Mamdani’s Red Guards Take Shape

We reported some time ago on New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plan to create a “Department of Community Safety.” This is the initiative that gets characterized misleadingly as simply a plan to replace cops with social workers. It is much more than that. It is much more frightening than that. It is the ultimate fulfillment of the leftist vision of abolishing the police and substituting for them a cadre of individuals who will be empowered to forge the new society Mamdani and his Marxist supporters envision.

The first step in this effort has been the creation of something called the Office of Community Safety. It has an initial budget of a quarter of a billion dollars. Mamdani established the office in a March 19 executive order. The Office of Community Safety is intended as a precursor to a larger Department of Community Safety, which would have a total yearly budget of $1.1 billion, with more than $600 million coming from undefined “transfers of existing programs.”

The language in Mamdani’s executive order places the Office of Crime Victim Services, Office for Neighborhood Safety and the Prevention of Gun Violence, Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence, Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes, and Office of Community Mental Health under the control of the new agency. Renita Francois is the head of this new office with the status of deputy mayor.

Francois, 42, spent the past four years working for West Hollywood, California-based Beyond Impact, most recently as its chief program officer. Per the New York Post, the group’s programs include:

“Dream Defenders,” a “black-led, feminist, socialist, abolitionist, and internationalist political formation fighting for a world without prisons, police, capitalism, and imperialism.”

“Movement for Black Lives Action,” which embraces the “Defund the Police” movement, supports abolishing prisons and providing reparations for slavery descendants. Beyond Impact has received more than $51 million over the past decade from Soros’ Open Society Foundation.

The best way to understand where this is all headed is to look at the bill introduced before the New York City Council to create the proposed new Department of Community Safety. Brooklyn Lincoln Restler, a member of the Working Families Party, is the sponsor. Restler is a radical leftist who has been pushing to defund the police for years.

The bill before the City Council concerns a lot more than sending out social workers to respond to mental health calls. It creates a brand new agency with equal status to that of the New York Police Department and a broad, intentionally ambiguous charter to ensure “community safety” by means of “holistic efforts to prevent and respond to incidents of physical, emotional, and financial harm with specialized resources and responders, and the provision of social services aimed to improve safety, quality of life, and stability of neighborhoods.”

This new department will “maintain no fewer than one office in each borough” and assist in “the coordination of operations among agencies and offices under the jurisdiction of the mayor that are involved in law enforcement, emergency response, crime prevention, victim services, social services, homeless services, mental health, and public health.”

The Department of Community Safety will provide “alternatives to incarceration”, including “programs for diversion from incarceration; services related to re-entry to the community following incarceration; services related to pretrial supervised release; and violence prevention programming.”

The Department will also directly deploy personnel to provide emergency responses to promote community safety. “Such efforts shall include, but not be limited to, the following:

(1) Outreach to vulnerable populations and facilitating the delivery of social services, medical care, and case management, through partnerships with city agencies and community-based service providers;

(2) Engaging in safety patrols, in collaboration with community volunteers, that involve maintaining a visible presence in targeted areas to prevent violence and advance a sense of security, and creating safe passage routes within communities and providing walking escorts when requested;

(3) Participating in emergency responses, in coordination with law enforcement and emergency medical services; and

(4) Providing conflict mediation and de-escalation in circumstances that are not likely to result in immediate harm or danger to the public.”

Oh, and the Department will also, by order of the Mayor, “Serve any additional function, or role, related to promoting community safety, including through subsuming the functions and powers of any existing office or agency not established pursuant to this charter.”

It doesn’t take a legal scholar to understand that what Zohran and his henchmen want is a brand new and very powerful agency that will pursue an agenda completely distinct from that of public safety. This new department will be based on the central precept of the Democratic Socialists and their allies. Criminals are the victims. It is capitalism that is the real problem. The guy shoving you on the subway tracks and stealing your purse has been forced into this action by the abuses of an illegitimate system. It is he who must be supported, coddled, and empowered.

The bill before the City Council is based on the idea that the NYPD perpetuates violence and racial inequity. The police are the problem.

When Mao Tse-tung was attempting to transform Chinese culture and cement revolutionary control, he employed the Red Guards. They were his shock troops, tasked with purging the system, enforcing his vision, and attacking the “enemies of the people.” Their mission, put succinctly, was to eradicate the “four olds”: “old ideas, old culture, old habits, and old customs.” The Red Guards created societal chaos.

We are about to see the same thing when Zohran’s Department of Community Safety releases felons from confinement, puts “safety patrols” on the streets to intervene between the police and criminals, and takes other actions to maintain “the stability of neighborhoods.” Standby for the debut of Zohran’s Red Guards.