Portside

New York City Councilmember Vickie Paladino, best known for her rabid Islamophobia and calls for white nationalist militia members to attack her own constituents, sank to a new low earlier this month—even for her. The councilmember joined a horrific, right-wing smear campaign targeting a young woman whose partner was killed in front of her two years earlier. Paladino helped spread the lie that the woman didn’t cooperate with law enforcement, and mocked the woman for her membership in the Democratic Socialists of America and for supporting Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign. “She’s a self-described ‘police abolitionist’ and she’s swooning over Zohran, who shares her politics,” Paladino said.

Paladino eventually deleted her tweets, but she’s just one of the hordes of right-wing trolls to pile on the woman for being the victim of a horrific crime and voicing her support for Mamdani over the last several months. Since Mamdani’s historic primary victory in June, right-wing rags like the New York Post have published deliberately salacious stories about police planning to leave the city in droves if Mamdani takes office. We’re hearing similar stories about billionaires and CEOs planning to do the same—if only either of these stories were true.

The right-wing panic about what a Mamdani victory could mean for the New York Police Department stems from his past calls to defund the police. Earlier this year, his campaign shared a thoughtful video outlining his evidenced-based plan to create a Department of Community Safety that would bolster the city’s safety net, leading to a reduced reliance on the police. Mamdani rightly argued that cities where people’s needs are met are safer than cities with excessive police funding and involvement in emergency responses. 

After all, homicide rates are actually down across the country. Meanwhile, the real threat to people’s lives comes from, say, the Trump administration’s massive cuts to public services that could lead to thousands of deaths. More so than homicide and street-based crimes, people’s lives are endangered each day from being unable to afford health care or housing.

If elected, Mamdani has said he’ll work with the NYPD on his community safety plan. But that hasn’t stopped the right-wing fearmongering, all predicated on the delusional theory that cops make us safer, at this point a mythology akin to believing in the Tooth Fairy.

Police don’t prevent “crime” or violence—they merely (sometimes) respond to it, often inadequately, and often in ways that only worsen or reproduce the violence in question, all while swallowing up cities’ entire budgets. 

Modern policing in the U.S. originates from slave patrols, and policing today builds on that tradition. Black Americans are far more likely to experience police-initiated contact that all too often leads to brutality, incarceration, or even death, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. By design, police don’t protect people; their job is to protect capital and private property. They bulldoze crowds and brutalize and kill human beings in the name of protecting property. And when right-wingers describe the apocalyptic conditions that would arise if cities allocated even a little less funding to police departments, what they’re willfully ignoring is that the crime anecdotes they cite are all happening now, under a status quo of massive funding for police and jails.

The right has long attacked Mamdani over his thoughtful positions on crime, but more recently, these attacks have taken on an even more desperate dimension, manipulatively invoking victims of domestic violence. Earlier this month, right-wing media resurfaced Mamdani’s remarks on a 2020 podcast while he was running for State Assembly, in which he argued that we should rethink sending police to respond to domestic violence or other mental health crises. “There are so many responsibilities we have given to police that frankly should have nothing to do with their departments. A homeless person is on a train, they do not need a stranger with a gun to come and resolve that situation,” he said. “If somebody is jaywalking, if somebody is surviving, going through domestic violence—there are so many different situations that would be far better handled by people trained to deal with those specific situations, as opposed to an individual with a gun.” His current mayoral platform also advocates for police to be replaced with appropriate crisis responders for varying scenarios.

Since the resurfacing of these comments, right-wing commentators are having a field day. Zionist writer Batya Ungar-Sargon shared the audio, claiming, “Zohran Mamdani wants women to have the shit beaten out of them in the best case scenario, be murdered by their husbands in the worst, in the name of Defund the Police.” With zero sense of irony, conservative commentator Megyn Kelly shared the audio and invoked the case of OJ and Nicole Simpson, suggesting that Mamdani’s proposal would kill victims like Nicole. Nicole, of course, repeatedly called the police to report domestic violence and was still murdered while her killer went free. A former NYPD homicide detective called Mamdani’s proposal “absolutely insane” and claimed that if it’s implemented, “homicide rates will increase, women will be pulverized.” 

In reality, it’s hard to identify any group of people who pose a greater danger to abuse victims than the police. About a quarter of victims who call 911 over a domestic violence incident are arrested or threatened with arrest themselves. The National Domestic Violence Hotline’s 2022 survey of 1,500 domestic violence victims (82% of whom contacted police) found that 77% of respondents who called the police were afraid to call them again. Victims, as a class, are far more likely to be jailed than their rapists and abusers: It’s estimated that just 3% of rapists will ever spend a day in jail, while about 90% of incarcerated women are survivors.

The available data shows us just how detrimental policing is to victims’ safety: More than 66% of sexual assaults are unreported, often because victims fear police. Many worry they’ll be punished rather than their abuser—a valid concern given all existing data—or they fear sending someone else to prison. Even if rape victims who report their experiences are believed, many are ultimately re-traumatized for nothing: Hundreds of thousands of rape kits sit untested across the U.S. 

At the same time, police and prison staff are frequently perpetrators of gender-based violence themselves, placing victims who turn to them for help at risk. One survey has shown that about 40% of police officers self-reported as behaving violently toward their spouse or children, and 60% of prison rapes are committed by guards and staff. Sexual abuse is the second-most common act of police misconduct.

There is also no shortage of examples of police officers exploiting their state power to stalk, harass, assault, and even kill women—and these are just the cases we know of. Over the last decade, cops in Arizona, Georgia, Maryland, Kansas, and other states have been exposed for stalking local women. In 2020, the parents of Lauren McCluskey, a Utah woman who was denied a restraining order against her ex-boyfriend who later killed her, filed a lawsuit against police officers, alleging that they shared nude photos of McCluskey. In Oklahoma, an officer named Daniel Holtzclaw was imprisoned for stalking and sexually assaulting more than a dozen Black women from 2013 to 2014.

It’s not a radical position to state that police aren’t trained or equipped to respond to domestic violence; it’s a statement of fact. Directing police to address domestic violence is precisely what leads to tragedies like that of Gabby Petito, who police treated as the abuser, and her eventual killer, Brian Laundrie, as her victim. Body camera footage shows that the police who responded to a call about Petito and Laundrie and performed a wellness check have such a friendly rapport with Laundrie that they appear to laugh and joke with him at different points in the footage. They put Petito’s future killer up in a hotel, while making her spend the night in her van just days before her death. 

Incidentally, a few years before this encounter, one of the officers involved in the encounter allegedly threatened to kill his ex-girlfriend while he worked as a cop in a different city. He was able to simply move cities and continue working as a cop.

You don’t have to be an abolitionist to grasp that the current response system doesn’t work—rather, it actively endangers victims and the public more broadly. In the same resurfaced podcast interview from 2020, Mamdani rightly said, “Police do not create safety. For many, many people across this city and this state, police actually create and amplify violence. And it is very important to speak about that reality that many people have, because it pushes up against the conventional understanding of police, who are seen to be people who come to resolve violence.” 

This reality is concealed by a broad public failure to conceive of violence on a structural level. Grown adults who are unable to grasp the innate violence perpetrated by the state—through not just police brutality, but through austerity policies that enable wealth hoarding, through prisons, through the for-profit health system—are similar to toddlers who lack object permanence. If you don’t slap or murder someone right before their eyes, they don’t recognize the violence.

Police shoot and kill around 1,000 people per year in the U.S., but generations of propaganda have deluded the public into believing that calling police somehow makes any of us safer. Police are agents of the state, which holds a monopoly on violence. The allocation of extraordinary resources and funding to police departments, at the expense of funding a lifesaving social safety, is also violent. State violence extends beyond acts of police brutality—the misallocation of resources also kills. Still, even the most overt acts of state violence, like police brutality, aren’t seen as criminal or violent because of officers’ social and political positioning as agents of the state; consequently, we allow police to remain heralded as the solution to crime and violence when they are, rather, the ultimate purveyors of it.

As journalist Dave McKenna wrote in 2020, referencing the ongoing crisis of poisoned water in Flint, Michigan, yet another example of state violence: “Poison a person, go to jail, they call you a felon for life. Poison a city resulting in dozens of deaths and thousands with brain damage, get a teaching fellowship at Harvard, they call you ex-Gov of Michigan Rick Snyder.”

Mamdani in particular has sparked right-wing ire because he has advocated for defunding the police, which conservatives characterize as the most radical position one could possibly take. “Defund the police” is their boogeyman, the slogan blamed for everything that’s already happening, right now, in a society where police departments are more funded than any other institution.

Time and again, anyone who proposes even modest changes to the current criminal legal system that is responsible for such large-scale suffering is framed as radical. Politicians like Mamdani are forced onto the defensive, pressured to scale back this proposal or that in order to seem more “reasonable.” But in reality, fascists will smear anything even a hair short of fascism as “radical.” 

And we get nowhere by playing their games.

Kylie Cheung is a freelance writer reporting on politics and culture. She is the author of Survivor Injustice: State-Sanctioned Abuse, Domestic Violence, and the Fight for Bodily Autonomy.

When Prism was established in 2019, it was because we knew that the status quo media landscape wasn’t reflecting enough of the truth—and it wasn’t bringing us closer to our vision of collective liberation and justice. We saw a different path forward, one that we could forge by disrupting and dismantling toxic narratives, uncovering the hard truths of injustice alongside the people experiencing the acute impacts of injustice, and providing a platform for people of color to tell their own stories, and those of their communities.