Mamdani follows through on campaign promise with NYPD hiring freeze
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has made good on his campaign pledge to freeze further hiring for New York Police Department
NEW YORK, United States (MNTV) – New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has made good on his campaign pledge to freeze further hiring for the New York Police Department (NYPD) — a decision that has drawn criticism from across the political spectrum, including from within his own party.
Oswald Feliz (D-Bronx), who chairs the City Council’s Committee on Public Safety, warned that the freeze comes as the department is “already facing unprecedented officer shortages.” “This is not good,” he told The Post on Sunday. “Cutting police hiring will exacerbate problems related to excessive overtime, slow response times, and crime.”
Mamdani’s preliminary budget last week reversed a plan by his predecessor, Eric Adams, to add thousands of officers and bring NYPD staffing to levels not seen in decades. Adams’ proposal would have raised the department’s headcount to 40,000, but Mamdani’s administration intends to keep it at 35,000, in line with his campaign commitment.
In place of expanded hiring, Mamdani has vowed to establish an entirely new agency — a Department of Community Safety — to handle mental health calls, freeing up officers to focus on violent crime.
However, his administration has offered little concrete information about how the department would function, and the $127 billion budget he proposed contains no dedicated funding for the agency, which Mamdani has estimated would cost $1 billion.
“Public safety must continue to be a top priority,” Feliz said. “NYC has made progress on the issue of public safety, including record-low shootings, and we must work to preserve that progress.
Moving forward with the hiring of new officers will ensure police precincts have the tools to decrease crime and resolve complex challenges related to the safety of New Yorkers.”
Council Speaker Julie Menin (D-Manhattan) echoed the concern in a Fox 5 appearance, saying city lawmakers were monitoring crime numbers closely.
“We do want to make sure that the NYPD has the proper resources,” she said. “We’ve got basically the same number of officers we had on 9/11, yet the city has grown substantially.”
The issue has drawn rare bipartisan consensus. Councilman Frank Morano (R-Staten Island) called halting police additions “the wrong decision at the wrong time.” “When you weaken your police force, everything else suffers,” he said.
The NYPD had nearly 38,000 officers in 2019, but that number dropped sharply in the years that followed as officers filed retirement papers in large numbers and the city struggled to recruit amid a wave of anti-police sentiment.
A Mamdani administration spokesperson did not directly address the staffing concerns but pointed to comments the mayor made at a Thursday press conference.
“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,” Mamdani said.
“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 establishing a Department of Community Safety is to start to take that responsibility off the NYPD 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.”
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