New Yorkers watching a sit-down interview Monday with Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani were inadvertently treated to the sound of things to come.
But it wasn’t the leftist’s plans for free busing and freezes on rent that summed up the future of his administration, or even his relationship with President Donald Trump.
It was the sound of police sirens rising ominously — and loud enough, briefly, to practically drown out the interview, just as Mamdani talked about disbanding the NYPD’s top unit for responding to public disorder.
“Very poetic …,” conservative commentator Greg Price wrote in a post on the social media platform X.
Zohran Mamdani talks about his plan to dismantle the NYPD’s anti-riot division.
Sirens then begin blaring in the background of the interview.
Very poetic… pic.twitter.com/MlBL9rPLKi
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) November 19, 2025
“This is fitting,” WPIX-TV interviewer Dan Mannarino said as the siren sounds gathered strength
“While we’re talking about public safety, right? You hear the sirens going.”
“Fitting” would be one word for emergency sirens surrounding the Mamdani era.
Will New York be safe with Zohran Mamdani as mayor?
Mandani doesn’t like cops, and he campaigned at least in part on the argument that teams of social workers would be more effective in handling certain violent situations than armed officers.
That’s a belief that’s not going to survive contact with reality — but Mamdani is a guy who pushed the “defund-the-police mania” during its heyday five years ago, so it’s a pretty good chance that more than a few people are going to have to get hurt before he realizes the error of his ways.
(The chance is even better that those people are going to be poor and minorities — the kind of New York residents who need police protection the most.)
When it comes to the kind of rioting that wracked New York City — and the rest of the country — in 2020, his public sympathies are much more clearly with the rioters than the men and women charged with keeping order.
In fact, when the sirens interrupted his interview, Mamdani was in the process of explaining that he was doing away with the Strategic Response Group, an arm of the NYPD Special Operations Bureau.
According to the bureau’s webpage, the “group responds to citywide mobilizations, civil disorders, and major events with highly trained personnel and specialized equipment. They are also deployed to areas requiring an increased police presence due to increased crime or other conditions. With multiple missions that include disorder response, crime suppression, and crowd control.”
Now, why would the nation’s largest city need some fascist operation like that?
According to Mamdani, it won’t.
“I’ve made clear my concerns,” Mamdani told Mannarino, an edge evident in his voice (the kind of edge New Yorkers and the country are likely to see a lot more of before too long).
“I don’t think that the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group should be how we respond to protests. And that’s something we’ll be following through on.”
That should be a comfort to the businesses that get looted the next time some social justice mania sweeps the country. It should be a comfort to the families of the men, women, and children who are going to inevitably be casualties of “protests” that get out of hand — to deadly effect.
Heck, it should be something that liberal New Yorkers who put this nut into office will be able to point to with pride between now and 2029, when Mandani’s term in office is up.
They might have wrecked their city, but they got that Strategic Response Group canceled.
The moment in the interview didn’t go unnoticed on social media:
That is definitely what I would call a sign
— Michael Giannulis (@mikegiannulis) November 19, 2025
What a riot! lol
— 𝐉𝐂 𝐒𝐢𝐥𝐯𝐚 (@VascoDG2) November 19, 2025
It is funny, in a disturbing way.
It’s fitting, as Mannarino said. It’s even “very poetic,” as Price put it.
But most important of all, it’s sad that a city that gave itself a new life by electing Rudy Giuliani as mayor in the 1990s has spent a full generation destroying itself again — complete with the election of a socialist to lead the financial capital of the United States.
And that’s about as ominous as it gets.
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