Mamdani is facing his first full-blown crisis on his way to the general election, which is just four months away. He is now contending with a timeworn tradition in New York City politics — the recriminations that almost inevitably follow a civic trauma and the expectation that elected leaders be present when such a rupture occurs.
“This is a reality check: public safety is literally a matter of life and death,” former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Mamdani’s leading general election rival, said Tuesday in an interview with POLITICO. “His positions when it comes to public safety are abhorrent and wholly disconnected from any responsible government approach.”
Mamdani shocked the political world a month ago with his primary defeat of Cuomo, who was heavily favored to win. The democratic socialist’s victory stemmed in large part from his unrelenting focus on affordability, an issue that remains on the front burner for voters. But the death of a New York City police officer has a way of shifting the political focus, and that dynamic especially stands to help incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, a retired NYPD captain who ran and won on a public safety platform in 2021. Both Adams and Cuomo are now running as independents and trail Mamdani in recent general election polling.
Islam’s family expects to hold a public funeral, according to the NYPD Muslim Officer Society. And funerals for murdered police officers have in recent years posed a challenge for elected leaders in the city. The widow of slain NYPD Officer Jason Rivera criticized Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg from the pulpit in 2022. And thousands of cops turned their backs on former Mayor Bill de Blasio after the 2014 killings of Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos.
Neither politician could reasonably be blamed for those deaths, but the emotionally charged ceremonies inevitably became political, replete with messages of who’s with the fallen officer, and who isn’t.
“Mamdani and certainly his supporters are going to have to be careful about how they engage this,” said Basil Smikle, Democratic political strategist who teaches at Columbia University. “It’s at moments like this where ‘defund the police’ — nobody wants to hear that.”
Since making his “defund” calls years ago, Mamdani has moderated his positions on policing, saying he has no plans to defund the NYPD. His platform instead pushes to reduce the department’s billion-dollar overtime budget and create a Department of Community Safety that would assume some responsibilities now handled by police, like responding to mental health emergencies.
Still, Mamdani will face additional scrutiny for supporting slashed police budgets, according to Democratic strategist Lupe Todd-Medina.
“Where he’s going to have issues involving unfortunate incidents like the killing of a police officer, it will resurface his support for defund the police,” she said. “That’s where he’s going to have that disconnect — not just with New York City residents, but with the NYPD itself.”
Todd-Medina didn’t fault Mamdani for being out of the country, but she added mayors are expected to be on call when a crisis strikes — like Rudy Giuliani following the Sept. 11 attacks.
“If there’s one area New Yorkers expect our mayors to step up is during a crisis. Because we’re a big city, our mayors have personality, they’re bigger than life and we expect a bigger-than-life result,” she said. “It’s how you respond and how you react to it.”
Mark Botnick, a former adviser to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, suggested Mamdani should already be held to that standard, given his run.
“This is reminiscent of Karen Bass being MIA during the wildfires — except this time it’s Zohran Mamdani, who is asking New Yorkers to elect him as mayor, vanishing during a crisis in his own city,” Botnick said, referring to the Los Angeles mayor. “For every other moment of the campaign, his highly skilled social media team has been quick to drop a video — but now, radio silence. A single tweet doesn’t cut it. You can’t run New York from a different time zone. If this is how he shows leadership in a crisis, he’s already shown why he doesn’t deserve the job.”
Cuomo was eager to draw a contrast between himself and Mamdani over the trip.
“He takes a two week vacation. I worked for 16 years, I never took a two week vacation. I never even heard of taking a two week vacation,” Cuomo said, referring to his years as governor and state attorney general.
“He’s very good at telling other countries how to run their other business, but then he goes to Uganda where they murder gay people. So the constant is the phoniness. And New Yorkers detect phonies. We do that instinctively,” Cuomo added.
Mamdani was born in Uganda and has previously criticized the government’s anti-gay policies in social media posts, but did not publicly distance himself from the government during his trip.
Mamdani’s campaign said Cuomo was politicizing the tragedy.
“Families across our city are mourning — including members of our Muslim community grieving an officer who leaves behind his pregnant wife and young children. Multiple victims remain in the hospital, fighting for their lives,” Mamdani campaign spokesperson Zara Rahim said in a statement. “Our focus is on supporting those who’ve lost loved ones and bringing our communities together in the face of tragedy. This is a moment for compassion and solidarity — not cheap shots in the press.”
Islam’s identity as a Bangladeshi immigrant and Muslim could ease the political dynamics for Mamdani, who is seeking to be the first Muslim mayor of New York City. Muslim and South Asian voters rallied around the candidate with unprecedented energy, and Mamdani could attend a Muslim funeral with a familiarity unlike any of his rivals — even if Mamdani, the son of a filmmaker and anthropologist, comes from a different social strata. Adams has been eager to point out that fact, casting the race as a contest between a candidate “with a blue collar” and one with a “silver spoon.”
Mamdani was already scheduled to return to New York on Wednesday morning from his vacation in Uganda and plans to address the shooting, campaign spokesperson Dora Pekec said, adding that he will “of course” hope to attend Islam’s funeral.
The democratic socialist has previously taken to X to criticize the NYPD, calling repeatedly and explicitly for the department to be defunded, and generally criticizing it and its officers.
In a social media exchange that critics have widely promoted since Islam’s death, Mamdani wrote in 2020 that “Nature is healing” in response to the remark: “I JUST SAW A COP CRYING IN HIS CAR LMAOOOO.”
Cuomo highlighted Mamdani’s past posts ahead of the primary, printing them on posterboards for a press conference with the mother of a boy shot in the Bronx in 2018. “How are you going to get a police force to work for you?” Cuomo asked. That message didn’t prevent Mamdani from winning the primary — but it’ll come up again.
“If you’re Andrew Cuomo or Eric Adams, you’re going to absolutely use that as a tool to say ‘he’s not prepared to run this city, he’s not serious about going after criminals, and he’s not supportive of police,’” Smikle said.
Cuomo doubled down on his criticisms of Mamdani on Tuesday afternoon.
“Can you stop every crime? No. But do you save many lives by stopping crimes?” he said. “What you can do is have the best police force in the country. That is what you must do. And everything he has said has been the exact opposite: defund, dismantle, they’re racists.”
Prominent Mamdani critics like Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik also slammed Mamdani on X Monday night for his defund support as a “disgrace and truly unfit to be mayor” of New York City while highlighting one of his 2020 posts backing police budget cuts.
Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul on Tuesday defended Mamdani, who she is yet to endorse, against Stefanik, who is planning to run for governor next year.
“That’s about as pathetic as it gets,” Hochul said of Stefanik’s statement during a CNN interview. “Seriously, going after an unelected official who said something back in 2020 when many people were? I mean, c’mon. Ask her the question: ‘What are you doing to keep your constituents safe?’”
Mamdani’s other general election rivals avoided such direct criticism in the hours after the shooting.
Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa blamed police understaffing. But the alleged shooter Shane Tamura only briefly exposed himself as he walked from his car to the Park Avenue office building where he shot five people and himself, according to NYPD officials. “We just don’t have enough police. There’s 31,000 cops, we need at least 40,000 cops,” Sliwa said in an interview with News12 Tuesday. “And they’re spread too thin. We need to hire more cops.”
Adams himself rushed to the scene. He maintained a solemn, measured tone across the Monday night press conference and a series of media appearances Tuesday. While he’s often contrasted himself with “defund the police” Democrats before, Adams instead focused on gun control — touting his administration’s own record seizing firearms and calling for stricter laws on a federal level.
Adams faces a difficult path to reelection against the surging Mamdani who is leading every general election poll. Still, the tragedy serves to highlight the mayor’s support for the police department at a time when he’s running, once again, on public safety.
“This helps Adams because it makes him appear that he’s the one who has the pain, and is seeking to stabilize things,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a retired cop and political consultant who’s running an anti-Mamdani super PAC. “It’s a trauma that impacts every New Yorker, because when a cop gets shot, it makes people feel like it could happen to anyone.”
