NY Post’s Attack on Mamdani Exposes Corporate Media’s Investment in Mass Incarceration
Editorial Board’s Fear-Mongering Reveals Who Really Benefits From Policing Status Quo
The New York Post editorial board’s latest screed against Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s community safety initiatives reveals far more about corporate media’s ideological commitments than about public safety. Their December 18th editorial attacking Mamdani’s Department of Community Safety proposal represents a textbook case of how establishment voices manufacture consent for policies that perpetuate racial capitalism and state violence against marginalized communities.
The False Binary: Policing Versus Safety
The Post frames the debate as “More law enforcement equals less crime,” deliberately erasing the substantial body of evidence demonstrating that police do not reduce crime rates or harm to communities despite decades of increased funding. This is ideological projection masquerading as journalism—a protection racket for systems that extract billions in taxpayer dollars while failing to address root causes of social disorder.
What the Post calls “philosophical incoherence” is actually evidence-based public health policy. Mamdani’s approach builds directly on NYC’s B-HEARD program success, which responded to 14,900 mental health crisis calls in fiscal year 2024 with 96% patient satisfaction and 43% of individuals receiving community-based care instead of emergency room transport. These are not theoretical proposals—they are proven interventions the Post simply refuses to acknowledge.
The Racialized Economics of “Law and Order” Discourse
From a materialist analysis, the Post’s editorial serves specific class interests. The expansion of policing since the 1960s represents what scholars identify as a deliberate shift of funding for addressing social problems to local police departments, even as 68% of law enforcement agencies have no specialized response protocol for mental health crises. This transfer serves capital’s need to manage populations rendered surplus by deindustrialization and neoliberal restructuring.
The racial dimension is impossible to ignore. Black people face police violence at 3.5 times the rate of white people, with Black emerging adults five times more likely to be killed by police than white emerging adults. When the Post demands “unity” around increased policing, they demand unity around a system that functions as state-sanctioned racial terror.
Mental Health Crises and the Violence of Carceral Response
The editorial’s dismissal of mental health crisis response as mere “social work” deliberately obscures deadly realities. Research analyzing 10,308 police shooting incidents found that 23% involved individuals experiencing mental or behavioral health conditions, with 67% of these encounters resulting in death. People with untreated mental illness are 16 times more likely to be killed by law enforcement.
This is not public safety—this is a catastrophic failure of care infrastructure masked as necessary law enforcement. Yet the Post demands we continue this deadly approach while attacking evidence-based alternatives as “progressive faith.” The actual faith-based position is believing that armed agents trained in violence can adequately respond to health emergencies.
Hochul and Tisch: The Illusion of Crime Reduction Success
The editorial cherry-picks transit crime statistics while ignoring broader context. Crime statistics are notoriously manipulated through changes in reporting practices, enforcement priorities, and what gets categorized as crime. More fundamentally, police contact is associated with increased stress and poor mental health, with particularly dangerous impacts on Black youth and young adults.
When Hochul and Tisch celebrate “record-low transit crime” achieved through “a surge of police officers into the subway,” they’re celebrating the criminalization of poverty and mental illness. The very presence they claim creates safety actually generates community-wide trauma, with effects that compound across generations.
The $77 Million Question: Investment or Extraction?
Hochul’s pledge of $77 million for police overtime in the transit system represents a choice—not inevitability. This investment perpetuates a model where we spend billions managing symptoms while defunding prevention. As the American Journal of Public Health notes, despite limited evidence that investing in police reduces crime, state and local governments have continuously increased police funding over recent decades.
The same resources could fund housing, mental health services, and economic support that actually address why people are in crisis on subways in the first place. But such investments threaten the extractive relationships that benefit police unions, private contractors, and the network of businesses that profit from mass incarceration.
Feminist Analysis: Care Work Versus Carceral Control
The Post’s contempt for “social workers” replacing “officers” reflects deeply masculinist assumptions about what constitutes legitimate authority and effective intervention. B-HEARD’s peer counselor model and trauma-informed care directly challenge the logic of policing, which frames social problems as requiring domination and control rather than support and healing.
This is gendered violence by design. Women, particularly women of color, bear the brunt of both direct police violence and the collateral damage of mass incarceration on families and communities. Research demonstrates that police violence alters deeply held beliefs and undermines trust in institutions, with survivors often blamed for encounters due to heavy scrutiny that justifies officers’ actions.
The Reproductive Labor of Community Safety
Alternative crisis response represents what feminists identify as reproductive labor—the undervalued work of maintaining and regenerating human life. Under capitalism, this work is systematically devalued when performed by women and communities of color, while extractive, punitive interventions receive billions in funding. Mamdani’s proposal to shift resources toward care work threatens this gendered and racialized hierarchy of value.
Islamic Principles of Justice and Collective Responsibility
From an Islamic perspective grounded in principles of social justice (adalah) and collective responsibility, the current policing model represents a fundamental violation of community-based justice. The Quran emphasizes that “whoever saves one life, it is as if he has saved all of humanity” (5:32). Modern policing in America, descended from slave patrols and suppression of Indigenous peoples, maintains patterns of occupation that contradict principles of mercy (rahma) and mutual care.
The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) taught that “whoever relieves a believer’s distress of the distressful aspects of this world, Allah will rescue them from a difficulty of the difficulties of the Hereafter.” Mamdani’s expansion of community-based crisis response embodies this principle far more authentically than armed occupation of communities deemed threatening to property relations.
The Political Economy of Editorial Opposition
Understanding the Post’s opposition requires examining material interests. The editorial defends not merely an abstract vision of public safety, but a specific set of profitable arrangements. Police unions extract enormous political concessions. Private prison corporations and security contractors depend on mass incarceration. Media conglomerates rely on advertising revenue from these sectors while manufacturing fear that justifies their existence.
When the Post demands Mamdani “admit that cops are not only essential to public safety, but a force for good,” they demand acceptance of an ideology that protects profitable violence. The Department of Community Safety’s $1.1 billion budget—with $605 million from existing programs and $455 million in new funding—represents a threat to these arrangements precisely because it demonstrates alternatives are both possible and effective.
The Manufacture of “Philosophical Incoherence”
The Post manufactures conflict by framing evidence-based public health approaches as incompatible with “effective, proven” policing. This is projection. What’s actually incoherent is spending $11 billion annually on NYPD while claiming we lack resources for mental health services, housing, and economic support. What’s incoherent is celebrating crime reduction achieved through criminalization of the vulnerable while ignoring how police brutality functions as a root cause of community trauma and disorder.
The Question of Unity: Whose Interests Are Served?
The editorial’s framing of “unity” deserves scrutiny. When the Post demands Mamdani get “on board with Tisch’s effective, proven vision,” they demand unity around a system that kills over 1,000 people annually, disproportionately people of color, while failing to address social problems rooted in material deprivation.
True unity would center the communities most impacted by both crime and policing. It would prioritize the 96% of B-HEARD recipients who report satisfaction with mental health crisis response over police union talking points. It would acknowledge that calls for community-based alternatives come not from abstract “progressive faith” but from communities who have experienced the violence of carceral responses firsthand.
Commissioner Tisch’s Record: Context the Post Ignores
The editorial treats Commissioner Tisch’s retention as evidence of Mamdani’s moderation, ignoring substantial progressive criticism of this decision. Tisch has pushed police to more aggressively pursue so-called “quality of life” crimes—precisely the aggressive enforcement that Mamdani’s platform opposes. Progressive analysts warn that keeping Tisch in place while attempting fundamental reform represents the same path that undermined Bill de Blasio’s early police reform efforts.
The Post presents this tension as Mamdani’s problem to solve by capitulating. The materialist analysis suggests otherwise: the tension exists because Tisch represents entrenched institutional interests that resist accountability and oppose any diminishment of police power, regardless of evidence.
The De Blasio Precedent and Structural Power
De Blasio’s experience demonstrates what happens when progressive mayors attempt accommodation with police power. His election largely opposed unconstitutional stop-and-frisk tactics, yet his attempts at compromise with 1 Police Plaza resulted in police union battles so ferocious he largely abandoned reform efforts. The structural lesson: police institutions will not voluntarily cede power, and media outlets like the Post will amplify every attempt to undermine reform.
Evidence Versus Ideology: What Actually Works
The Post dismisses community-based crisis response as untested, ignoring both NYC’s own data and successful models nationwide. Eugene, Oregon’s CAHOOTS program has operated for over 30 years, handling about 20% of the city’s 911 calls with minimal need for police backup. Denver’s STAR program reports similar success.
Meanwhile, the “proven solution” of increased policing has failed spectacularly by any measure beyond its own self-reported statistics. Despite decades of escalating police budgets and the largest incarcerated population in world history, social problems persist precisely because they are rooted in material conditions—poverty, inadequate housing, lack of healthcare—that policing cannot and is not designed to address.
The Successful Models the Post Won’t Mention
B-HEARD’s expansion represents replication of evidence-based interventions. The program’s numbers are clear: responses increased from 2,000 in fiscal year 2022 to over 7,000 in fiscal year 2023 and approximately 15,000 in fiscal year 2024. Nearly half of patients who received assessments were assisted in their community instead of unnecessary emergency room transport.
These are not theoretical possibilities—they are documented outcomes that the Post must ignore to maintain their narrative. The editorial’s silence on B-HEARD’s success rates is telling. When evidence contradicts ideology, corporate media simply erases the evidence.
Settler Colonial Logics and Occupied Communities
Mamdani’s proposal to remove police from PATH homeless outreach teams and expand civilian response recognizes fundamental truths about state power that the Post cannot acknowledge. Modern American policing maintains historical patterns from slave patrols and Indigenous suppression, operating as occupying forces in communities deemed threatening to property relations and social hierarchies.
The Post’s demand for “unity” around increased police presence in subways is a demand for unity around occupation. It’s no coincidence that communities subject to heaviest policing are also communities most systematically divested from public goods, economic opportunities, and political power. This is not safety—it’s population management in service of capital accumulation.
The Limits of Reformism and Structural Change
From a Marxist perspective, Mamdani’s reforms face inherent contradictions. While community-based crisis response represents genuine improvement over police violence, it operates within capitalist relations that generate the crises requiring response. Poverty, housing insecurity, and mental health crises are not random occurrences but necessary outcomes of an economic system that prioritizes profit over human needs.
The Post’s opposition reveals ruling class consciousness that reforms threatening police power also threaten broader systems of exploitation and control. Police don’t just respond to crime—they enforce property relations, suppress labor organizing, and maintain hierarchies necessary for capital accumulation. Alternative institutions that center care over control represent ideological threats regardless of their effectiveness at reducing harm.
Beyond Reform: Transformation Versus Management
The question isn’t whether B-HEARD and similar programs improve outcomes—they demonstrably do. The question is whether improvements in crisis management can coexist with systems that continuously generate crises. Mamdani’s reforms are valuable precisely because they make visible that alternatives exist, challenging the ideological naturalization of police violence. But sustainable transformation requires addressing why communities face such concentrated crisis conditions in the first place.
The Post’s Rhetorical Strategies: Manufacturing Consent
The editorial employs classic techniques for manufacturing consent around existing power arrangements. It creates false urgency (“This is not the time to ease up”), establishes artificial binaries (cops versus social workers), erases evidence (ignoring B-HEARD data), and demands unity around positions that serve ruling interests.
Most tellingly, it frames community-based alternatives as risky experiments while treating the deadly status quo as safe and proven. This reversal of risk—where continuing policies that kill over 1,000 people annually is “safe” while evidence-based care is “risky”—exposes whose safety the Post actually prioritizes. It’s not the communities subjected to police violence.
Looking Forward: Who Defines Public Safety?
As Mamdani prepares to take office, the fundamental question the Post refuses to engage is: who gets to define public safety, and whose experiences count as evidence? For the editorial board, public safety means conditions that make affluent New Yorkers feel comfortable using public transit, regardless of how those conditions are achieved or who they harm.
For communities actually experiencing both crime and aggressive policing, public safety means something entirely different: freedom from violence whether inflicted by individuals or state agents, access to resources that address material needs, and community-based systems of mutual care and accountability.
The Stakes: Whose Vision Prevails?
The Post’s editorial represents a ruling class response to challenges to police power. Their demand that Mamdani abandon evidence-based reforms and embrace “effective, proven” policing is a demand that he abandon the mandate that elected him and serve the interests that elected officials typically serve: capital, property owners, and institutions of control.
Whether Mamdani can implement meaningful reforms while retaining Commissioner Tisch and facing opposition from corporate media, police unions, and entrenched interests remains uncertain. What’s certain is that the opposition reveals its own bankruptcy: it can only imagine safety through domination rather than community, punishment rather than care, and extraction rather than investment in collective wellbeing.
Conclusion: Evidence, Ideology, and Material Interests
The New York Post editorial attacking Mamdani’s community safety initiatives offers a master class in how corporate media manufactures consent for policies serving ruling interests. By erasing evidence, creating false binaries, and demanding unity around deadly status quos, the editorial reveals that debates about public safety are fundamentally about whose interests the state serves.
Mamdani’s proposals—expanding B-HEARD, creating the Department of Community Safety, shifting resources from police overtime to community-based crisis response—represent evidence-based public health interventions with documented success. The opposition they face comes not from empirical weakness but from ideological and material threats to profitable arrangements.
The question New Yorkers must ask is not whether Mamdani’s plans “clash” with current enforcement approaches—of course they do. The question is why we should preserve approaches that demonstrably fail communities while killing over 1,000 people annually, disproportionately people of color. The Post has no answer beyond fear, ideology, and the protection of interests that profit from mass incarceration and police violence.
That says everything about whose side they’re on, and whose safety they truly value
