Zohran Mamdani Issues Apology to NYPD for ‘Defund the Police’ Comments

Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Party’s candidate for New York City mayor, has publicly apologized to the New York Police Department for repeatedly calling to defund and dismantle the agency several years ago.

During an interview with Fox News host Martha MacCallum on Wednesday, Mamdani said he regretted the language he used in past criticism of the police.

“Absolutely, I’ll apologize to police officers right here,” Mamdani told MacCallum, who asked him if he was willing to offer a “broad, public apology” on her show.

“I apologize because of the fact that I’m looking to work with these officers,” he said. “And I know that these officers, these men and women who serve in the NYPD, they put their lives on the line every single day.”

This marked the first time Mamdani had offered a public apology to the city’s law enforcement as a whole, although he said he had previously expressed regret in private conversations with individual officers.

Mamdani’s original comments date back to 2020, before his election to his current post as a state Assembly member representing parts of western Queens.

“We don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety. What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD,” Mamdani wrote in the June 2020 post on Twitter, now rebranded as X.

“There is no negotiating with an institution this wicked & corrupt,” he wrote in another post in December of that year, referencing city budget negotiations around proposed cuts to the NYPD. “Defund it. Dismantle it. End the cycle of violence.”

Since entering the mayoral race, Mamdani has sought to distance himself from those remarks. On the campaign trail, he has repeatedly said they were made in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis police custody, which sparked a nationwide debate on excessive use of force by police, and that those posts no longer reflect where he now stands on policing.

During his Fox News interview, Mamdani said that his “defund the police” statements were born out of the anger and frustration of that period and that his experience as a lawmaker has since reshaped his perspective.

“And now what I know—having represented 100,000 people in western Queens—is that to deliver that justice you have to also deliver that safety, and that means representing the men and women of the NYPD,” he told MacCallum.

The Police Benevolent Association, the labor union representing the NYPD’s rank-and-file officers, responded to Mamdani’s apology, saying what the next mayors do matters more than what they say.

“Elected leaders’ words matter, but their actions matter more,” union president Patrick Hendry said in a statement to New York Daily News.

“An apology will not improve police officers’ quality of life. It will not protect them from being assaulted by dangerous repeat offenders or having their rights trampled by the CCRB,” Hendry said, referring to the Civilian Complaint Review Board that handles misconduct allegations against officers. “Those are the issues we are focused on now, and they’re the same ones we’ll be discussing with the next mayor after Election Day.”

Mamdani, a self-described Democratic Socialist, has repeatedly promised to keep NYPD headcounts at current levels if elected mayor. Instead, he said he’d slash police overtime assignments by transferring mental health–related emergency calls to a new civilian agency, the proposed Department of Community Safety.

Mamdani insists, however, that he’d disband the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group, a unit progressive activists accused of using aggressive crowd-control tactics and of being deployed too often to protests rather than emergencies such as shootings.