After an ICE shooting and a night of protest policing, the left wing of the mayor’s coalition wants a date for ending the Strategic Response Group.
NEW YORK, New York (Mamdani Post) – The uneasy peace between Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the police department he promised to change has come under its heaviest strain yet, and the socialists who elected him are asking for a deadline.
A truce that did not survive October
For most of his first year, Mamdani avoided open conflict with the NYPD. That ended in the span of a few weeks. Tisya Mavuram’s analysis in The Nation points to two flashpoints: the arrests of dozens of protesters outside the United Nations during a protest over a Netanyahu visit, among them elected officials affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America, some of them taken by officers of the Strategic Response Group; and the protests that followed an ICE shooting in Marble Hill on October 8, when police force was used against demonstrators, including DSA-affiliated congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier.
The result is that policing, which Mamdani campaigned on mostly by promising not to defund the force while abolishing its most aggressive units, is now the issue that tests whether his coalition holds together.
What DSA is demanding
On Saturday, October 10, the national DSA posted a demand that the mayor fire Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch and end the Strategic Response Group and the Community Response Team, as syndicated reporting on the DSA demand recounts. Avila Chevalier had called for Tisch to resign the day before. The Nation adds that the New York City chapter took a more conditional position, tying Tisch’s future to an end to police cooperation with ICE, and that City Council members Julie Won and Carmen De La Rosa, who are not DSA members, also called for replacing her.
Tisch has said the NYPD had no involvement in the federal operation before the shooting. The mayor’s office and the department said the Strategic Response Group was not deployed on the night of the shooting itself.
Mamdani keeps the commissioner
The mayor told The New York Times that there were no plans to change police leadership, a position amNY also covered, and he has stuck to it. According to Ian F. Blair’s report for The Intercept, Mamdani called the treatment of Avila Chevalier unacceptable, ordered a review of use-of-force policies, and added funding to the inspector general’s office, while praising Tisch’s record on corruption and crime.
That record is the mayor’s best argument, and it deserves a fair hearing. Tisch has support well beyond the left: The Nation notes that Governor Kathy Hochul and House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries cited the decision to keep her in their endorsements of Mamdani. A mayor who inherited a large deficit and a hostile national government has reasons to want a steady hand at the department that employs more than 33,000 officers.
The argument for patience
Defenders say structural change takes time, and that firing a commissioner whom the mayor credits with lowering crime would hand Mamdani’s enemies a gift. They are right that a rushed purge could be reversed by the next mayor.
The argument against it
The counterargument is that the promise on the table was specific. Mamdani pledged to abolish the Strategic Response Group and the gang database. By The Nation’s count, the group still exists, he stood beside Tisch in January as she defended the database, and in April he signaled reform rather than abolition. Tisch, the magazine notes, supports keeping the group. Nothing in the reporting says a timeline exists.
The longer record on NYPD and ICE
The Intercept’s timeline shows why left critics are impatient. It notes that a January 2025 NYPD memo barred officers from facilitating street closures for immigration enforcement, yet in October 2025 under the previous administration officers set up perimeters during a raid in Chinatown. In February, Mamdani signed an executive order that created an Office of Immigrant Affairs, barred ICE from city garages and vacant lots, and ordered agency audits. In May, after ICE removed a man from a Brooklyn hospital, police arrested protesters, and a city audit later found the NYPD was “not being held to a high standard of accountability or scrutiny for collusion.”
Blair argues that Mamdani has never squarely addressed the role officers play as a buffer between protesters and federal agents. The mayor says the NYPD will not take part in civil immigration enforcement, and the department insists it follows sanctuary law. But when a crowd is angry about a shooting and officers push it back so federal agents can work, the distinction between policing a protest and assisting ICE becomes thin for the people on the street.
What the left should ask for
Police are not a neutral service. They are the means by which a city enforces property, order and, increasingly, a federal government that hunts its own workers. A socialist mayor does not have to pretend otherwise, but he does have to make a clear public choice about which side of that line the department stands on during protests against ICE.
Three concrete steps would answer most of the criticism without a commissioner’s firing: a signed date for disbanding the Strategic Response Group, a written protocol that forbids crowd control or perimeters at ICE operations and is enforced by the inspector general, and public release of the review he has already promised. If the mayor can deliver those, the argument over one official’s job becomes less urgent. If he cannot, the demand to replace her will grow.
For lighter commentary on City Hall, readers can turn to Bohiney Magazine, though the stakes in this story are real.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/