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A large swath of New York City crimes plummeted three months into 2026, but police staffing shortages, subway scares and questions about Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s larger plans for law enforcement have kept public safety front and center of the Big Apple’s political spotlight.
“I think that right now there’s a wait and see attitude. Is Mayor Mamdani going to be supportive [of the police] or is it going to be like he’s still campaigning for a socialist position? We don’t know,” James Mulvaney, an adjunct professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told Fox News Digital.
The New York Police Department (NYPD) has pointed to an early-year crime snapshot that looks, on paper, like a success: January and February combined saw 83 shooting incidents and 97 shooting victims, along with 32 murders, record lows for the first two months of the year, according to the department.
But transit crime jumped 18.5% in February, largely driven by felony assaults and grand larcenies.
“You know, so many transit workers are being assaulted. Police officers have been bitten. We have a lot of homeless, emotionally disturbed individuals,” Passengers United Founding President Charlton D’Souza said during a late-night tour of the New York City subway system.
D’Souza called for a more consistent NYPD presence underground, with a greater number of small police installations.
“The subways need constant security,” he said, detailing recent violent crimes at stations and expressing concern at the quantity of homeless people, many of whom he says are migrants sleeping in the system.
“The public knows that if there’s an emergency… they can get police assistance in real time.”
The NYPD, for its part, has acknowledged the February spike and says it responded by deploying “approximately 140 additional cops a day into the transit system.”
The department’s breakdown of February’s transit crime paints a picture that aligns with recent rider complaints: Thefts of unattended items surged, thefts from sleeping passengers rose, and assaults drove a significant share of offenses.
Mulvaney stressed that despite some harrowing headlines, the city today is significantly safer than in decades past. Still, he noted how quickly a single high-profile crime incident can shift public mood, even if personal risk remains relatively low.
“It only takes one or two anecdotes for people to flip out,” he said. “Look at that. Why was he or she let go?”
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D’Souza also flagged a constraint that has voices across the political spectrum sounding the alarm.
“NYPD is so short-staffed,” he said. “They don’t have enough police to cover this.”
Mulvaney said that NYPD shortages are, in part, the result of nearby counties offering better salaries and a calmer environment.
He also suggested that police attrition may accelerate if officers continue to sense an “erosion of respect” in a department already stretched thin. Rebuilding trust, he said, must start “from the top.”
Heather Mac Donald, a Manhattan Institute fellow and author of The New York Times bestseller “The War on Cops,” took it a step further and claimed that many of these staffing issues are the result of longstanding animosity towards police. Mac Donald believes that rhetoric painting cops as “racist” has led to crumbling morale.
Mamdani’s predecessor, Eric Adams, proposed at the end of his term that the city hire 5,000 more police officers. However, upon entering office, Mamdani moved to cancel all orders signed by Adams following his Sept. 26, 2024, indictment on bribery and campaign finance offenses. This included the proposed NYPD personnel increase.
Additionally, the preliminary FY 2027 budget notes the importance of “significantly reducing current vacancies,” which could include reductions in funding for the NYPD based on unfilled positions. Mamdani’s budget proposes a $22 million decrease in the NYPD’s $6.4 billion budget next year.
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Mac Donald said the city’s safety problems are a “completely voluntary choice by our government officials,” and warned that the “number of police make a big, big difference in crime prevention.” Her case is rooted in deterrence more than arrests.
“There’s a concept in the field known as command presence,” she said. “Merely by being there, police deter crime.”
Mulvaney added that the recent footprint and strategy of the NYPD is producing results despite staffing constraints. He claimed that officers “understand that their visibility and their concentration on high crime areas is paying off.”
Now, Mamdani’s administration is being judged against these two competing realities: a historic citywide reduction in crime and continued anxiety about subway safety and police officer attrition.
That split is the context for a broader question hanging over Mamdani’s first year: can the new mayor preserve the city’s gains against crime while delivering on a campaign argument that public safety is bigger than arrests and enforcement?
Prior to his inauguration in January, Mamdani promised to keep pressure on serious, violent crimes while shifting parts of the city’s response to mental illness, homelessness and low-level disorder away from traditional policing.
In his public safety plan released amid the NYC mayor race, Mamdani said he would work to create a Department of Community Safety aimed at expanding mental health teams and other non-law enforcement personnel, such as social workers, who can respond to certain 911 calls.
Community transit advocates and criminal justice scholars who spoke with Fox News Digital remain divided over whether Mamdani’s approach to public safety will represent a gradual evolution of established policy, or a reimagining of modern policing based on the inclinations of his socialist base.
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Mac Donald suggested that a public safety plan that increases the use of social workers is like putting a “Band-Aid” over problems resulting from larger governmental inadequacies.
D’Souza warned that sending social workers to 911 calls alone could be a “recipe for disaster,” and urged City Hall to create a plan that pairs non-law enforcement personnel with the NYPD to improve safety when responding to disorderly individuals.
“If that person has a knife, if they’re armed, if they have a weapon, what are [social workers] going to do?” he said.
Mulvaney was also cautious but not dismissive of the idea.
“In terms of mental health issues, the problem is that cops are going to get to places first. It would be great to have a counselor with you, but how soon are they going to get there? Would it be helpful? Yeah. What do you do in the interim to protect the person who is having an issue and everybody else?” he told Fox News Digital.
“Generally, society has pushed the icky jobs that nobody else wants to deal with onto the police and given them no proper training or solutions. I mean what does a New York City cop do with a perhaps intoxicated person sleeping on a subway? So, I think that in many ways both the mayor and the police are coming from the same direction,” Mulvaney added.
Mamdani’s decision to retain Commissioner Jessica Tisch is widely seen as a signal that, despite running as a Democratic socialist, the mayor may not intend to govern as a pure anti-police ideologue.
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Mac Donald described the move as a deliberate attempt to “reassure rightfully jittery New Yorkers,” but claimed the decision would likely lead to complications down the road.
“Tisch believes in enforcing the law. Above all, she believes in enforcing essential, so-called broken windows or quality of life laws, things which Mamdani’s base and the platform of the Democratic Socialists of America completely oppose. So, the big conflict or suspense in New York at the moment is who’s going to blink first,” Mac Donald said.
Mamdani’s office and the NYPD did not return Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
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