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VIOLENCE DECONSTRUCTED: HYSTERIA OVER ZOHRAN MAMDANI’S CRIME
PLATFORM IS ROOTED IN LIE THAT COPS MAKE WOMEN SAFER  
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Kylie Cheung
July 29, 2025
Prism
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_ Mamdani’s critics have launched a smear campaign that ignores
that police pose an existential threat to victims—and all of us. _

, NYC Assemblymember and mayoral candidate Zohran Kwame Mamdani
(Mamdani campaign website)

 

New York City Councilmember Vickie Paladino, best known for her rabid
Islamophobia [[link removed]]
and calls for white nationalist militia members to attack her own
constituents, sank to a new low earlier this month—even for her. The
councilmember joined a horrific, right-wing smear campaign targeting a
young woman [[link removed]]
whose partner was killed in front of her two years earlier. Paladino
helped spread the lie that the woman didn’t cooperate with law
enforcement, and mocked the woman for her membership in the Democratic
Socialists of America and for supporting Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral
campaign. “She’s a self-described ‘police abolitionist’ and
she’s swooning over Zohran, who shares her politics,” Paladino
said.

Paladino eventually deleted her tweets, but she’s just one of the
hordes of right-wing trolls to pile on the woman for being the victim
of a horrific crime and voicing her support for Mamdani over the last
several months. Since Mamdani’s historic primary victory in June,
right-wing rags like the _New York Post_ have published deliberately
salacious stories about police planning to leave the city in droves if
Mamdani takes office. We’re hearing similar stories about
billionaires and CEOs planning to do the same—if only either of
these stories were true.

The right-wing panic about what a Mamdani victory could mean for the
New York Police Department stems from his past calls to defund the
police. Earlier this year, his campaign shared a thoughtful video
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evidenced-based plan to create a Department of Community Safety that
would bolster the city’s safety net, leading to a reduced reliance
on the police. Mamdani rightly argued that cities where people’s
needs are met are safer than cities with excessive police funding and
involvement in emergency responses. 

After all, homicide rates are actually down across the country
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Meanwhile, the real threat to people’s lives comes from, say, the
Trump administration’s massive cuts to public services that could
lead to thousands of deaths
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More so than homicide and street-based crimes, people’s lives are
endangered each day from being unable to afford health care or
housing.

If elected, Mamdani has said
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the NYPD on his community safety plan. But that hasn’t stopped the
right-wing fearmongering, all predicated on the delusional theory
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that cops make us safer, at this point a mythology akin to believing
in the Tooth Fairy.

Police don’t prevent “crime” or violence—they merely
(_sometimes_) respond to it, often inadequately, and often in ways
that only worsen or reproduce the violence in question, all while
swallowing up cities’ entire budgets
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Modern policing in the U.S. originates
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from slave patrols, and policing today builds on that tradition
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Black Americans are far more likely to experience police-initiated
contact that all too often leads to brutality, incarceration, or even
death, according to
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the Prison Policy Initiative. By design, police don’t protect
people; their job is to protect capital and private property
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They bulldoze
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crowds and brutalize and kill human beings in the name of protecting
property
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And when right-wingers describe the apocalyptic conditions that would
arise if cities allocated even a little less funding to police
departments, what they’re willfully ignoring is that the crime
anecdotes they cite are all happening _now_, under a status quo of
massive funding for police
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and jails.

The right has long attacked Mamdani over his thoughtful positions on
crime, but more recently, these attacks have taken on an even more
desperate dimension, manipulatively invoking victims of domestic
violence. Earlier this month, right-wing media resurfaced
[[link removed]] Mamdani’s
remarks on a 2020 podcast while he was running for State Assembly, in
which he argued that we should rethink sending police to respond to
domestic violence or other mental health crises. “There are so many
responsibilities we have given to police that frankly should have
nothing to do with their departments. A homeless person is on a train,
they do not need a stranger with a gun to come and resolve that
situation,” he said. “If somebody is jaywalking, if somebody is
surviving, going through domestic violence—there are so many
different situations that would be far better handled by people
trained to deal with those specific situations, as opposed to an
individual with a gun.” His current mayoral platform also advocates
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for police to be replaced with appropriate crisis responders for
varying scenarios.

Since the resurfacing of these comments, right-wing commentators are
having a field day. Zionist writer Batya Ungar-Sargon
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shared the audio
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“Zohran Mamdani wants women to have the shit beaten out of them in
the best case scenario, be murdered by their husbands in the worst, in
the name of Defund the Police.” With zero sense of irony,
conservative commentator Megyn Kelly shared the audio and invoked the
case [[link removed]] of OJ and
Nicole Simpson, suggesting that Mamdani’s proposal would kill
victims like Nicole. Nicole, of course, repeatedly called the police
to report domestic violence and was still murdered while her killer
went free. A former NYPD homicide detective called
[[link removed]] Mamdani’s
proposal “absolutely insane” and claimed that if it’s
implemented, “homicide rates will increase, women will be
pulverized.” 

In reality, it’s hard to identify any group of people who pose a
greater danger to abuse victims than the police. About a quarter
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of victims who call 911 over a domestic violence incident are arrested
or threatened with arrest themselves. The National Domestic Violence
Hotline’s 2022 survey
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of 1,500 domestic violence victims (82% of whom contacted police)
found that 77% of respondents who called the police were afraid to
call them again. Victims, as a class, are far more likely to be jailed
than their rapists and abusers: It’s estimated
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that just 3% of rapists will ever spend a day in jail, while about 90%
of incarcerated women are survivors
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The available data shows us just how detrimental policing is to
victims’ safety: More than 66%
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assaults are unreported, often because victims fear police. Many worry
they’ll be punished rather than their abuser—a valid concern given
all existing data—or they fear sending someone else to prison. Even
if rape victims who report their experiences are believed
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many are ultimately re-traumatized for nothing: Hundreds of thousands
of rape kits sit untested
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the U.S. 

At the same time, police and prison staff are frequently perpetrators
of gender-based violence themselves, placing victims who turn to them
for help at risk
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One survey has shown that about 40% of police officers self-reported
as behaving violently toward their spouse or children
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and 60% of prison rapes are committed by guards and staff
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Sexual abuse is the second-most common
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act of police misconduct.

There is also no shortage of examples of police officers exploiting
their state power to stalk, harass, assault, and even kill women—and
these are just the cases we know of. Over the last decade, cops in
Arizona
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Georgia
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Maryland
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Kansas
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and other states have been exposed for stalking local women. In 2020,
the parents of Lauren McCluskey, a Utah woman who was denied a
restraining order against her ex-boyfriend who later killed her, filed
a lawsuit against police officers, alleging that they shared nude
photos of McCluskey
[[link removed]].
In Oklahoma, an officer named Daniel Holtzclaw was imprisoned
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for stalking and sexually assaulting more than a dozen Black women
from 2013 to 2014.

It’s not a radical position to state that police aren’t trained or
equipped to respond to domestic violence; it’s a statement of fact.
Directing police to address domestic violence is precisely what leads
to tragedies like that of Gabby Petito
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who police treated as the abuser
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and her eventual killer, Brian Laundrie, as _her_ victim. Body camera
footage shows that the police who responded to a call about Petito and
Laundrie and performed a wellness check have such a friendly rapport
with Laundrie that they appear to laugh and joke with him at different
points in the footage [[link removed]].
They put Petito’s future killer up in a hotel, while making her
spend the night in her van just days before her death. 

Incidentally, a few years before this encounter, one of the officers
involved in the encounter allegedly threatened
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to kill his ex-girlfriend while he worked as a cop in a different
city. He was able to simply move cities and continue working as a cop.

You don’t have to be an abolitionist to grasp that the current
response system doesn’t work—rather, it actively endangers victims
and the public more broadly. In the same resurfaced podcast interview
from 2020, Mamdani rightly said, “Police do not create safety. For
many, many people across this city and this state, police actually
create and amplify violence. And it is very important to speak about
that reality that many people have, because it pushes up against the
conventional understanding of police, who are seen to be people who
come to resolve violence.” 

This reality is concealed by a broad public failure to conceive of
violence on a structural level. Grown adults who are unable to grasp
the innate violence perpetrated by the state—through not just police
brutality, but through austerity policies that enable wealth hoarding,
through prisons, through the for-profit health system—are similar to
toddlers who lack object permanence. If you don’t slap or murder
someone right before their eyes, they don’t recognize the violence.

Police shoot and kill around 1,000 people per year
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in the U.S., but generations of propaganda have deluded the public
into believing that calling police somehow makes any of us safer.
Police are agents of the state, which holds a monopoly on violence.
The allocation of extraordinary resources and funding to police
departments, at the expense of funding a lifesaving social safety, is
also violent. State violence extends beyond acts of police
brutality—the misallocation of resources also kills. Still, even the
most overt acts of state violence, like police brutality, aren’t
seen as criminal or violent because of officers’ social and
political positioning as agents of the state; consequently, we allow
police to remain heralded as the solution to crime and violence when
they are, rather, the ultimate purveyors of it.

As journalist Dave McKenna wrote
[[link removed]] in 2020,
referencing the ongoing crisis of poisoned water in Flint, Michigan,
yet another example of state violence: “Poison a person, go to jail,
they call you a felon for life. Poison a city resulting in dozens of
deaths and thousands with brain damage, get a teaching fellowship at
Harvard, they call you ex-Gov of Michigan Rick Snyder.”

Mamdani in particular has sparked right-wing ire because he has
advocated for defunding the police, which conservatives characterize
as the most radical position one could possibly take. “Defund the
police” is their boogeyman, the slogan blamed for everything
that’s already happening, right now, in a society where police
departments are more funded than any other institution.

Time and again, anyone who proposes even modest changes to the current
criminal legal system that is responsible for such large-scale
suffering is framed as radical. Politicians like Mamdani are forced
onto the defensive, pressured to scale back this proposal or that in
order to seem more “reasonable.” But in reality, fascists will
smear anything even a hair short of fascism as “radical.” 

And we get nowhere by playing their games.

_Kylie Cheung is a freelance writer reporting on politics and culture.
She is the author of Survivor Injustice: State-Sanctioned Abuse,
Domestic Violence, and the Fight for Bodily Autonomy._

_When Prism was established in 2019, it was because we knew that the
status quo media landscape wasn’t reflecting enough of the
truth—and it wasn’t bringing us closer to our vision of collective
liberation and justice. We saw a different path forward, one that we
could forge by disrupting and dismantling toxic narratives, uncovering
the hard truths of injustice alongside the people experiencing the
acute impacts of injustice, and providing a platform for people of
color to tell their own stories, and those of their communities._

* Zohran Mamdani
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* criminal justice reform
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* police violence
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* domestic abuse
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