Alex S. Vitale is a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College, where he coordinates the Policing and Social Justice Project. He’s the best-selling author of the 2017 book The End of Policing, and a contributor to Current Affairs. As of last week’s inauguration in New York City, he’s also part of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s inner circle, appointed as a member of the transition team for the new Committee on Community Safety. (Fox News and the New York Post were not very happy about his appointment, which is how you know it was a good choice.) Current Affairs associate editor Alex Skopic sat down with Vitale to discuss the tensions between Mamdani and the NYPD, the force’s infamous “gang database,” and where the fight for police reform and abolition goes from here. 

Alex Skopic

We’re speaking on the first full day of Mamdani’s mayoralty. We both attended the inauguration yesterday, and we’ve just come from his first official press conference. There’s a lot of hope for the new administration, and also a lot of concern. Will he be able to deliver? Will he be able to pull off his big ambitions? Now, you’ve been working with the transition team over the last month or two. How are you feeling about the new administration, and has your sense of it changed at all from being involved?

Alex Vitale

I think we’re seeing a tremendous amount of vitality from the Mamdani team and, of course, from the mayor himself. I think the kinds of people he pulled together to be on the transition subcommittees are a real testament to a new direction in the city’s politics, and I think some of his appointments over the last few days also indicate just how serious he is about the commitments he’s made around the kinds of core issues that he campaigned on. So I’m excited about the possibilities, but also cognizant of the challenges that lie ahead.

Skopic

And your area of expertise, of course, is policing, criminal justice, and the militarization of the police. And in that department, we’ve seen Mamdani moderate somewhat over the course of his run. He has, from statements he made in 2020, walked back from things like an explicit call to defund the police. He has made the really controversial decision to retain Jessica Tisch, the police commissioner under Eric Adams. How are you feeling about those decisions, and about the role Tisch will have in particular?

Vitale

My overarching concern is really about creating safety, about creating real justice. Policing, we’ve been told, is this solitary tool to be used to produce those things, which I think is a completely misguided endeavor. So the question is, what are the steps that will be necessary for us to unwind this idea that policing equals public safety? And I don’t think we’re going to do that by trying to micromanage a set of policy decisions within the NYPD; it’s an incredibly powerful, insular, and independent agency, as we’ve seen with previous progressive mayors. So while I don’t have any inside knowledge about the thinking among Mamdani’s central team about this, I think that I can see a logic of saying, let’s spend our political capital on things that we can really affect, that will actually make a difference. And so for me, one of the exciting things about the campaign was that they did not waste a lot of energy talking about superficial procedural police reforms that often take up so much of the airspace around public safety and yet actually fail to deliver.

Skopic

What kind of thing do you mean by a superficial reform?

Vitale

So things like creating civilian complaint review boards, giving police body cameras, spending more money on police training, diversifying the leadership of police departments—these things don’t produce better policing. They produce, at best, greater public acceptance of the legitimacy of policing, which is something I don’t actually support. I don’t think we should be trying to do that. I think we should be doing exactly what Mamdani has said he’s going to do, which is double down on investments in community-centered, civilian-based efforts to produce real public safety, at the same time trying to intervene in some of the underlying issues that produce instability, that produce situations where violence and other harmful behavior are more likely to occur. The more we can address the affordability crisis, the more we can create economic sustainability for people and stability in their lives; that’s how we really ultimately are going to achieve real public safety for people.

Skopic

There was one specific thing that I know a lot of community organizers and activists, yourself included, have been thinking seriously about in the last few years and calling for, which has to do with the NYPD gang database. How long has that been around, and why are people calling for the removal of that particular part of the NYPD?

Vitale

So about 12 years ago, the city began to make a shift in how it thought about violence problems in the neighborhoods and began to label violence increasingly as “gang-related.” They beefed up the gang unit and created this new criminal group database, which we call the gang database because that’s basically its function, and really reoriented the city’s thinking about violence towards labeling it a gang problem that could be best addressed through gang suppression policing. And so this produced a bunch of massive gang conspiracy cases that resulted in the arrests of dozens, sometimes over 100 individuals at once, even though the shootings that were motivating these cases had already been adjudicated and people were already in prison for them.

This was an attempt to just criminalize a whole demographic of young people in certain areas, mostly in and around public housing developments in the city. And so I was part of the initial effort to try to bring people together to understand what was happening and to begin to strategize about what should be done about it. This became the New York City G.A.N.G.S. Coalition, which I’m a part of. We have both litigation against the city that points out the ways in which this database is unconstitutional, and we have a bill before the city council that would eliminate the database and any similar kinds of databases. And of course, it’s the hope of this movement that the Mamdani administration will take steps to move the city away from that gang suppression style of policing. This could be done as part of settling the lawsuits, or it could just be done administratively to say, yes, we don’t even need legislation or a lawsuit; we’re going to get rid of this. So, that is an ongoing issue, and we’re waiting to see what steps the administration will take to address it.

Skopic

And I bring this up because it seems to me, in the reporting I’ve seen, that this will possibly be an early point of contention within the administration, because as recently as August, Commissioner Tisch was defending the database in public. Do you expect that there’s a reasonable chance that with enough continued public pressure, Mamdani or his administration can be persuaded to get rid of it, or do you reckon the resistance from the NYPD will be too much to overcome?

Vitale

It’s hard to say. It’s really speculation at this point about the balance of power and the questions of strategic timing. So I can’t say what I think will happen and when. I just know that this is an issue that is not going to go away, that it’s going to continue to be something that the administration is pressured on, and that we hope they’ll take seriously. And I think that in addition to the pressure on the Mamdani administration, this campaign is going to continue to do the kind of public outreach and education work that has helped us to convince over a majority of the members of the city council to sign on to support our bill.

Skopic

Another potential difficulty that I can see coming up—one of the articles you wrote for us recently in Current Affairs was about these National Guard incursions into major cities, and you made the point that Democratic mayors over the years, and Democratic politicians more generally, have really laid the groundwork for the Trump administration invading cities and taking over their law enforcement by not being resistant enough. How do you see Mamdani breaking from that pattern, or how do you think his response will be if there comes a moment where [a National Guard deployment] happens?

Vitale

Well, first of all, on January 1 the mayor signed an executive order that, among other things, rolled back an executive order from the Adams administration that gave ICE access to the city jail system in relationship to “crime fighting.” So the mayor’s already signaled very clearly a change in direction there. He signaled his support for strengthening the kind of sanctuary city protections that the city has in place for the population here, and I think that we will see a vigorous opposition to ICE if that is what happens. I think the good news is that Trump announced this week that he was not going to send National Guard troops into a bunch of cities, and I think we’ve seen a broad erosion of public support for the kind of blanket ICE enforcement that’s been occurring around the country. And as the midterm elections get closer, I think we’re going to see the Republicans and the Trump administration retreat even further from this kind of militarized response.

I just want to address a broader issue, which is that many mayors across the country kind of opened the door to the federalizing of law enforcement because they embraced policing as the solution to a whole set of political failures in their administrations: their unwillingness or inability to address mass homelessness, untreated mental health problems, and entrenched poverty. And so Mamdani has signaled not just an opposition to ICE, but an opposition to framing the city’s problems as problems that can be fixed by policing. He’s framed his administration as an attack against austerity, not an embracing of austerity backed up by intensive and invasive policing. So it’s really a fundamental shift in the political understanding of the role of police and their relationship to the city’s problems, and it’s that fundamental shift that I think is the most exciting and also creates the political space for resisting this kind of federal policing incursion.

Skopic

So basically, rather than the specifics of a particular police action, you think it’s more about challenging the assumption of policing on a more fundamental level?

Vitale

I think if you look at other cities around the country, maybe Chicago being an exception, it was very hard for these mayors to, on the one hand, say, “We’re using the police every day to attack homeless people and to manage people with mental health problems; we want more federal police to be involved in helping our cities; we want federal money for policing,” and then at the same time to say, “But we don’t want the federal police to come in under Trump’s leadership.” And so they were weak in their ability to resist, and many of them capitulated, essentially. Mamdani is in a much stronger position to say we don’t see this as a law enforcement issue. We don’t see law enforcement as the appropriate tool to address our city’s problems, and we’re in the process of making concrete investments in very specific strategies to address the city’s issues in another way. That builds support in the neighborhoods for this new approach and, I think, strengthens the hand of people in the neighborhoods who want to oppose this kind of federal intervention.

Skopic

And really, this change that’s just happened between the Adams and Mamdani administrations is very dramatic. Because Adams was a former policeman himself. He had very tight ties with the NYPD, and really favored them in budgeting, even to the extent where it looked like other city services would be cut in favor of the NYPD. He also was really pushing police surveillance, things like helicopters and drone flights over the city. Do you expect to see some of the surveillance removed as well? Or is it a point where the inertia of these systems already being in place may be difficult?

Vitale

So we’re doing this interview in a branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, which was cut to support the police budget in a very concrete way. Essential city services that make the city more livable and that disproportionately benefit high-needs populations were cut to fund a completely corrupt and ineffective set of policing initiatives, and so we need a radical transformation in that. Will we see immediate changes in how policing is done in levels of surveillance? It’s unclear how quickly that will happen. We’re up against a very powerful, entrenched institution. And even when we’ve seen mayors make demands on their police forces, the police sometimes just don’t follow those demands. So I don’t think we should be assuming that we’re going to immediately see a radical transformation in policing. I think that the emphasis should be on building facts on the ground in the neighborhoods around how we really create public safety, and that’s going to create the political space that’s going to allow us to then revisit what the appropriate role of police is, whether it’s police surveillance or the number of police in the neighborhoods.

Skopic

And as you say, we are in the very early days. We are essentially on day two of the administration today. So as the next weeks and months roll out and we begin to see things like the appointments of more government officials, and we begin to see things like a potential budget come out, what are some things that you would hope to see or that would indicate that the administration is on the right track? And then, alternatively, what are some things that would be red flags for you?

Vitale

Well, first, we need to see progress on the key elements of the affordability agenda; we need to see an impact on the housing situation, on child care funding, on food security, and on transportation. So the more he makes progress on those things, the more he directly affects the economic well-being of New Yorkers. But he also creates a political environment of success, of making progress, which then builds his political capital, makes it easier for him to get the support of the city council and the state government, and to resist federal incursions. So I want to see that, and we’re seeing appointments that indicate seriousness in getting that done.

On the specific kind of public safety front, the infrastructure around that, I’m looking to see appointments that indicate a commitment to addressing the crises that some of our most vulnerable populations face. Because we have defined for too long public safety in terms of middle- and upper-class people not having their lives interfered with by poor and otherwise vulnerable populations. So public safety on the subways meant protecting middle-class riders from people who were unhoused or had untreated mental health issues, rather than thinking about public safety as being, what are we doing to improve the lives of those people who find themselves living in the subway system? And so I want to see appointments that indicate that public safety is not just about doing well for the haves at the expense of the have-nots, but how are we actually making the lives of these most vulnerable populations better? Because that is in itself a just and necessary thing to do, but it also makes the city a better place for all of us.

Skopic

Yes, and when you think about the contrast and the potential conflict between Mamdani and Trump, that is a point where they really have a sharp contrast. Because I remember Trump a while ago having a quote about homelessness, and he said something like, it’s a terrible problem; people don’t like to see it.

Vitale

Yes, and really, that was the Adams administration’s approach as well. This was another way in which Adams and Trump were on the same page. Neither of them actually was interested in solving the crises that these communities of people were facing. They wanted to manage those populations, to reduce their impact on the rest of us, and to me, that’s a fundamentally unjust endeavor. And so I’m deeply hopeful that we’re going to have an administration that is actually interested in stabilizing the lives of people with mental health problems, people who are unhoused, young people who’ve suffered trauma, who fear violence, and who have substance use issues that are interfering with them having stable lives. That if we really focus on improving their lives, that’s going to make the city a much better place for everyone.

Skopic

And talking about appointments, I think one of the encouraging signs has been, in the inauguration itself, Mamdani had this wonderful line. He asked everyone to stay outside and stay active. And just today, at the press conference, he’s announced this new—what was the name of the office?

Vitale

Office of Mass Engagement. 

Skopic

The Office of Mass Engagement. So, a big theme of his initial push here has been to keep everyone engaged.

Vitale

And look at the dozens of people who just showed up for the press conference because they heard about it, or something. People are just coming out of the woodwork because they want to be a part of this moment, of this opening, of this opportunity, and what’s needed is to create actual structures to allow for grassroots participation to meaningfully push the city in the right direction. So instead of just thinking of grassroots participation in terms of the electoral process, actually think of it as a part of the governing process. And this is a huge shift, and it’s going to be challenging, and it has to be very thoughtfully built into the functioning of a whole range of bureaucracies, not just the kind of Mayor Bloomberg approach of giving people portals to put their complaints in, but actually creating mechanisms of deliberation, of decision-making, of access to resources that can help shape the direction of government. So it means taking a new look at things like participatory budgeting, bringing things like participatory action research into the functioning of government bureaucracies, creating guiding councils, community access to planning procedures, rethinking our community board structures, creating neighborhood assemblies, and all the rest. So I’m very excited about that possibility. It’s going to take time, though, to create new structures that are going to feel very different for folks in government who are used to limiting public participation to some very highly staged mechanisms of speaking at public hearings, which don’t really exert power and have meaningful influence

Skopic

And that’s been the pattern so far. In a lot of places, there have been these sort of performative cases where they’ll do a community input board, or they’ll have, as you say, a web portal, and they’ll supposedly take advice from the community, and then not take it seriously or act on it.

Vitale

At the same time, we have a lot of examples, though, of cities that are trying to do this in a more serious way, that are creating commissions and advisory boards and participatory budgeting schemes that have real power and influence. So we have some models out there to look at. And we have some people in the administration and advising the administration who know these models, both in the U.S. and internationally, and I think that’s a sign that they’re serious about trying to figure this out.

Skopic

Are there other particular cases that you think show the model that you hope might be imitated here?

Vitale

I don’t think there’s one approach, because how you might handle the standing up of a new bureaucracy might be different from how you handle input on the day-to-day operations of something. So we could look, for instance, at Albuquerque, New Mexico, when it created its new civilian Department of Public Safety, which was focused initially, primarily, on mental health crisis response. It created an advisory board before it created the department, and that advisory board, made up of community stakeholders, engaged in public outreach and deliberation and basically laid the framework for the creation of a new department, and then new mechanisms of community input were put in place as part of the ongoing management of that department. So we have examples of different pieces of it around the country and internationally, and we need to figure out how to adapt them to the particular needs of New York City and its many different bureaucratic functions.

Skopic

That makes sense, because I feel like no city necessarily has every piece, but put all of them together...

Vitale

Yes. And the same is true for trying to create this Department of Community Safety. We know that Denver and Albuquerque are doing great things on public safety and mental health crisis response, and we know Newark, New Jersey, and Richmond, California, are doing great stuff on community violence reduction initiatives. So we need to borrow the best examples and learn from them and adapt them to what needs to be done here in New York City.

Skopic

And I think the last thing I want to ask here is, because of this election and inauguration, there are so many people who are just tuning into the political process for the first time, and they may want to get involved in helping reform their city, but may not know exactly how. And that may be the case here in New York or in cities all around the country. What does that sort of community engagement look like? What should people be doing? Is it a case of political education and getting informed? Is it a case of joining an organization?

Vitale

Well, I think both of those. I think that people have got to join organizations. The mayor today in his press conference said that for too long, we’ve come to believe that political activism is limited to voting, and once there’s an outcome of the voting, we get to “get back to our normal lives” of having no engagement with politics.

Skopic

To go back to brunch.

Vitale

Yes. And so part of what the mayor is saying and what the movement that put him into office—the Democratic Socialists of America, and others like the union movement—are saying is, no, political activity has to be part of our lives if we don’t want billionaires to run our economy, our government, and our personal lives, controlling the internet and everything else. We have to stay engaged, and we cannot reduce politics to pushing a lever every four years for president. It has to be an ongoing process. I often joke, Thursday night is meeting night in my house; my wife is going to go to a union meeting, and I’m going to go to a community meeting—somebody’s got to go to a meeting. And yes, these meetings can be boring. They can be infuriating at times, but there’s just no substitute for building that kind of sustained political engagement into our daily lives.

Skopic

Well, we certainly hope people will do that, and it’s something we’re going to be pushing for as well.

Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth.