When Zohran won his election, we looked to his promise of freezing NYPD staffing levels as a vital pivot from Eric Adams’ pro-carceral plan to add nearly 5,000 more cops to the rolls. But in raising the headcount of the NYPD by 580 officers this year, Zohran has broken that promise. While cutting nearly 600 vacant Department of Corrections staffing positions is a step in the right direction, Zohran’s reversal on NYPD staffing continues a trend of capitulation to police power. 

Police Commissioner Tisch, who recently bragged about the Israel Day Parade having the most NYPD officers ever assigned to an event in NYC history, has expanded a system of ‘data driven’ policing that in reality is a renewal of broken windows policing—a strategy that targets minor infractions to create the appearance of “order” and that serves to further entrench these occupying armies in primarily Black and brown neighborhoods. New York City Legal advocates have noted a sharp rise in individuals prosecuted for minor offenses since the beginning of the year. These individuals are not data points: they are our neighbors and comrades in struggle.

The socialist movement’s failure to merge with grassroots abolitionism has led to a dearth of popular institutions that can check police power and extend the capabilities of socialist governance. This gap has enabled the NYPD to continue to surveill, imprison, and murder oppressed people despite an administration with a socialist at the helm. Failure to address the contradictions within our movement will only cede more ground to Tisch and the carceral state.

For socialism to succeed, our movement must confront police power, and socialists in office at every level of government must not capitulate to narratives of public safety that ignore the unending violence of our carceral system, from slavery and Jim Crow to ICE kidnappings and police murder. Emerge reaffirms the core demands of the abolitionist movement, some of which are promises from Zohran’s own campaign:

1. Fire Jessica Tisch, immediately
2. Freeze the headcount of the NYPD and reverse the proposed expansion of officers
3. Abolish the Strategic Response Group and Gang Database
4. Stop the expansion of borough-based jails and close Rikers
5. Accelerate the creation of a Department of Community Safety, and truly empower the Office of Community Safety as an oppositional pillar to NYPD 

Emerge will continue to fight alongside grassroots abolitionist movements, support political prisoners, and work to deepen community connections and defense networks. We hope that all of our comrades in DSA, including Mayor Mamdani, will join us.