How the mayor chose not to escalate a viral blizzard moment
When the Snowball Fight Became a Political Football
A viral post from the TikTok account Sidetalk, which has 4.4 million followers, was all it took. Within hours of the February 2026 blizzard, thousands of New Yorkers descended on Washington Square Park for a massive snowball battle. The crowd was enormous, the energy was high, and then the police showed up. What happened next became one of the defining moments of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s first two months in office, not because of what occurred in the park, but because of how the mayor chose to respond.
What Happened in Washington Square Park
As the blizzard wound down, an impromptu call for a post-storm snowball fight went viral across social media. Thousands of people, many of them young, converged on the park. By most accounts, the event began as genuine communal celebration of a snow day. Then officers arrived to respond to 911 calls about a disorderly crowd, and portions of the crowd began throwing snowballs at them. Video showed officers struck by snow and retreating toward their vehicles. The NYPD said officers suffered injuries. Reports indicated that some officers used chemical irritants as they withdrew. A 27-year-old man was arrested. Others were identified as subjects of ongoing investigation.
Two Responses, One Office
Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch called the behavior disgraceful and criminal. The Police Benevolent Association described what happened as an assault, claiming chunks of ice and rocks were thrown alongside snowballs. Mamdani’s response was different in tone and substance. He said what he saw was a snowball fight that got out of hand. He said it should be treated accordingly. He urged New Yorkers to respect officers who had worked through the blizzard. He joked that if anyone should be catching a snowball, it should be him. And he declined to endorse criminal framing of the incident, saying that any investigation was up to the police. The PBA called his response a complete failure of leadership. Tisch, while affirming her positive relationship with the mayor, made clear at an NYPD promotion ceremony that she would not tolerate attacks on her officers under any circumstances.
The Broader Argument
Slate magazine published an analysis arguing that Mamdani’s restraint was politically sophisticated, not politically weak. The piece pointed to the 2019 incident in which NYPD officers were doused with water buckets in Brooklyn, after which de Blasio quickly condemned the behavior, and the condemnation failed to protect him from the unions’ narrative that he was anti-police. The argument is that escalating rhetoric rarely improves outcomes in these situations and that Mamdani avoided inflating a chaotic but bounded incident into a symbolic referendum on the character of all New Yorkers. The analysis also noted the particular complexity for a mayor who is Muslim and the city’s first of that background, who is acutely aware of how crowd behavior involving brown people is often perceived and framed in media coverage.
Crowd Control and Police Response
Policing experts have long debated the most effective approaches to managing large, spontaneous crowds. Research published by the Police Chief Magazine of the International Association of Chiefs of Police has explored how aggressive police intervention in large gatherings can escalate rather than de-escalate crowd behavior. The ACLU’s reporting on assembly rights provides a civil liberties framework for evaluating how cities respond to mass gatherings. The tension between ensuring officer safety, protecting the right to public assembly, and avoiding provocations that intensify crowd behavior is one of the oldest challenges in urban policing. How the Mamdani administration navigates that tension over the course of its term will be closely watched.
