New York City Mayor Zohran ("The Magnificent") Mamdani got upset when hundreds of anti-ICE protesters descended on the Hilton Garden Inn on Sixth Avenue in Tribeca around 6 p.m on Tuesday, filling up the lobby and scaring hotel guests half to death. The anti-ICE fanatics were demanding that Hilton refuse to give rooms to ICE agents.
No, he wasn't angry at the protesters. He was mad at the NYPD Strategic Response Group (SRG), a highly trained group of officers from all five boroughs who respond to protests as well as terror attacks in the city. The SRG calmly worked its way through the crowd and ended up arresting 64 protesters, citing them for trespassing and other minor offenses.
This was too much for the city's socialist mayor.
“We don’t believe that there should be a unit that has both counterterrorism responsibilities and responsibilities to respond to protests. The conflation of the two is part of this issue,” Mamdani said during a press conference on Wednesday.
Why disband what most police officers believe is a very effective unit in keeping protests from turning violent?
“This is totally driven by emotion. There’s not even one data point to back up why the SRG should be disbanded,” retired NYPD lieutenant John D. Macari Jr., tells the New York Sun.
The SRG was launched in 2015, the brainchild of then-Mayor Bill de Blasio’s police commissioner, William Bratton, to allow police officers to operate on both “offense and defense” when responding to terrorist attacks. The SRG consolidated eight separate patrol borough task forces into one unified command, expanded its missions from potential terror attacks to other daily needs such as disorder response, crime suppression, and mobilizations to emergencies that include bank robberies and protests.
That same year, the SRG came under fire for its “aggressive” response to protesters demonstrating against the death of Freddie Gray, who died while in police custody in Baltimore, inflaming anti-police sentiment in cities across the country. The NYPD arrested more than 140 people, at least two of them for assaulting officers – a response that social justice groups and progressive city politicians claimed was needlessly escalatory.
There is no way the SRG will come out on top in this PR scrum with Mamdani. They could wear handcuffs and never lay a hand on any protester and still be accused of using "excessive force." The system is rigged in favor of protesters to gain a PR advantage, except when they start looting and setting fires. Protest leaders need the SRG as props in their little morality play.
But life for the protesters would be so much easier if the SRG were disbanded. Then, the task of breaking up protests would fall to the regular police, who are far less trained than SRG officers and more likely to give the protesters exactly what they want: scenes of chaos and mayhem, leading to charges of "police brutality" and lawsuits galore.
On Wednesday, Mr. Mamdani – who has said the NYPD will not cooperate with the Trump Administration’s immigration enforcement efforts – “commended” the protestors “who exercise their constitutional right to protest, especially in bringing attention to the horrific abuses of ICE across this country, and I think especially right now in Minneapolis.”
But Mr. Mamdani’s office also issued a seemingly contradictory statement that praised the NYPD’s response to the protest, even as he called for disbanding the unit involved in the arrest.
“The mayor is also pleased with the NYPD’s response to the protest and that today’s demonstration concluded without violence,” Mr. Mamdani’s office said in a statement.
The two-faced socialist charlatan will still try to disband the unit that steered the protests to end "without violence."
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