New York City’s incoming Democratic socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has chosen for his transition team a sociology professor at Brooklyn College who wrote a book about ending policing.
“I’m excited to announce that I have been asked to join the Mamdani Transition Team to work on community safety issues. A New Era for NYC,” Alex Vitale wrote on social media.
Mr. Vitale is the author of “The End of Policing,” a 2017 book that argues for the abolition of almost all police activity in the U.S. It was published in the wake of violent demonstrations after Michael Brown was killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri.
The professor has spent three decades writing about policing, and consults both law enforcement and human rights organizations internationally, according to his profile on Brooklyn College’s website.
In the book, he wrote that law enforcement exacerbates the problems it is supposed to solve, writing that “the problem is policing itself.”
Mr. Vitale said that the police should not combat street gangs because doing so can be racist, and expanding border patrol powers in the U.S. is “inhumane.”
He also called for the end of traditional policing for most crimes, including for drug use, border control, prostitution and “misbehaving adolescents,” instead pointing toward legalization, restorative justice and harm reduction to reduce crime, spending and injustice.
Mr. Vitale’s book argues that the whole system of policing is racist.
“Training officers to recognize implicit bias without changing what they are tasked with enforcing is like teaching a soldier to be sensitive while sending him to occupy a foreign country,” the book reads.
His book’s attention grew following George Floyd’s death in 2020, as Black Lives Matter gained national traction.
Mr. Mamdani announced two weeks ago that New York Police Department Commissioner Jessica Tisch accepted his offer to stay at the helm of the nation’s largest police force.
During the campaign, Mr. Mamdani tried to distance himself from past comments criticizing law enforcement and saying the New York Police Department should be defunded.
“We don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety. What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD,” he posted on social media in 2020.
After a mass shooting over the summer, Mr. Mamdani told reporters, “I am not defunding the police. I am not running to defund the police.”
Mr. Mamdani has proposed a Department of Community Safety to spend money on citywide mental health programs and crisis response, expand evidence-based gun violence prevention programs and increase funding for hate violence prevention programs.
“Police have a critical role to play. But right now, we’re relying on them to deal with the failures of our social safety net — which prevents them from doing their actual jobs,” his proposal reads on his campaign website.
