NYC mayoral candidate Mamdani fact-checked on NYPD staffing claims

New York City socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani was hit with a “fact check” from a local crime expert over a post where the potential future mayor opined on the cause of the New York Police Department’s staffing problems.

“There is so much wrong with @ZohranKMamdani’s post here,” Rafael A. Mangual, senior fellow and head of research for policing and public safety at the Manhattan Institute, posted on X in response to Mamdani, who has faced criticism for his past repeated calls to defund the NYPD. 

Mamdani used the article, which was headlined “Bleeding blue: Why is the NYPD losing an average of 300 cops per month?” as an example of why his policing proposal for a “Department of Community Safety” will “allow police to do the jobs they actually signed up for.”

“Fact Check: It does NOT say cops are unhappy because the scope of their duties is too large,” Mangual said about the article Mamdani cited. 

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New York City Democratic mayoral nominee, Zohran Mamdani, spoke to supporters at a canvass launch event in Prospect Park on Sunday, Aug. 17, 2025.  (Deirdre Heavey/Fox News Digital)

Mangual went on to explain that the reason NYPD officers are leaving the force has a “hell of a lot more to do with the fact that” there are currently only 33,000 officers compared to the 40,000 the force used to be staffed with.

“There’s no question that a larger force would be able to handle the NYPD’s current set of responsibilities were it adequately staffed,” Mangual’s thread added.

Mangual acknowledged that forced overtime is “certainly an issue” but that the solution to that problem is to hire more police officers rather than to “shrink the scope” of what they do, as the Mamdani campaign has suggested.

“So why not commit to getting 7,000 more of them into the department?” Mangual asked. “Answer: Because Mamdani doesn’t want more cops.”

Mamdani tempered his past support of defunding the police department in July after an NYPD officer was shot and killed in the worst mass shooting in the city in a quarter-century, but has expressed his desire to keep staffing at its current level. 

“Mamdani’s proposal should be seen for what it is: A depolicing initiative masquerading as compassionate relief,” Mangual said on X. “Let’s get real, Mamdani had the idea for an ‘alternative’ agency long before he abandoned his vitriolic opposition to the NYPD and his support for its abolition.”

Mangual, in an interview with Fox News Digital earlier this month, warned that the NYPD is “approaching skeleton crew status” down to 33,000 officers compared to 41,000 at the turn of the century. 

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Mamdani has faced criticism for his past repeated calls to defund the NYPD.  (Getty Images)

“That’s a really big change, especially given how many more 911 calls that department is fielding on an annual basis and how much more it has to do in a post-9/11 world where the department kind of took on these additional counter-terrorism and intelligence aspects to it,” Mangual said. “So, you run the risk of creating a situation in which a department that is already starved for recruits is going to become even more unattractive to people who are considering work in that department.“

Social workers and other non-police professionals like “transit ambassadors” should handle certain 911 calls to ease NYPD workloads and improve officer retention, Mamdani has argued on the campaign trail.

“I’ve said time and time again that every decision I make with regards to the NYPD will work backwards from an outcome of public safety and that public safety, we know, it is one that also comes from listening to officers themselves,” Mamdani said earlier this month.

Mamdani has cited “forced overtime” as a leading cause for many New York City police officers’ decision to leave their jobs, noting that NYPD officers receive around 200,000 emergency calls pertaining to a mental health crisis every year. 

“The fact that every year we ask them to take on additional responsibilities – we are making it more and more difficult for them to respond to the very responsibilities that drew them to the job in the first place,” Mamdani argued. “New Yorkers rightfully have concerns around public safety, and I want to empower police officers to respond to serious crime and hire the mental health professionals to respond to mental health calls.”

In his thread on X, Mangual also took issue with what he says is Mamdani’s assertion that gun violence is part of the failure of the “social safety net.”

“So, there’s a massive problem with Mamdani’s premise, which is this: GUN VIOLENCE IS NOT A BYPRODUCT OF THE SAFETY NET’S FAILURE,” Mangual said. “Neither is ‘hate violence,’ or any other kind of violence, for that matter.”

“The idea that people hurt others because they lack material resources is one that goes against the weight of a ton of social science evidence to the contrary. It’s also incredibly insulting to the vast majority of poor New Yorkers, who’ve never considered a life of violent crime.”

New York City Democratic mayoral nominee, Zohran Mamdani, spoke to supporters at a canvass launch event in Prospect Park on Sunday, Aug. 17, 2025.  (Deirdre Heavey/Fox News Digital)

Fox News Digital reached out to the Mamdani campaign for comment. 

Mangual told Fox News Digital that it was “important” to “call out” Mamdani because his public safety platform “relies on some particularly bad assumptions and fundamental misunderstandings about how and why policing is done. 

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“The underlying idea that police should spend less time on the ‘small stuff’ so that they can focus on the ‘big stuff’ reflects a deep misunderstanding of the reality that the ‘big stuff’ is often discovered via interactions based on the ‘small stuff’,” Mangual explained.

“Case in point: Mamdani has argued for taking the cops out of the traffic enforcement game. Yet in 2020, 42% of the NYPD’s gun arrests began as traffic stops (see also the famous Kansas City Gun Experiment). These are important nuances that the public should understand given the centrality of public safety questions in this election.”

Fox News Digital’s Alec Schemmel contributed to this report