First posted on Instagram
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is facing backlash over his reported plan to disband the New York Police Department's Strategic Response Group, the roughly 600-officer unit that handles riots, major protests and counterterrorism operations, and replace it with a civilian de-escalation unit.
Disbanding the unit was one of Mamdani's campaign promises. In December 2024 he wrote on X: "As Mayor, I will disband the SRG, which has cost taxpayers millions in lawsuit settlements + brutalized countless New Yorkers exercising their first amendment rights." After the unit arrested people protesting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's appearance at the United Nations General Assembly in September, Mamdani repeated the pledge, saying: "I have made that promise, I will fulfill that promise. The only question is the timeline of it."
The Strategic Response Group was created in 2015 under then-Police Commissioner Bill Bratton in the aftermath of the Bataclan massacre in Paris, replacing the NYPD's Hercules teams. It is the department's rapid-response force, trained and equipped to arrive first at terror attacks, riots and other major emergencies anywhere in the city.
The unit has long drawn scrutiny over its handling of protests, including disproportionately high rates of misconduct and use-of-force complaints, and a 2023 court settlement imposed new restrictions on its deployment at demonstrations. Critics of the disbandment plan say removing the unit would leave the city without its fastest counterterrorism response; supporters of the plan say its record of force against protesters makes it unfit to keep.
City Hall has said the administration "shares the goal" of disbanding the unit, but as of October it was still operating. This week, Politico confirmed that the unit now needs City Hall's sign-off before it can be deployed to make arrests — a requirement critics say already slows a force whose only value is that it moves in minutes.
In the City Council, the CURB Act, sponsored by Council Member Chi Ossé, would bar the unit from responding to First Amendment events and from using kettling and tear gas. The bill has 26 sponsors, a majority of the Council, but no hearing has been scheduled, and Public Safety Committee Chair Oswald Feliz has said the change requires executive action.
Mamdani has also moved to build the civilian alternative, signing an executive order to create an Office of Community Safety, a scaled-down version of the Department of Community Safety he proposed on the campaign trail. The Council held a hearing on October 30 on a bill to create the full department, which would take over violence prevention and responses to mental health emergencies.
The future of the unit remains a point of tension between the mayor and Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, whom Mamdani retained despite pressure from progressive allies to remove her. Mamdani has said he has no plans to remove Tisch, praising her for "uprooting corruption" and lowering crime across the city.