New York’s new mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, quietly stacked his transition team this week with figures who cheerfully celebrate the idea of gutting law enforcement and shrinking jails to quasi-abolition levels. On November 25, 2025, Mamdani announced transition committees that include police-critics tapped to advise on community safety and the criminal legal system, choices that should make every hardworking New Yorker sit up and pay attention. This is not moderate reform — these are ideological appointments that telegraph a radical agenda for our streets.
One of the names Mamdani brought in is Alex Vitale, the Brooklyn College professor best known for writing The End of Policing, a book embraced by activists who want to defund or abolish traditional policing. Vitale himself has publicly embraced abolitionist rhetoric and announced he was asked to join the transition team to work on community safety, which means the man who called police “violence workers” will now have a say in how our neighborhoods are kept safe. For those of us who believe in law, order, and the protection of families and businesses, that is a warning light flashing red.
Mamdani also appointed Janos Marton to his criminal legal committee, a figure who once campaigned on cutting the Manhattan jail population by 80 percent — an idea he detailed in a public policy platform that outlined radical pretrial and sentencing changes. Marton has pushed pretrial reforms, elimination of cash bail, and converting low-level offenses into social-service responses in place of incarceration, all of which sound compassionate until you consider who pays the price when violent offenders are back on the streets. New Yorkers who actually live with crime know there are limits to social experiments when public safety is at stake.
You cannot appoint a parade of abolitionist thinkers to “community safety” posts and pretend nothing will change; this is not harmless academic debate, it is policy design with real-world consequences. Conservatives point to the chaos and crime spikes in cities that flirted with defund rhetoric and soft-on-crime prosecutions as proof that theory and reality are miles apart. If you shrink deterrents and tie the hands of prosecutors and police, the people who lose are ordinary citizens, small-business owners, and children trying to walk to school without fear.
Mamdani will tell you he no longer supports abolishing the NYPD, but actions speak louder than words; staffing your transition with people whose whole mission is to minimize policing and decarceration is a political tactic to usher in those very outcomes. This is classic left-wing playbook stuff: reassure voters with centrist language while building a movement infrastructure ready to implement radical change once in power. Patriots who love New York — and every American city threatened by rising crime — should be skeptical and vocal.
The bottom line is simple: safety is not an abstract academic exercise, it is the foundation of prosperous communities and free lives. Voters who value order, property, and family must demand clear, enforceable plans from elected officials — not ideological wish lists that treat prisons as the enemy and criminals as victims. If Mamdani wants to govern responsibly, he will replace signal appointments with practical partners who respect both justice and the men and women who put their lives on the line to keep our neighborhoods safe.
Patriots in every borough should hold their leaders accountable, show up at hearings, and make their voices heard in precincts and on city ballots. We will not sit quietly while another city experiments with policies that hand power to radicals and hand danger to ordinary people. America was built on the rule of law, and we will fight to keep our streets safe, our police supported, and our communities free.
