What Mamdani gets wrong about the NYPD’s use of force

In the first six months of this year, NYPD officers made 24,343 arrests of suspects carrying weapons. Cops fired their guns just 23 times.

Yet last week, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced he was directing the police department “to conduct a comprehensive review of its use-of-force policies and practices.”

“Every New Yorker deserves to know that force will be used lawfully, carefully and only when necessary,” declared the mayor, implying that New Yorkers have reason to believe the NYPD falls short of that standard now.

But does it? Let’s look at the numbers.

From Jan. 1 through June 30 of this year, the NYPD fielded more than 3.35 million 911 calls — more than 100,000 of which involved either persons in crisis (75,746) or weapons (33,063).

The 24,343 arrests of weapons-carrying subjects were part of more than 141,000 arrests officers made over the same six-month period.

Despite all that activity, the department recorded fewer than 6,000 use-of-force incidents, and only 23 involved an officer firing a gun.

Assuming each use of force came within the context of an arrest, the NYPD has used deadly force in no more than 0.02% of arrests, and force of any kind in just 4.2% of arrests.

Note, too, that nearly 2,500 officers were injured in use-of-force incidents in the first half of 2026, almost as many as the roughly 2,600 subjects injured in those same encounters.

The facts speak for themselves: The NYPD is appropriately restrained, especially when it comes to deadly force.

Yet even before the mayor’s new review had begun, Mamdani felt it necessary to announce five new “reforms” to reflect that “accountability is a central value” of his administration.

These include more money for the NYPD’s inspector general and making it harder for officers who leave the department with pending disciplinary charges to be rehired elsewhere in New York state.

But again, the premise that the NYPD has an issue with accountability is baseless.

Nor is there much reason to suppose a new suite of reforms will significantly reduce the use of deadly force.

Consider: The department recorded 52 firearm discharges in 2017, and 53 in 2024.

Both numbers were in line with the average of 50 firearm discharges over the eight-year period.

This is notable, because in 2020, NYPD became subject to a slew of reforms adopted at the state and city levels that don’t seem to have had any effect on police firearm discharges.

To refresh our memories, after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order “requiring each local government in the State to adopt a policing reform plan by April 1, 2021.”

In conjunction with that order, he signed into law a package of 10 police reforms hastily passed by the Legislature.

That included: a criminally enforceable ban on chokeholds, new and more stringent reporting requirements after firearm discharges, a new office to probe officer misconduct and the appointment of the attorney general as an independent prosecutor in cases involving the death of an unarmed civilian.

Not to be outdone, in 2020, the New York City Council passed the so-called “diaphragm law,” criminalizing even the accidental compression of the necks and diaphragms of even violently resisting subjects.

The following year, the council created a way to sue police officers by letting plaintiffs sidestep qualified immunity, a legal shield against civil suits, and voted on a number of other reform measures.

This all was on top of the adoption of body cameras by the NYPD, which began in 2017 and was also supposed to reduce use-of-force incidents.

Yet despite these changes, the number of force incidents reported by the NYPD grew every year between 2020-2024 (as did the number of NYPD members injured by subjects).

From where I sit, what these reforms did achieve was worse officer morale — and more suspects willing to resist arrest.

Whether police use force depends far more on the choices of the subjects they try to arrest than on utopian proposals dreamt up by “progressive” police critics.

That may be a hard pill for NYPD’s foes to swallow, but it might be easier if they let the facts wash it down.

Rafael A. Mangual is the Nick Ohnell fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of “Criminal (In)Justice” (2022).