You fucking watched this video, and your takeaway was "Mamdani fucking loves cops now"? I don't get it. Are we just accepting the framing from a self-identified MAGA Twitter account now? Did you make this meme? I'm seriously confused here. This "Pivot to Police" is literally right-wing framing being used, right now, against Mamdani:
The question was: "You know, there's been a lot of talk here today about Andrew Como, and apparently, the person who wants to become the Mayor of New York, is now going to be calling on you and others to do something about increasing the number of police, not just accepting the number of police that are there now. But also to keep up the SRJ, which was responsible last week for going after the shooter last week on Park Avenue, and I wonder, you know obviously hes trying to go after a weak spot on you. I wonder if you would like to respond to that because that's going to be his campaign pitch."
His answer was:
- Why are 200 cops leaving a month? Forced over time.
- Why do they have so much forced over time? We're making cops do things they shouldn't do.
- What are the jobs cops shouldn't be doing? Standing around the MTA, answering tourists questions about the MTA. Answering 200,000 mental health calls every year.
These are the exact kinds of policies that grew out of the Defund the Police movement in 2020.
What's the deal here? The obvious way you fund this is by cutting police budgets and shifting that money into human services like the ones he's referring to. Did you actually think Mamdani was going to abolish the NYPD? He would be the fucking head of the NYPD, for Christ sake. Even still, the right-wing media is trying to skewer him for his answer here. Somehow, they've come all the way around to being pro-defunding the fucking police because he outlined changes to the NYPD that could only be achieved through taking some of their annual funding, which won't even be actual cuts, as we've seen before, but instead a pause in budget increases, or a 0% increase on the yearly budget.
shit every time Mamdani's caught talking to a democrat because him being a neoliberal sheepdog sleeper agent "here to defuse revolutionary sentiment" is apparently infinitely more likely in the minds of some than "they're smearing mamdani in literally every possible way" even though we literally saw a multi-month long period where they threw essentially whatever they could fucking think of at the wall to see if it would stick
