By James J. Devine
In the raw hours after Mayor Zohran Mamdani faced two high-profile NYPD incidents in the first days of his tenure, a familiar, weary script began its first draft.
Pundits and political opponents sharpened their knives, ready to slice open the nascent administration with a single, demanding question: What is your judgment?
The facts, as currently known, are terrible and tense.
On Thursday evening, a man armed with a knife had barricaded himself with others inside New York-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital. Police ordered him to drop the weapon, used a Taser, and struggled with him before gunfire erupted. The man was killed. A second incident took place in the West Village, where a police officer shot and killed a male driver of a BMW that had been involved in a motor vehicle incident after he drew an imitation firearm.
The NYPD brass has spoken of the dangers officers face daily. Mayor Mamdani, standing beside Commissioner Jessica Tisch and Governor Kathy Hochul, has not yet commented on the specific incident.
This silence is being framed as a failure. But consider the alternative: a mayor, just weeks in office, instantly adjudicating a lethal encounter from a podium. That is not justice; it is political theater. The demand for immediate condemnation from a man elected on a promise to fundamentally rethink public safety is not a demand for accountability. It is a demand for hypocrisy.
Mamdani’s past criticisms of the NYPD are not a secret; they are a matter of public record. He once called the department “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety” and advocated for its defunding.
His rhetoric was the ignited powder of a city’s fury, the kind that followed the killings of Eric Garner and Win Rozario—a Queens teen shot by police in his home during a mental health crisis.
That fury is not illegitimate. It is the product of a history where officers like Daniel Pantaleo are fired, but criminal charges remain elusive, and where internal charges, as in the Rozario case, move at a glacial pace.
But as a candidate, Mamdani evolved. He apologized for his fiery language. He pivoted from abolition to a complex reform agenda: maintaining police staffing while building a new, billion-dollar Department of Community Safety to handle crises like the one that ended in tragedy at that hospital.
He kept NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch. This was not a surrender, but a strategy.
Now, his critics wish to hold him only to his most inflammatory past words while denying him the time to enact his stated, practical plans. They would have him be both the radical outsider and the instantly conforming insider.
They pour decades of institutional failure into a cup and demand he drain it in his first month.
A just review takes time. A fair process requires facts, not frenzy.
The true test of Mayor Mamdani is not whether he performs outrage on demand today, but whether he builds the systems that prevent these tragedies tomorrow.
Whether he ensures that the coming investigations by the CCRB and the district attorney are thorough and transparent, not whitewashed or buried.
Whether his promised civilian agency becomes a reality, so that the next call about a man in crisis brings a different kind of response.
The impatience is understandable. It has been earned by a long line of empty promises and unpunished failures.
However, directing that entire backlog of rage at a new mayor before his administration can even find its footing is not accountability. It is sabotage.
Let the investigation proceed. Hold him to his larger promise, because judging a man who promises change for not changing everything in an instant is not wisdom. It is a guarantee that nothing will ever change at all.