By Gloria Pazmino, CNN

New York (CNN) — Months before winning New York City’s Democratic primary for mayor, Zohran Mamdani sat inside a Pakistani restaurant in Queens with around two dozen off-duty police officers.

The officers were familiar with the 33-year-old assemblyman’s past calls to defund America’s largest police force and social media posts in which he referred to police as racist and wicked.

They’d been invited to the private meet-and-greet by a retired New York Police Department officer who’d spent years helping to boost the department’s Bangladeshi and South Asian enrollment. He told the officers to give Mamdani a chance.

“I was not a fan of Mamdani at all, but as I got to know him more, I began to respect him and like him more,” said Shamsul Haque, the meeting’s organizer and a Bangladeshi American who spent 21 years in the department, rising to become the NYPD’s first Muslim and South Asian to hold the rank of lieutenant commander.

If he wins November’s general election, Mamdani would oversee the nation’s largest municipal police department. It will be a huge political and public safety test for both sides: Mamdani as a democratic socialist who has called for sweeping changes in law enforcement and the NYPD as a 36,000-officer force that has long faced calls for reform.

As his opponents accuse him of trying to undermine public safety, Mamdani has disavowed his past calls to defund the police and leaned on validators like Haque, who said he went from apprehension to a full embrace of Mamdani due to a belief that if “given the chance,” some of Mamdani’s proposals could “revolutionize law enforcement and community safety in a way that will be beneficial to society.”

Mamdani is also getting support from a seasoned NYPD veteran: Rodney Harrison, who served as chief of department, the department’s highest-ranking uniformed officer, before his retirement in 2021 has recently met with Mamdani and endorsed his campaign.

But Mamdani’s support among police leaders remains slim. Among those who question his plans is Bill Bratton, who served as police commissioner under Bill de Blasio, a Mamdani ally whom the Democratic nominee has called the best mayor of his lifetime, as well as under Rudy Giuliani in the 1990s.

“He is thought of as being anti-police, anti-NYPD, so he’s starting off in a tough place,” Bratton said in an interview. “It will be interesting to see how a political novice who has never run anything runs the largest police force in America.”

Mamdani gets a key endorsement

During his time with the NYPD, Harrison, whose support of Mamdani has not been previously reported, helped to implement the Neighborhood Policing Program, a de Blasio-era initiative which sought to improve relationships between communities and the police. After retiring from the NYPD, Harrison went on to lead the Suffolk County Police Department where he led a successful effort to catch Rex Heuermann, suspected in the Gilgo Beach murders.

In a statement released by the campaign, Harrison praised the idea of a Department of Community Safety, calling it a “thoughtful and impactful plan” that he believes could help decrease officer workloads by bringing mental health professionals into the fold.

“I know police are working hard to keep us safe, and that we also can’t keep using the same playbook for every issue,” Harrison said.

Mamdani’s campaign says he’s holding meetings to understand how to implement the proposals outlined in his public safety agenda, which seek to overhaul the way in which New York City deals with its most vulnerable residents.

One of his major proposals is creating a Department of Community Safety. Elle Bisgaard-Church, who ran Mamdani’s primary campaign and is now working as his chief adviser, described the proposed department as tackling “gun violence, subway safety, mental health crises, and other severe issues with evidence-based solutions.”

Mamdani has met with families of New Yorkers suffering from mental illness, including the family of Win Rozario, a 19-year-old man who was in the throes of a mental health crisis when he called 911 for help in March of last year.

NYPD officers arrived to find Rozario standing in the kitchen with his mother nearby. When an officer moved toward the kitchen, Rozario seemed to become distressed and picked up a pair of kitchen scissors. Officers first fired their Tasers but when Rozario continued to move towards them with scissors in his hand, the officers opened fire killing him. The entire incident unfolded in minutes, Rozario’s family has said.

Mamdani wants to centralize and expand part of the system that already exists by tripling the size of the city’s Mobile Crisis Team program enabling 24-hour, 7-day-a-week service, raising their salaries and creating a separate mobile crisis system similar to 911 where New Yorkers would call to request help.

New York City would be far from the first city to try and implement changes. Mamdani’s campaign is taking inspiration from smaller cities.

In Eugene, Oregon, the Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets – CAHOOTS for short – handles a 24/7 crisis response system that pairs behavioral health workers and medics to respond to non-emergency calls involving people experiencing mental health crises. A 2020 study of the program found that from approximately 24,000 calls CAHOOTS responded to in 2019, only 311 required police back-up.

But the program has run into significant budgetary challenges. Earlier this year, Eugene – a city of 180,000 people compared to New York’s 8 million – announced it would no longer serve the area due to contract and funding issues.

Ben Struhl, executive director of the Crime and Justice Policy Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, said Mamdani will have twin challenges: overhauling a massive system that demands equally massive investment while overcoming general skepticism that the government is doing its job.

“For New York, picking some things that are problems that communities care about and demonstrating that the government is actually trying to solve those problems is the thing that will work to try and overcome that cynicism,” Struhl said.

A perhaps inevitable clash with Jessica Tisch

As a prominent member of the Democratic Socialists of America, Mamdani has previously called for policy changes and budget cuts that clash sharply with the department’s current priorities and its leader, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch.

While Mamdani has praised Tisch’s leadership of the NYPD, noting she has been effective in helping to root out corruption inside the agency and crediting her with bringing down crime, he has stopped short of committing to keep her in charge of the department.

The stark ideological divide between Mamdani and Tisch suggests her future under a potential Mamdani administration remains uncertain, though Mamdani’s campaign says it has not made any decisions on top posts. Tisch, whose family controls the Loews Corporation, has spent much her career in municipal government. She has emphasized technology-focused surveillance and traditional policing tactics.

Tisch has made it a point recently to rail against criminal justice reforms, advocating for changes that Mamdani is unlikely to support like expanding policing teams focused on quality-of-life enforcement, a policing strategy focused on low-level offenses like public urination, fare jumping or panhandling.

The strategy is rooted in the belief that ignoring visible nuisances ultimately leads to more serious crime and that keeping public order results in increased safety and better living conditions. Critics of the practice say quality-of-life policing disproportionately targets communities of color.

Tisch has also been critical of the state’s Raise the Age Law, blaming the measure for an increase in youth violence in the city. The law, passed in 2017, raises the age of criminal responsibility in New York from 16 to 18, keeping youth offenders from being prosecuted in criminal court.

President Donald Trump and Republicans have made Mamdani into a key target as they argue that Democratic-run cities are poorly run and dangerous. Trump has deployed National Guard troops into Washington, DC, and threatened to do the same in Chicago. The president has vowed to “straighten out” New York if Mamdani wins.

Mamdani brushed off Trump’s threat to send soldiers into the city, pivoting to cast the department as capable and effective while saying Trump would actually “put New Yorkers in danger.”

Tisch and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul have reached out to the Trump administration directly in the meantime.

Hochul spoke to Trump on the phone about his threat to deploy soldiers in recent days, she told reporters this week. Hochul, who herself has sent the National Guard to patrol some of the city’s busiest transportation hubs, said she tried to talk Trump out of sending in soldiers, telling him crime in New York city is down and that the NYPD’s policies are working.

The conversation seemed to stick with Trump.

“I get along with Kathy. If she’d like to do that, I would do it,” he said during a Cabinet meeting when a reporter asked him about the prospect of deploying soldiers.

Tisch is also making her case. A source with knowledge of the meeting confirmed to CNN the commissioner and Attorney General Pam Bondi met this week. During what was described as a “positive and productive” meeting that lasted about 30 minutes, Tisch told Bondi that New York City’s crime rate is low and that the NYPD did not need federal help or involvement from the National Guard.

An early test but more to come

An early test for Mamdani came after a mass shooting inside a Manhattan office building that left 5 people dead including an off-duty police officer who was working security in the lobby of the building. The incident unfolded while Mamdani was out of the country on vacation. After his return, Mamdani was quickly embraced by the fallen officer’s family days after distancing himself from previous comments that were critical of police.

Bratton said Mamdani’s proposal to task mental health professionals with responding to calls involving people in mental distress is a “well-intended effort” sure to come up against the city’s massive bureaucracy and a spider-web of agencies and task forces already trying to tackle with the city’s mental health crisis.

“I am very supportive of the concept of intervention,” said the former police commissioner. “But how do you balance the idea of the need for police at some of these calls? Many of them don’t need it, but they have to be available if they are needed.”

Bratton, who has not met with Mamdani, believes any effort to “significantly curtail quality of life enforcement” by a potential Mamdani administration could undo a lot of the gains made in the past few years.

“The only glimmer I see of positive light is that Mamdani is seeking to learn as de Blasio was at first,” Bratton said. “He tried to understand how to motivate cops, how to deal with crime and disorder at the same time.

“Will he listen and who is he listening to?” he said. “That’s the question.”

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