Mamdani booed off stage at Staten Island police event

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani got a hostile reception from the one borough that never warmed to him, drawing sustained boos and chants of “get out of here” less than a minute into his remarks at a Staten Island police event Tuesday night.

Mr. Mamdani appeared at the 43rd annual NYPD Patrol Borough Staten Island National Night Out Against Crime, held at Turtle Circle on the Midland Beach Boardwalk, where roughly 3,500 residents and families had gathered for the community-and-police event. As he approached the podium, sections of the crowd erupted in jeers and profanity, with some attendees shouting for him to leave. He kept a smile on his face throughout, thanked the crowd, and left the stage in under a minute.

It was a sharp contrast to earlier that evening, when Mr. Mamdani joined NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch at friendlier National Night Out stops in Brooklyn and Manhattan, touting record-low shootings and murders under his administration.

Staten Island artist and activist Scott LoBaido was reportedly among a group hoping to confront Mr. Mamdani over his police budget decisions; witnesses described NYPD officers holding him back as he moved toward the stage. LoBaido later suffered a cardiac arrest at the event and was hospitalized; first responders performed CPR and used a defibrillator before he was taken to Staten Island University Hospital.

Staten Island is the only one of the city’s five boroughs Mr. Mamdani lost in last November’s mayoral election, where he took roughly 23% of the vote compared with Andrew Cuomo’s 55% and Curtis Sliwa’s 21%. The borough has been a persistent source of friction for the democratic socialist mayor, whose past statements calling to “defund” the NYPD resurfaced during his campaign.

That tension carried into his first city budget. Mr. Mamdani initially proposed adding 580 NYPD officers in his May executive budget, then dropped the increase from the final deal after the proposal drew opposition from the NYC Democratic Socialists of America and other left-wing allies. Mr. Mamdani cited budget savings as the reason for the reversal, which kept the department’s headcount flat at roughly 35,000; DSA organizers described it as a win for their pressure campaign. The move drew criticism from police unions and Republican council members alike.

Staten Island’s Italian-American community has also clashed with City Hall this summer over a city immigrant-enclaves map that omitted Little Italy and other historically Italian neighborhoods. Mr. Mamdani blamed the map’s creation on the prior Adams administration and said his office would add the neighborhood in a future update.