First Zohran Mamdani spent weeks threatening to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu. Then he had to publicly admit he had no power to do it — one of the more humiliating climbdowns any major American mayor has made in recent memory. And his response to that humiliation was to pivot immediately to encouraging massive street protests against the Israeli Prime Minister during the UN General Assembly in September.
“I think one of the bedrocks of our city is protest… If anyone feels a level of frustration or opposition, protest is something that we will always respect. I leave it to New Yorkers themselves to make that decision,” Mandani said this week.
The NYPD is not impressed.
NYPD Police Benevolent Association President Patrick Hendry didn’t mince words: “The mayor’s activist posturing puts police officers on the street in a terrible position. Protests during the UN General Assembly are nothing new, but when the mayor of the city is actively calling for demonstrations, violent agitators will assume they have permission to cause as much havoc as possible.”
He then added the detail that should make every New Yorker pay attention: the NYPD’s protest response is already “hamstrung by the dangerous lawsuit settlement the city signed over the PBA’s opposition.” Mamdani’s rhetorical gasoline is being poured on a situation where the fire department has already had its hoses cut.
The rank-and-file reactions were equally unsparing. One Manhattan cop noted that officers just came off six weeks of brutal overtime during the Knicks run and World Cup — and now their own mayor is engineering unnecessary chaos on top of it. A Brooklyn cop called Mamdani “nothing more than a cheap politician looking for cheap headlines” who knew perfectly well he never had the power to arrest Netanyahu and is now mobilizing the people most likely to turn a protest into a riot anyway. A department veteran put it most directly: “He should be governing the city and trying to keep the peace, instead of inciting a riot with his rhetoric. He is basically telling the crazy people to do what they want, and there will be no repercussions. If a cop gets hurt, it will be on him.”
Detective’s Endowment Association President Scott Munro added the line that cuts to the heart of the entire Mamdani experiment: he “still acts like he’s leading a protest movement instead of running the largest city in America.” He’s inviting agitators who look for “confrontation and violence” — and it will be the detectives who pay the price when those agitators show up in September.
Munro’s suggested response was appropriately pointed: maybe the 96 unions in the New York State Public Safety Alliance should show up outside Gracie Mansion and let Mamdani experience firsthand what it feels like when someone encourages protests without guardrails. A lawful demonstration, of course.
Here’s the summary: Mamdani failed to arrest Netanyahu, so he’s encouraging his supporters to protest Netanyahu instead — while the police force he spent his entire campaign attacking is stuck managing whatever chaos his rhetoric produces.