Mayor Mamdani made a hospital visit to comfort the victim of a knife attack on a police officer, who was forced to fire his weapon to defend himself. Of course, the bed Mamdani visited was that of the schizophrenic man, Jabez Chakraborty, who charged at police and was shot as a result. It almost goes without saying that New York’s new mayor did not check in on the officer.
Face and voice full of strained emotion, Mamdani said after the visit: “No family should have to endure this kind of pain,” referring to the family of the knife-wielder. He made no remarks about the strains on families of police officers whose incredibly difficult, and increasingly thankless job, puts them face-to-face with knife wielding assailants for a starting salary of $60,000.
Mamdani went on to call for city prosecutors to drop attempted murder charges against Chakraborty, who was tased before he was shot but did not stop charging or drop his knife.
No one is meant to be above the law, remember? No one has the right to charge at an officer with a knife. If Mr. Chakraboty has a legal defense – perhaps an insanity defense – that is between him and his defense lawyer.
Democratic lawmakers have to give up their default position of “blame the cops” if they want to escape the now painfully obvious conclusion that anti-cop, pro-criminal and crime-excusing policies make blue cities less safe, less livable and more expensive.
As a public defender for many years I represented many men with Mr. Chakraboty’s exact profile. Deeply mentally ill, sometimes violent, often with family that loved them and wanted to help them, but had run out of ways to manage their illness and outbursts, and resorted to calling 911. It is a failure on so many levels that family members have nowhere else to turn.
Demonizing the police and blaming them for doing their job fixes absolutely nothing about a system that is mostly incapable of providing relief to the severely mentally ill or their families.
The old insane asylums were riddled with cruelty and abuse but the pendulum of reform has swung too far in the opposite direction. Now we have laws that make it nearly impossible to get the severely mentally ill the help they need and their families want them to get, and too few beds to meet the needs of would-be patients even if we could get them admitted.
California’s multi-generational experiments with “Harm Reduction” and “Housing First” policies – which decriminalize open-air drug use and prevent even the most psychotic or severely addicted individuals from being forcibly removed from public spaces – has resulted in a dramatic surge in homelessness across the state, alongside staggering public costs. California now has over 187,000 homeless people – the highest of any state – after spending between $24 billion and $37 billion (depending on how you characterize some services) to address homelessness, more than any other state.
The failed policies which prioritize voluntary services and low-barrier housing without requiring sobriety or treatment, have failed to curb crime, addiction, or even overdose deaths among the homeless. New York, with its historically stricter enforcement and greater use of shelters, should view California’s outcomes as a stark cautionary tale – not an invitation to replicate similar non-interventionist strategies that have proven both ineffective and enormously expensive.
But Mayor Mamdani ran on, and is still talking about, a “Department of Community Safety” to respond to calls exactly like the one the Chakraborty family made on January 26th. As a campaign promise it sounded great – especially to Mamdani’s peers – a generation raised on intense virtue-signalling and political propaganda that does not always factor in reality.
Mamdani’s “Department of Community Safety” idea is based on how he and his voters want the world to be, not how it actually is – ask any Californian. Take the January 26th encounter. Mamdani’s entire proposal rests on the idea that the man who was so mentally ill and behaving in such a concerning manner that his family called 911 would respond differently to a community safety worker than a cop. What’s the reason for believing this other than wishful thinking based on the highly advanced reasoning of “Cop: bad, Community Worker: good”?
What happens if Chakraborty charges at the unarmed community worker? What’s the protocol Mr. Mayor? Until there is a good answer to that question, the Department of Community Safety is a TikTok video and not a serious policy worth funding. If Chakraborty was rational enough to make the distinction between various uniformed people entering the house, he would have been rational enough to go to the local ER with his family.
Mr. Chakraborty should be prosecuted for attempting to assault the responding officer with a knife because anyone should be prosecuted for that crime. And the Mayor should talk to the cops, lawyers, health care workers and doctors who actually treat and interact with the severely mentally ill to understand the real world decisions they make every day – and make policy proposals based on those real world scenarios.
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