If the NYPD’s boots are laced by the IDF, as the mayor once said, then he’s letting them wear shoes in his house.

Highlights:

the NYPD liaison stationed in Israel, whom the New York Post reported had left the job a week before Mamdani was elected, is now back on the job

As an Assembly member, Mamdani had called for a boycott of Cornell Tech, a partnership between Cornell University and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, due to the latter’s ties to the Israeli military. […] But a few days after winning the mayoral election, Mamdani said he would not support a boycott of Cornell Tech.

Mamdani said that he would instruct the NYPD to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu […] Last month, he released a video calling Netanyahu a war criminal while admitting he did not have the authority to arrest him.

In a 2023 speech at the Democratic Socialists of America’s national convention, Mamdani said, “When the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF” […] As mayor, though, he has not made any efforts to disentangle the NYPD from Israeli law enforcement. Instead, he has largely left the department to its own devices under the leadership of NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who describes herself as a “proud Zionist.”

Israel and the NYPD

After 9/11, the NYPD looked to Israel to learn best practices for counterterrorism and intelligence gathering, sending officers to a law enforcement exchange program in 2002 […] In 2007, the NYPD began stationing an officer in Israel through its International/Domestic Liaison Program […] which is partially funded by the New York City Police Foundation. In turn, the foundation is funded by wealthy donors, including the Tisch family. The NYPD commissioner’s uncle Andrew Tisch and her cousin Alexander Tisch sit on the foundation’s Board of Trustees. Netanyahu even reportedly likes to stay in the Tisch family’s hotel when he is in New York.

Mamdani is [was] a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel and as an Assembly member, he sponsored the Not On Our Dime act aimed at preventing New York-registered charities from funding activity connected to illegal Israeli settlements.

[Now that he can, he’s not doing anything about “New York-registered charities funding activity connected to illegal Israeli settlements”]

Mamdani now has control over the NYPD, which means he has inherited all of the department’s problems. Critics of the police department’s surveillance measures, which Mamdani himself once lambasted, have been disappointed by the mayor’s lack of action in curtailing these measures.

[Again: now that he’s in the best position in his life do actually do something about what he advocated for, he doesn’t]

  • amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml
    91·
    21 days ago

    I don’t say the following to defend him at all, but really just to discuss the logistics of it and if people have reason to believe this is wrong, they can say so: He’d probably have his life threatened, or worse, if he did try to actually follow through on these kind of things. If that hasn’t happened already behind closed doors.

    Can a single elected rep really “have control over” the NYPD? Some cops in the US are in literal gangs.

    I think it’s good to call him out for not following through because reformists should be called out for capturing revolutionary energy and selling people a lie that they can totally fix things this time with the right election (Lucy and Charlie Brown with the football energy). But I’m also not sure that he can follow through in the first place and this is one of those things to understand about the limitations of bougie electoral politics. How much of a rep’s power comes from the position itself and how much comes from the rest of the apparatus being okay with what they do? In other words, if a rep does what the system wants, it might look like they’re doing a lot of their own power granted by the position. But when they want to do the opposite, how much of that power still exists?