Mamdani Taps Academic Who Wrote of The ‘End of Policing’ For Community Safety Role

One of Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s newest transition team picks for community safety is a professor known for pushing the elimination of traditional policing — a move that immediately sparked backlash across New York City, though wasn’t unexpected given Mamdani’s history of “defund the police” ideology; a notion he claimed to have abandoned on the campaign trail.

Alex Vitale, a sociology professor at Brooklyn College, was announced Monday as part of Mamdani’s incoming advisory group on community safety during the mayoral handover.

Vitale celebrated the appointment online, writing on X, “I’m excited to announce that I have been asked to join the Mamdani Transition Team to work on community safety issues. A New Era for NYC.”

Vitale is best known for his 2017 book The End of Policing, which openly argues that policing itself, not training or tactics, is a problem at its core. The book condemns “broken windows” strategies and other proactive enforcement measures, insisting they have harmed minority communities.

“The problem is not police training, police diversity, or police methods. The problem is the dramatic and unprecedented expansion and intensity of policing in the last 40 years, a fundamental shift in the role of police in society,” a description of the book says.

His position is blunt: “The problem is policing itself.”

Vitale has repeatedly denounced broken-windows policing, maintaining that NYPD strategies have unfairly singled out minority neighborhoods. Now, with his selection by Mamdani, a wave of critics — from retired officers to everyday New Yorkers — warned that his ideology could destabilize the city.

One person posted, “RIP NYC,” while others called the pick “a guaranteed disaster.” Another critic wrote, “Reading your bio, the last thing in the world I’d entrust you with is community safety.”

Vitale is expected to help shape the policy direction of Mamdani’s administration as the transition continues.