NYC's incoming socialist mayor hires 'community safety' advisor who wants to abolish cops and who said policing gangs is 'racist'
By Will Potter
Daily Mail
Dec 1, 2025
New York City 's incoming socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani has appointed anti-police advocate Alex Vitale (pictured) to join his transition team
New York City's incoming socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani has appointed an anti-cop advocate to his team who has called to end policing and abolish the presidency.
Sociologist Alex Vitale, author of 'The End of Policing', a 2017 book that argued for the abolition of almost all police activity in the US, was added to Mamdani's team last week.
Vitale was among 26 advocates tapped to join Mamdani's Committee on Community Safety, and on X the author said the news marked 'A New Era for NYC.'
Vitale's book rose to prominence following the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and subsequent anti-police demonstrations.
The author argues that police officers do not intend to help citizens and prevent crimes, but instead work to uphold inequalities in society, at one point writing that 'the problem is policing itself.'
In the book, Vitale also calls for the end of traditional policing for most crimes, including for drug use, border control, prostitution, and 'misbehaving adolescents.'
The appointment sparked backlash after Vitale shared the news to social media, with many fearing a reduction in policing in New York City could have catastrophic effects for the city of over eight million people.
Mamdani had attempted to distance himself from his own past anti-police rhetoric during the campaign, and his independent rival Jim Walden wrote on X after Vitale's appointment: 'Just when a glimmer of centrist hope started to flicker, THIS.'
Mamdani had attempted to distance himself from his own past anti-police rhetoric during the campaign, but Vitale's appointment sparked backlash for his ardent advocacy against police
NYPD officers escort a person who has been arrested during a protest in New York, November 29, 2025
Vitale was an early proponent of a policy that Mamdani adopted during his campaign, which is to reduce the number of NYPD officers and replace them with social workers.
Mamdani has said he will create a 'Department of Community Safety' for the social workers to handle public safety issues, feeling that cops do not fix the root causes of why a person commits a crime.
Despite the Big Apple's long history of gang violence, Vitale has also argued that the police should not combat street gangs, arguing that doing so can be racist.
In chapter five of his book, Vitale wrote: 'In most cities, gang units function as a mechanism for racialized social control.
'Black and Latino youth are labeled as gang members for hanging out together, while white youth groups are dismissed as harmless.'
He also argues that the 'expansion' of border patrol powers in the United States is 'inhumane' and 'has been justified through fear and racism.'
'It legitimizes xenophobic narratives that define immigrants as threats rather than as fellow workers or neighbors,' Vitale wrote.
His book became popular on the left as Black Lives Matter protests swept the country, as he proclaimed that the entire system of policing is racist even if individual police officers are not.
'Racism in policing is structural, not simply a product of bad attitudes,' Vitale wrote.
'Training officers to recognize implicit bias without changing what they are tasked with enforcing is like teaching a soldier to be sensitive while sending him to occupy a foreign country.'
Vitale has also shared some outlandish views on his X account, including calling for the abolition of the presidency, and the end of a number of law enforcement agencies, including the DEA and anti-terrorism task forces.
Vitale is not alone among the controversial appointees to Mamdani's Committee on Community Safety, also including Dana Rachlin, an advocate who helped create the Brownsville Safety Alliance, a police‑alternative' zone where social workers and community groups handled low-level issues instead of the NYPD
Joining him on Mamdani's Committee on Community Safety is a number of other far-left advocates who have called for the end of policing.
Among them is Joo-Hyun Kang, a 'defund-the-police' campaigner who is the director for Communities United for Police Reform.
In 2020, she proclaimed: 'We would argue that the police unions as an institution, as well as the NYPD, because they're not as separate as people say, have outsized political power', per the New York Post.
Also on the team is Dana Rachlin, an advocate who helped create the Brownsville Safety Alliance, a 'police‑alternative' zone where social workers and community groups handled low-level issues instead of the NYPD.
The experiment was slated as 'reckless' by city leaders.
1 comment:
People are finding out that they don't have to stay in Hell Holes like NYC or San Francisco. I have an acquaintance that moved from San Francisco to Texas. He runs his successful business from Galveston and in reality most of it is handled on line.
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