Infernal Affairs

We are in the home stretch of the New York City mayoral campaign, with democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani polling far ahead of disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo and perpetual gadfly Curtis Sliwa. Mayor Eric Adams, the five boroughs’ immaculately well-groomed and wildly corrupt answer to former Philadelphia mayor Frank Rizzo, dropped out last month while polling in the mid-single digits. With Sliwa unwilling to pull out despite alleged quid-pro-quo entreaties by the city’s reactionary elite, Mamdani is on course to win with his relentless focus on affordability.

Cuomo, meanwhile, has made “public safety” and unconditional support for the New York City Police Department central to his campaign: he’s attacked Mamdani for criticizing the police department’s brutal repression of the 2020 George Floyd protests; vowed to expand the Strategic Response Group (SRG), colloquially known as the “goon squad”; and has promised to hire five thousand new officers. But for whatever reason, Mamdani’s campaign is running shy on the issue, even though the country’s largest police department—an openly right-wing and flagrantly corrupt cabal—is ripe for top-to-bottom reform.

It’s an open question whether Mamdani is game for a prolonged and bitter confrontation with the NYPD, even though some cops are apparently quivering in their boots at the prospect of his administration. Aside from a vow to establish a $1 billion Department of Community Safety and take authority over police discipline away from the police commissioner (which would require changes in city and state law), he has yet to propose anything in the way of substantive reform to the daily functions of the NYPD itself. Most of Mamdani’s statements on law enforcement have been driven, instead, by media pressure to distance himself from past calls to “defund” a department he characterized in 2020 as “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety” (all objectively true in the context of that summer’s generational police violence). So far, he’s generally obliged: in September, he told the New York Times he would apologize to the rank-and-file for his previous comments.

But the obsessive media focus on misinterpreted catchphrase politics in the New York City mayoral race misses the forest for the trees. When you drill down on the actual task of reforming the NYPD, the enormity—and complexity—of the task becomes apparent.

One marker of the decline of New York City’s press corps is that law enforcement is infrequently reported on in terms of policy or outcomes, be they arrests, traffic citations, convictions, legal settlement payouts, or any other tangible metric. Public safety in the United States’ largest city is, instead, more often reported through the lens of horse-race politics.

It wasn’t always this way: stop-and-frisk’s wild abuses from 2004 through 2013 were so obscene that, even in spite of plummeting crime rates, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly could not staunch a grassroots groundswell against the NYPD. Dogged reporting by the New York Times about the NYPD’s skyrocketing number of street stops, coupled with a class action lawsuit brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights, built a movement for police accountability over half a decade. Following a landmark consent decree after a federal civil trial in 2013 found the NYPD’s practice to be unconstitutional, stop-and-frisk stops declined from a peak of 685,724 in 2011 to 25,386 in 2024.

Bill de Blasio was elected in 2013, in large part due to his promise to reform the NYPD, which he abandoned once in office, bringing back “broken windows” fanatic and Giuliani retread Bill Bratton, who introduced LAPD-style gang sweeps to New York City; drastically expanded the department’s use of advanced surveillance tools (including predictive policing, gunshot sensors from a company Bratton had a financial stake in, and a gang database); and the SRG to violently suppress Black Lives Matters protests. Still, tensions persisted between the department and the administration: hundreds of cops turned their backs on de Blasio at a funeral for two officers who were killed on the job in late 2014.

In his 2021 campaign, Adams—himself a former cop—ran on restoring order to a city scarred by the Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting social and economic disruptions, which led to increases in violent and property crimes that returned New York City back to the state of affairs during Michael Bloomberg’s first term—a far cry from 1987 through 1994, when two thousand people-plus were murdered annually. Under Adams, the NYPD not only reverted to 1990’s zero-tolerance tactics but became a nexus for graft, highlighted by a sprawling federal corruption indictment of Adams that was short-circuited by a quid pro quo over immigration enforcement with President Trump earlier this year. Meanwhile, the city’s independent police oversight agency has two reflexively pro-cop board members installed by Adams undermining the board’s investigative work. Now, it is declining to hear some cases against cops accused of lying or cooking the books. With apologies to Frank Serpico and the Mollen Commission, all that’s old is new again.

Though Keechant Sewell was appointed as police commissioner under Adams, the department was effectively run by former chief of department Philip Banks III. Banks, who was the NYPD’s highest ranking uniformed officer during de Blasio’s first term, quit abruptly in 2014 while in the crosshairs of an FBI corruption investigation involving prominent real estate developers, other NYPD brass, and even Big Bird himself (though de Blasio avoided charges thanks in large part to a Supreme Court ruling on political corruption cases). Banks returned as a deputy mayor of public safety in 2021 under Adams and essentially ran the NYPD as its unappointed “shadow commissioner.” He resigned from his position last October, shortly after the federal indictment of Adams was handed down.

During the Adams administration, the mayor and his allies elevated a series of violent and corrupt officers to department leadership, who—if you believe a telephone book-sized lawsuit filed by former interim commissioner Tom Donlon in mid-July—ran the department as “a deeply entrenched criminal enterprise” that needs the intervention of a federal judge and aggressive reform. This is an astounding way to describe any government agency, let alone a police department with a multi-billion-dollar budget, more manpower than midsized European armies, its own intelligence division, doctors, and, hell, even beekeepers. An FBI veteran and NYPD outsider who clashed with NYPD’s chief spin officer Tarik Sheppard before being forced out by Adams last fall and replaced by Zionist real estate scion Jessica Tisch, Donlon lays out a stunning series of allegations in the suit.

Many of the claims advanced in the lawsuit, however, were reported in episodic fashion over the past three years. But others were not. According to Donlon, the NYPD’s already, err, problematic methods have spun out of control to encompass nakedly corrupt promotion mechanisms, the repression of certain types of protest, and a politicized drone unit that surveils not only demonstrations but also Labor Day barbecues in majority-black neighborhoods.

The officers responsible for helming the NYPD under Adams are a tight cadre of loyalists. Many of them are named in Donlon’s suit. There’s Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey, who was set to be disciplined for voiding a former colleague’s gun arrest before that was overruled by Adams. Maddrey, who is built like a human refrigerator, resigned in December 2024 while facing lurid accusations of coercing female subordinates to have sex with him against their will. In turn Maddrey would grant the female officers overtime as compensation, a claim that is the subject of ongoing civil litigation and an FBI probe. One female cop claimed that Maddrey was such a sex fiend that he showed up to visit her while she was receiving medical treatment at a hospital. “This fool had the audacity to come for Azz while I had [an] iv in my arm,” the cop wrote in a Facebook post unearthed by the tabloids. The alleged coercion took place over several years—an allegation the NYPD’s Internal Affairs investigated, but which did nothing to impede Maddrey’s rise up the ranks. In Donlon’s suit, the department’s tolerance of Maddrey’s corruption and sexual assault speaks to a “deep moral rot at the heart of NYPD leadership.”

Or consider former Commissioner Edward Caban, appointed in July 2023 to succeed Sewell. Caban—a hard-partying cop with a nightlife-loving twin who allegedly posed as his brother in an ersatz vaudeville routine to shake down businesses for protection money—made a practice of protecting brutal and abusive cops by “retaining” a unprecedented number of disciplinary cases, effectively voiding investigations and even administrative trials. (This practice has continued unabated under the current police commissioner, Tisch.) Caban quit in September 2024 while under a now “deprioritized” federal investigation for soliciting bribes from nightclubs, along with other commanders in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood.

There’s also Chief of Patrol turned Chief of Department Jonathan Chell, who fatally shot a fleeing, unarmed suspect in the back in 2008 and faced no discipline—even though a civil jury found him liable and the city had to pay a $2.5 million settlement. Chell, a Trump enthusiast who was promoted in winter 2024 following Maddrey’s resignation, spearheaded the loosening of the department’s vehicular chase policy, which led to a major spike in injuries and at least a dozen fatalities before it was dialed back. That still didn’t prevent an incident this spring in which a car pursued by officers into Inwood crashed and caught fire. The driver was incinerated while the pursuing officers fled the scene. (Both officers involved in the fatal pursuit are currently suspended with pay while internal investigations continue.) Chell also helped run the Community Response Team, Adams’s reboot of the NYPD’s aggressive anti-crime squads—a brutal, unaccountable unit loaded with problem cops that reportedly livestreams body-camera footage directly to Mayor Adams for his own personal enjoyment. In early October, Chell announced he was putting in his papers for retirement since Adams dropped out of the mayoral race, presumably freeing up more time for him to referee rec league basketball.

This sordid cast of characters is already well known for intimidating local elected officials, reporters, and New Yorkers critical of the police. That behavior triggered a Department of Investigation probe in 2024 that found rampant violations of NYPD policy. No punishment was meted out, though Kaz Daughtry, the deputy commissioner of operations, and Chell did dial back their incendiary posting habits, one of the first directives Donlon issued when appointed commissioner in September 2024. However, Donlon’s lawsuit lays out a more sinister set of allegations that indicates the problem is more than just a bushel of bad apples.

Donlon, for instance, alleges that NYPD contracts were steered to companies associated with Banks and Tim Pearson, a retired inspector who worked in a shadowy role for Adams. Overwatch Services, a security firm once owned by Banks, was placed under investigation by the feds around the time the local news outlet The City revealed it had been given approval for a $1.5 million no-bid contract related to migrant shelters. And Pearson allegedly received kickbacks from a company that provided “panic button” apps to the NYPD’s School Safety Division, prompting an investigation last year.

The suit also alleges that there is regular abuse of overtime by officers loyal to Adams and his NYPD cabal. This includes one female lieutenant who earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in fraudulent overtime that she claims was doled out effectively as a bribe in response to being sexually assaulted by Jeffrey Maddrey. This accusation dovetails with the NYPD’s ballooning overtime spending, which clocked in at $1.1 billion during the 2024 fiscal year, $141 million more than the previous year. According to Donlon’s suit, Internal Affairs investigations were blocked and stymied for officers deemed loyal to Adams and his departmental allies. This not only includes Daughtry, Chell, and Sheppard but also members of the Community Response Team, who were protected from disciplinary consequences by Adams and his minions, despite their documented penchant for abuse.

Donlon’s suit—which is ongoing though the Adams administration has filed motions to dismiss—pointedly declines, however, to cite the NYPD’s violent suppression of pro-Palestine demonstrations (the subject of a class action filed in August), including its brutal raid on an occupied building at Columbia University in April 2024, and the skyrocketing civilian complaint rates. Meanwhile, NYPD legal payouts are through the roof: $206 million in 2024, the highest since 2018.

All this is to say: the NYPD is a shitshow, and has been since time immemorial. The agency hoovers up more than 10 percent of the city budget—roughly $11 billion at last count—as other agencies are cut to the bone. And yet officers are still unhappy: many have been on a “silent strike” since the 2020 protests. A simple metric is traffic enforcement, a basic public safety task, which is down by double-digit percentages since before the pandemic. Fewer than 40 percent of felony offenses are “cleared” (i.e., solved or closed out) by the NYPD, while 32 percent of all felony charges conclude in convictions, with the latter showing a major decline since 2019.

You can also gauge this work slowdown by the number of cops scrolling social media in the middle of the day or loitering in groups, something that prompted Adams to ask New Yorkers to send him proof. Predictably, he was inundated with images of uniformed Candy Crush champions in action.

The point of this long-winded breakdown of the NYPD’s maleficence is that the Adams years have undermined what little credibility the agency had left with much of the city—even with the rank-and-file, who have been leaving in droves. Moreover, the lawsuits leveled by former brass make clear there are an untold number of commanders who were improperly promoted at the expense of other, more qualified officers. The problematic promotions have not been officially addressed, except for the mayor’s continued denial of wrongdoing.

All of this is a gift to Mamdani’s campaign. However, all signs point to the fact that policing will be on the back-burner for Mamdani from now through the November election. There have been some preliminary conversations in his camp about who to select for police commissioner, but the NYPD’s immense structural issues he—or Cuomo—will inherit require attention to detail and a commitment to get ahead of the inevitable conservative media cycle accusing Zohran of being soft on the cops.

Taking on a behemoth like the NYPD that has essentially run itself—to disastrous effect—for decades is no small challenge. And it is increasingly unclear if this is a battle Mamdani is willing to fight. Just last week, Mamdani confirmed press reports that he will ask Jessica Tisch—whose stances on criminal justice policy and police surveillance run contrary to the mayoral favorite—to stay on as his police commissioner.