Zohran Mamdani Appoints Prominent Police Abolitionist to His Transition Team
Photo by: NDZ/STAR MAX/IPx 2025 11/5/25 via AP
New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani added Alex Vitale, the author of The End of Policing, who has called for the “abolition” of cops, to his community safety committee.
Vitale joined the Democratic Socialists’ team on Monday, along with about 400 other people who were added to other transition committees.
He discussed his anti-cop views in an interview with Tangle News in 2021, saying police officers were “violence workers” who hurt their communities more than they helped.
“That’s what distinguishes police from other government workers. It’s that authorization and capacity to use violence,” Vitale said. “That’s what undergirds police authority. It’s that that’s inherently dangerous and problematic for some democratic societies and that policing should always be the tool of absolute last resort.”
Policing, he added, has historically and in modern times been a way to “reproduce inequality, primarily along lines of race as well as class and sometimes gender and sexuality.”
Vitale, who is a sociology professor at Brooklyn College, argued in his aforementioned 2017 book that the issue with cops is not their training, methods, or their “diversity.” He said, “The problem is policing itself.”
He has called for taking funds earmarked for cops and funneling them into other services. In 2020, Vitale told The Guardian, “We should just have more social workers doing social work,” rather than turning police departments into “hubs” for social work.
Vitale is not the only anti-cop member of Mamdani’s transition team. Elena Leopold, the team’s executive director, signed an open letter in 2020 calling on then-Mayor Bill De Blasio to cut NYPD’s funding by $1 billion.
Mamdani, during a cozy meeting with President Donald Trump last week, committed to maintaining the NYPD’s headcount at 35,000 officers. NYC’s next mayor called for defunding the police several times in 2020, but in June, he pivoted away from those comments, saying “I will not defund the police.”
