Inside Mamdani’s fraught effort to rein in the NYPD unit he pledged to end

This post was originally published on Politico.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani pledged to disband the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group, but his office now approves its deployment at protests.

POLICING PROBLEMS: In the early days of his administration, Mayor Zohran Mamdani placed a new requirement on the NYPD: The department would have to secure permission from his office to deploy its Strategic Response Group to make arrests at protests.

The directive, which hasn’t been previously reported, shows Mamdani sought to exert significant influence over a core function of the police department. Its existence also calls into question why the mayor hasn’t more frequently used that authority to stop the SRG from being deployed at protests — since he promised as a candidate to disband the specialized unit.

The unit