Zohran Mamdani backs plan to end enforcement of misdemeanor crimes in NYC

The DSA’s national platform, adopted in 2021, labels prisons and police as “instruments of class war” and says their purpose is to “guarantee the domination of the working class.” The document, according to the New York Post, urges an end to “the criminalization of working-class survival.”

It further states: “For all of the working class to achieve collective liberation we must constrain, diminish, and abolish the carceral forces of the state — from prisons and police themselves, to their manifestations in all forms throughout society.”

Mamdani, a New York State assemblyman from Queens and the group’s endorsed candidate for mayor, has echoed similar themes during his campaign, calling for police to focus only on “serious” crimes.

He has also raised doubts about the usefulness of prisons and has continued to advocate for rolling back punishment of what he calls “non-violent offenses.” This week, he renewed his push to legalize prostitution.

The DSA has also endorsed eliminating cash bail, scrapping electronic monitoring, ending pre-trial detention, and halting imprisonment for parole violations. Mamdani has previously supported “defund the police” measures. He has slightly moderated his message since a massacre was committed on Park Avenue, saying he would maintain the NYPD at roughly its current size but redirect officers away from enforcing minor crimes.

“I don’t buy for a second that he is moderated on any of these policing questions because he has yet to really articulate in any deep way why he’s moderated or how he’s moderated,” said Rafael Mangual, a legal policy expert at the Manhattan Institute. “All he has really said is that he no longer wants to defund the police, even though police and prison and jail abolition are core tenets of the DSA party platform.”

Mamdani has also challenged how crimes are defined. At a 2021 protest outside the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, he declared, “What violent crime is – is defined by the state. Violence is an artificial construction.”

In New York, misdemeanors include offenses such as shoplifting up to $1,000, drug possession, simple assault, and driving while intoxicated. “They’re driving the city into a hole that’s never going to recover,” said Greenwich Village resident Susan Ginsburg. “People will break the law with impunity. There has to be deterrent for breaking the law.”

Maria Danzilo, an Upper West Side resident and founder of One City Rising, added: “It’s astonishing that we’re even having this conversation.”