Zohran Mamdani Kicked Out — He’s Furious After Announcement 1
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani encountered one of the most openly hostile public receptions of his young administration when he took the stage at Staten Island’s National Night Out Against Crime, where loud boos and shouted demands for him to leave overwhelmed a greeting that lasted less than a minute.
The confrontation unfolded Tuesday, Aug. 4, at Turtle Circle on the Midland Beach Boardwalk during the NYPD’s 43rd annual Patrol Borough Staten Island National Night Out Against Crime. Local reports estimated that roughly 3,500 residents, families, police supporters and community members attended the event, part of a citywide series of more than 70 gatherings intended to strengthen ties between police officers and the neighborhoods they serve.
Video from the Staten Island event showed Mamdani approaching the microphone to immediate jeers from sections of the crowd. Some attendees shouted “get out of here” and “nobody wants you,” while others gave thumbs-down gestures. Mamdani smiled, placed a hand over his heart and attempted to continue before keeping his remarks extremely short.
“Happy Night Out Against Crime. It’s amazing to be here for the Staten Island community,” Mamdani said during the brief appearance. He thanked local officials and Staten Island artist Scott LoBaido before concluding and stepping away from the podium as the hostile reaction continued.
The images quickly circulated nationally because they captured, in less than a minute, a political tension that has followed Mamdani since before he entered City Hall: a democratic socialist mayor who once called for defunding and dismantling the NYPD now leading a city government in which public safety remains one of the most visible responsibilities of the office.
It would be inaccurate, however, to describe every person among the estimated 3,500 attendees as participating in the jeering. The videos document a loud and sustained hostile reaction from substantial portions of the crowd, but they do not provide a reliable way to measure the opinion of every person present. Reports also said Mamdani remained at the gathering long enough to take photographs with some attendees after leaving the stage.
The Staten Island reception was particularly striking because it contrasted with Mamdani’s appearances at National Night Out events in other boroughs earlier in the day. At stops in Brooklyn and Manhattan, the mayor appeared alongside Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch and other officials and used the occasion to emphasize declining shootings and murders and the importance of police-community partnerships.
That difference in reception reflects the city’s political geography as much as it reflects the mayor’s policing history. Staten Island was the only borough Mamdani lost in the 2025 mayoral election. Certified and reported borough-level results showed him receiving about 23 percent of the vote there, compared with roughly 55 percent for former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and about 21 percent for Republican Curtis Sliwa.
The borough has long been New York City’s most Republican-leaning and police-friendly political stronghold, with large numbers of active and retired law-enforcement officers and their families. A Marist poll conducted during Mamdani’s first 100 days found that 57 percent of Staten Island residents disapproved of his job performance, substantially worse than his standing in Brooklyn and Manhattan.
For many of the mayor’s critics, the loud reaction at Midland Beach was inseparable from statements Mamdani made in 2020, during the nationwide protests that followed the murder of George Floyd. Those posts were repeatedly resurfaced during the 2025 mayoral campaign and remain among the most damaging material his opponents use against him.
In one June 2020 post, Mamdani wrote: “We don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety. What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD.” He criticized what he described as “budget tricks” intended to keep officers on the street and added: “NO to fake cuts – defund the police.”
Later that year, he sharpened the rhetoric further while criticizing NYPD overtime spending. “There is no negotiating with an institution this wicked & corrupt,” Mamdani wrote in December 2020. “Defund it. Dismantle it. End the cycle of violence.” He also wrote in a separate post that “queer liberation means defund the police.”
Those statements are real and remain relevant to understanding why some police officers and their supporters distrust the mayor. But they are not the whole record. During the 2025 campaign, Mamdani explicitly moved away from the position that he would defund the NYPD. After another round of his old posts resurfaced, he said they were out of step with his current position and stated during the campaign that police have a critical role in addressing violent crime.
“I will not defund the police,” Mamdani said while campaigning for mayor. He later expressed regret over the language he had used toward officers and said he wanted to work with the department rather than pursue the sweeping defunding agenda associated with his 2020 posts.
That shift did not erase the political consequences. Police unions and law-enforcement groups repeatedly raised concerns about Mamdani’s public-safety agenda before the election. Several uniformed-officer organizations backed then-Mayor Eric Adams during the 2025 race, and the Police Benevolent Association has continued to clash with Mamdani’s administration over officer staffing, workload and his response to incidents involving police.
The dispute over staffing is more complicated than the claim that Mamdani simply “killed 5,000 police jobs.” Before leaving office, Adams proposed increasing the NYPD’s uniformed headcount by 5,000 officers, bringing the department toward approximately 40,000 by fiscal year 2029. His November 2025 financial plan envisioned phasing in the additional hiring over several years.
After taking office, Mamdani reversed that expansion plan and chose to keep the department’s authorized headcount at roughly 35,000 rather than continue the proposed rise toward 40,000. The city comptroller’s office said the February financial plan eliminated the planned 5,000-officer expansion, producing projected savings that grew in later fiscal years.
At the same time, Mamdani has not governed as though officer deployment is irrelevant. His administration approved additional staffing and deployment measures for specific operational needs, including new training requirements, changes in Bronx command structure and increased uniformed presence in areas and times associated with higher summer violence. In June, Mamdani said he and Tisch had identified ways to meet crime-fighting needs while keeping the authorized headcount at 35,000.
That policy distinction matters. The mayor has rejected the Adams-era plan to build the NYPD to approximately 40,000 officers, but his administration has continued hiring within the authorized headcount and has supported targeted increases in street deployment. Critics argue that the city needs a substantially larger force because officers are overworked and attrition remains a concern. Mamdani argues that public safety can be maintained without the full 5,000-officer expansion and that some responsibilities now handled by police should be shifted to specialists.
That idea is central to his broader public-safety philosophy. Mamdani has argued that the NYPD has accumulated responsibilities that do not always require an armed police response, particularly some mental-health calls. His administration created an Office of Community Safety and has promoted a model in which mental-health professionals, violence-interruption programs, youth services and police are treated as separate components of a broader safety strategy.
For police unions, that approach has not ended concerns about staffing. PBA President Patrick Hendry has publicly warned that officers are overstretched, working long hours and facing heavy summer workloads. The union has also strongly criticized the mayor on specific incidents, accusing him in February of minimizing an assault on officers by referring to what happened as a “snowball fight.”
Mamdani’s supporters point to crime statistics as evidence that his approach has not produced the collapse opponents predicted. City Hall and the NYPD have reported record or near-record lows in murders and shootings during parts of 2026. At a May public-safety announcement with Tisch and Gov. Kathy Hochul, Mamdani said shootings, murders and auto theft were down and announced that more than 2,600 uniformed officers would walk beats in 72 zones during high-risk evening and early-morning periods.
Crime data do not settle the political argument by themselves. Public perceptions of safety can differ from citywide statistics, individual crime categories can move in different directions, and police officers can face workload and morale problems even during periods when major violent-crime indicators are falling. But the data complicate claims that Mamdani’s first months in office have produced a simple, across-the-board deterioration in public safety.
The mayor’s relationship with federal immigration enforcement has created another major line of conflict with conservatives and some law-enforcement supporters. Mamdani has repeatedly said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids are “cruel” and “inhumane” and do not advance public safety. He has called ICE a “rogue agency” and said it should be abolished.
His administration has also reinforced New York City’s sanctuary policies, including restrictions on ICE access to certain city properties without a judicial warrant and protections intended to limit unlawful access to city-held information. Mamdani says those measures protect immigrant New Yorkers and maintain trust between communities and local government. The Trump administration and its allies argue that sanctuary policies impede federal immigration enforcement.
That dispute took on an especially volatile dimension after a July attack outside 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan, a federal building that houses immigration offices, courts and other agencies. Federal prosecutors charged Andrew Arrabaca, a former Army soldier, with arson after authorities said he set a fire outside the building, ignited fireworks and fired a pellet weapon in the direction of the structure.
Officials said Arrabaca had anti-ICE material with him, including a sign reading “ICE Off Our Streets,” and told investigators he held anti-government beliefs. Three people suffered minor injuries. The FBI described the incident as a targeted anti-government attack, and prosecutors alleged that Arrabaca had planned his actions and selected a busy entrance.
The existence of that attack does not establish that Mamdani or his administration encouraged it. In fact, Mamdani publicly called the incident “deeply disturbing,” said he was relieved no one had been seriously injured and said his administration was in contact with law enforcement and would support the federal investigation. Any claim linking the mayor’s anti-ICE position directly to the alleged arson would require evidence that has not been established.
The distinction is important because the political rhetoric surrounding Mamdani often merges several separate disputes: his old calls to defund the NYPD, his current decision not to expand the force by 5,000 officers, his criticism of ICE and his defense of sanctuary-city policies. Those issues overlap politically, but they are not the same policy and should not be treated as interchangeable facts.
The National Night Out confrontation therefore became powerful political footage precisely because it compressed those disputes into a single visual moment. Mamdani stood at an event explicitly built around law-enforcement-community cooperation in the borough most skeptical of him, while residents who remembered his old anti-NYPD language shouted him down.
For opponents, the video appeared to validate warnings that the mayor’s ideological history would make it difficult for him to build trust with officers and pro-police communities. For supporters, the Staten Island reaction was less a citywide referendum than a predictable encounter in a borough that overwhelmingly rejected him at the ballot box and remains far more conservative than the rest of New York City.
There is evidence for both interpretations. Staten Island clearly represents a genuine political weakness for Mamdani, and his past rhetoric gives critics a concrete basis for questioning how dramatically his views have changed. But the same mayor who once wrote “Defund it. Dismantle it” now works daily with Tisch, has maintained a 35,000-officer authorized force, has deployed thousands of officers in summer crime zones and has publicly stated that the NYPD is necessary to combat violent crime.
That evolution has created an unusual governing challenge. If Mamdani moves too aggressively toward the police department, parts of his democratic socialist base accuse him of abandoning the movement that helped elect him. If he emphasizes alternatives to policing or repeats harsh criticism of federal law enforcement, police unions and conservative New Yorkers point back to his 2020 statements and argue that the underlying ideology has never changed.
The mayor’s decision to attend the Staten Island event can also be read in that context. Skipping a major NYPD community gathering in the borough where his relationship with law-enforcement supporters is weakest would have invited criticism of its own. Appearing gave Mamdani a chance, however difficult, to signal that he intended to serve residents who did not vote for him and participate in an institutionally pro-police event despite the political risk.
The risk was obvious once he reached the microphone. His remarks were so short that the hostile reaction became the story rather than anything he said. The visual of the mayor smiling and leaving the podium while boos continued proved far more durable online than a longer policy speech would likely have been.
Yet the event itself continued after Mamdani’s departure. National Night Out is not primarily a mayoral rally. It is a national community-building initiative, and the NYPD described the Aug. 4 events as opportunities for residents to meet precinct personnel, community organizations and local leaders while strengthening neighborhood relationships with law enforcement. Staten Island’s four precincts were all represented at the Midland Beach gathering.
Police Commissioner Tisch also addressed the event, emphasizing the relationship between residents and officers. Families participated in activities, met emergency-service personnel and interacted with community groups. The mayor’s reception was the most politically dramatic episode of the evening, but it was only one part of a much larger police-community gathering.
For Mamdani, however, the footage is likely to remain politically useful to his critics because it speaks to a question that cannot be resolved by crime statistics alone: whether officers and communities that strongly support traditional policing believe his change in rhetoric is genuine.
His administration can point to cooperation with the commissioner, targeted officer deployments and low shooting and murder numbers. Opponents can point to the decision to cancel the 5,000-officer expansion, his continuing campaign to abolish ICE and a documented archive of statements describing the NYPD as racist, anti-queer, wicked and corrupt.
The mayor has attempted to draw a line between the activist language of 2020 and the responsibilities of governing in 2026. Staten Island demonstrated that a significant number of New Yorkers are not yet prepared to accept that distinction simply because he says his position has changed.
Whether the hostility remains concentrated in the city’s most conservative borough or becomes a larger political vulnerability will depend on what happens next: crime trends, officer staffing, labor relations, the administration’s handling of high-profile incidents and the continuing confrontation between City Hall and the federal government over immigration enforcement.
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For roughly a minute on the Midland Beach Boardwalk, those larger conflicts were reduced to a simple exchange between a mayor and a crowd. Mamdani tried to deliver a greeting. The boos were louder. Whatever conclusions supporters or opponents draw from the scene, the underlying facts are clear: the mayor faced a sustained hostile reception at a pro-police Staten Island event, his remarks ended in under a minute, and his policing record—past and present—remains one of the central fault lines of his administration.
