Mamdani’s Criticism of the NYPD Should Not Be Taken Out of Context

If, indeed, it is true that Foggy Bottom or the United States’ Department of State, the equivalent of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in most English-speaking countries, has officially issued a Level-4 travel advisory “for discretionary reasons” against “nonessential” official or semi-official travels to such Middle-Eastern Countries as Syria and Lebanon, unarguably veritable war zones partially caught up in the perennial maelstrom and, for the most part, endless and pointless state-of-siege between Israel, staunchly backed by the United States, and Iran, presently, then, of course, it stands to reason for the New York Police Department (NYPD) Commissioner Jessica Tisch and the men and women who serve the New York City Metropolis under her to flatly and unreservedly decline to provide personal and private-security protection for Mrs. Rama Duwaji Mamdani on her recently announced intended unofficial visit to Syria and Lebanon, two Middle-Eastern Countries where Mrs. Mamdani, reportedly, has a significant number of her relatives resident and/or living presently.

Such a firmly established official protocol ought not to be turned into a gratuitous political soccer match or football game by both the ardent ideological opponents of Mayor Zohran “The Shining Star” Kwame Mamdani and the Fascist and the Rabidly Racist, White-Supremacis inveterate enemies of the first Continental African-Born and Indian-Descended Mayor of the World’s Most Cosmopolitan Financial Capital, as well as the Capital of the United Nations Organization (UN) - (See “NYPD Security for Mamdani’s Wife During Middle East Trip? Police Respond” Times Now 8/13/26).

Now, using Mayor Mamdani’s past criticisms of the New York Police Department to portray the 35-year-old former New York State Assemblyman from Queensborough, New York City, to demonize the most progressive and visionary New York City Mayor in our time will definitely work in the gratuitously scandalous manner in which Mr. Mamdani’s enemies and political opponents have been trying to do ever since he seismically defeated his robber-baron establishment political piranhas last November.

The stark and the unvarnished fact of the matter is that anybody who has lived or has been living in any of the Five Boroughs of New York City, or the proverbial Big Apple, for a considerable length of time ought to be well aware of the fact that the New York Police Department’s Personnel have not always performed up to par or to the optimum level of standards of public expectations, that is, at a level that is expected of arguably one of the finest and the most professional law-enforcement agencies in both the United States of America and, to be certain, the rest of the world. This author, a bona fide American Citizen and a resident of New York City well before the birth of Mayor Mamdani, which is more than four decades, knows conclusively clear that the quality of the work and the professional performance of the NYPD has sometimes, if not often, left much to be desired.

So, if once or twice the now-Mayor Zohran “The Shining Star” Kwame Mamdani, who also happens to be the highest and the most powerful and influential popularly elected official of the largest city in the United States had once or twice had grave concerns about the work ethic and the general conduct and the quality of the work performance of a remarkable percentage of the approximately 40,000-strong members of the NYPD, as it is popularly known and affectionately called, such as to provoke a “Social Welfarist” - as critically and significantly opposed to a “Traditional Marxian Socialist” - the extant New York State Assembly Representative must be envisaged to have expressed or registered his genuine concern and heartfelt conniption or moral outrage squarely and candidly within the context of a “Situational Observation and Consonant Analysis.”

Now, what the foregoing statement of incontrovertible fact means is that, and this can be readily accessed and/or verified from the proverbial record books, as the hitherto egregious and insufferably flagrant and, some would even say, lackluster performance quality of an otherwise diligent and hardworking NYPD men and women in blue, an unmistakable allusion to the metonymic blue uniform of the Force, as it were, for the most part significantly improved, Mr. Mamdani had to duly and appropriately revise and logically change some of his former pejorative views of the NYPD.

For instance, under former Mayor Eric Adams, himself a veteran Captain of the NYPD, who a newly elected Mayor Mamdani had a well-deserved occasion to momentarily shower with a modicum of condign encomiums, the former’s caustic barbs against the letter in a fierce battle for what the latter characterized as “An Epic Battle for the Soul of The Big Apple,” notwithstanding, Mr. Adams’ widely remarked positive, even if sometimes overreaching, hands-on approach to policing significantly redounded to the benefit of the approximately 8-million city residents, to such a morally refreshing extent that the newly elected Mayor Mamdani decided to hold off and allow The Adams-appointed Commissioner Jessica Tisch to continue with her yeomanly job performance.

Now, what the foregoing observation means is that contrary to the adamantly static and robotic portrait that his implacable enemies and political opponents would have the general public cut for arguably the most dynamic and visionary and “revolutionary” New York City Chief in more than a generation, under the stewardship of the First-Class Graduate of Global African Studies from the elite State of Maine-based Bowdoin College, New York City has notched many more significant positive quality-of-life improvement achievements than six years under America’s twice, nonconsecutively elected Make America Great Again (MAGA) Fascist President Donald John Trump.

The sardonic irony here, though, is that the very critics and naysayers who literally stampeded former Mayor Adams out of town on trumped-up bogus charges of bribery and corruption, actually as a veritable scapegoat of the age-old Armenian Jewish Pogrom which Turkiye/Turkey vehemently rejects, are the same Pro-Israel Amen Corner espousers and proponents of Vampire Capitalism, who would also have the rest of America believe that, to-date, the most genocidal crime committed against the overwhelming majority of us is the politically unyielding demand by the Zohran “The Shining Star” Kwame Mamdani-influenced Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) for Cost-of-Living Affordability and Livable Wages and Salaries for the wantonly MAGA-exploited “Wretched of the Earth,” our profound apologies to Dr. Frantz Omar Fanon, of Martinique and Algeria.

One also begins to wonder whether the relentless slamming of Mayor Mamdani as a “Marxist Socialist” was not really a thinly veiled streak of Antisemitic effusion in thrust. After all, who was Karl Marx but a politically and a civically proscribed “Wandering Jew”?

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]