health calls per year is a staggering load. But here's the problem: Mamdani's own $127 billion budget doesn't include funding for the Department of Community Safety. The mayor himself has said the new department would cost roughly $1 billion. He has offered little tangible information about how it would function, and questions about its rollout and funding remain unanswered.
So the plan is:
This is the progressive governance cycle in miniature. Dismantle an existing system on the promise of a better replacement, then fail to build the replacement, then blame the resulting chaos on insufficient funding or political opposition.
The department's staffing crisis didn't materialize overnight. In 2019, the NYPD had nearly 38,000 officers in its ranks. Then came the wave of anti-cop sentiment that swept American cities. Officers retired. Recruitment cratered. The force shed thousands and struggled to replenish them.
Adams recognized the problem and proposed ramping headcount back up to 40,000. Agree or disagree with Adams on any number of issues, but on this point, he read the room correctly: New Yorkers wanted more police, not fewer. That plan is now dead under Mamdani.
Mamdani's approach treats the staffing decline as a feature rather than a crisis. His framing suggests the city doesn't need 40,000 officers if responsibilities are redistributed. But redistributing responsibilities requires institutions that actually exist and function. You don't shrink the fire department before building the sprinkler system.
Mamdani acknowledged a retention issue in the NYPD, and he's not wrong that one exists. But freezing hiring doesn't fix retention. It compounds it. Officers who remain on a shrinking force absorb more overtime, cover more territory, and burn out faster. The officers who can leave, do. The ones who stay grow resentful. It's a cycle that feeds on itself.
If the mayor genuinely wanted to address retention, he'd be looking at the conditions that drove officers out in the first place. Morale doesn't recover when the message from City Hall is that your department is overstaffed and your responsibilities should be handed to an agency that doesn't have a budget line.
What's striking about the pushback against Mamdani is where it's coming from. This isn't Republicans manufacturing outrage. The loudest critics are Democrats who chair public safety committees and lead the City Council. Feliz and Menin aren't working from a conservative playbook. They're responding to a reality that transcends ideology: people want to feel safe in their city, and fewer cops make that harder.
New York City has been down this road before. Every time political leaders have treated policing as a problem to be minimized rather than a service to be optimized, the consequences have landed hardest on the communities that can least afford them. The Bronx, not the Upper East Side, pays the price when response times climb, and precincts are stretched thin.
Mamdani's $127 billion budget found room for plenty of priorities. It did not find room for the department, says it will replace the 5,000 officers he's cutting. When his own administration spokesperson was asked about the warnings from Council members, the response was a redirect to the mayor's Thursday press conference. No direct engagement with the concerns. No specific reassurance.
The mayor is betting that a city of eight million people can hold together with a police force he acknowledges is losing officers, while he builds an alternative infrastructure he hasn't funded. His own party is telling him the math doesn't work.
They should know. They've watched their cities try this before.