New York City spent the 1990s building its police force to 40,000 officers – and watched violent crime collapse by 50 percent in one of the most dramatic public safety turnarounds in American history.
Now a Democratic socialist mayor wants to run the same experiment in reverse.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani just canceled plans to hire 5,000 new NYPD officers – and former NYPD Chief John Chell went on Fox & Friends Thursday to explain exactly what New Yorkers are getting in return.
Mamdani's NYPD Budget Cuts Funded His DEI Bureaucracy Instead
The trade-off is sitting right there in Mamdani's $127 billion preliminary budget for fiscal year 2027.
Gone: the phased plan to restore the NYPD to roughly 40,000 officers – a force level that would have cost $315.8 million over its lifetime and put cops back in neighborhoods currently running on roughly 34,000 to 35,000.
Staying: $5.6 million for the Office of Racial Equity, $4.6 million for the Commission on Racial Equity, $835,000 for the Commission on Gender Equity, and six-figure diversity officer salaries spread across the fire department and Department of Education.
That's more than $10 million for racial equity bureaucrats – and zero new cops.
"Recipe for disaster," Chell said Thursday. "Public safety is the key to New York City."
He wasn't being dramatic.
The NYPD is already losing officers at a rate of roughly 4,000 per year through retirements and resignations.
Mamdani's budget does nothing to replace them.
The force that was supposed to grow to 40,000 is instead likely to shrink well below 34,000.
"So, you're gonna raise my taxes 10%, and you're going to reduce my public safety for my city," Chell said. "That's very appetizing for me to stay in New York City, isn't it?"
Defund the Police Already Destroyed San Francisco – New York Watched and Did It Anyway
San Francisco tried this exact experiment.
In 2020, Mayor London Breed redirected $120 million away from police and sheriffs to fund "equity" initiatives.
District Attorney Chesa Boudin stopped prosecuting what he called low-level crimes.
Within a year, homicides were up 17 percent, and the Central District recorded a 753 percent spike in car break-ins.
The San Francisco Chronicle – no conservative publication – actually asked readers in print whether they should learn to "tolerate" burglaries as a fact of life.
The backlash was swift.
San Franciscans recalled Boudin in June 2022 by a 10-point margin.
Breed reversed course, declared a public safety emergency, and started pleading for more police funding.
One supervisor who had championed defunding police was later publicly furious that there were "no officers" left to send to her district.
New York City watched all of that happen.
Mamdani is doing it anyway.
NYC Property Tax Hike and Police Cuts: Even the Washington Post Says Mamdani Has a Problem
When Mamdani unveiled the budget Tuesday, the Washington Post editorial board put out a piece built around one damning phrase about his spending plan: "Socialist utopia is expensive."
The board noted that Mamdani's $127 billion budget is larger than the state budgets of 47 states – including Florida, which runs a government for 23 million people.
If you've lost the Washington Post, you've lost the room.
Mamdani is threatening New York City homeowners with a 9.5 percent property tax increase – hitting more than 3 million residential units – if Albany won't raise income taxes on the wealthy.
Middle-class homeowners who voted for Mamdani are already doing the math: higher taxes, fewer cops, and a $10 million racial equity bureaucracy that has never stopped a single mugging.
New York City's great crime decline – the one that made the city livable again after the crack epidemic – was built on a simple foundation: put cops in the street, hold criminals accountable, and don't apologize for it.
Mamdani just told New York he's got a better idea.
Former Chief John Chell has seen this movie before.
He knows how it ends.
Sources:
- Max Bacall, "Former NYPD chief calls police cuts 'recipe for disaster' as Mamdani threatens tax hikes," Fox News, February 19, 2026.
- Fox News Politics, "Mamdani plan pours millions into 'racial equity' offices and six-figure diversity jobs, cuts 5K NYPD jobs," Fox News, February 18, 2026.
- Washington Examiner, "Mamdani's budget proposes millions for racial and gender equity," Washington Examiner, February 19, 2026.
- Fox News, "San Francisco defunded the police before reversing course the next year amid calls for 'accountability'," Fox News, August 2022.