Add The New York Post on Google Mayor Zohran Mamdani broke with his far‑left Democratic Socialists of America base — and delivered a win for police unions by supporting legislation that would pad cops’ pensions and bump up the NYPD retirement age.
Progressive City Council members had been vowing not to support the two state bills, which require “home rule” messages of support from Big Apple pols to make it through in Albany.
“The progressives were digging in, and the votes weren’t there,” a council source told The Post.
The police union-backed legislation would raise the mandatory retirement age for most NYPD officers from 62 to 65, letting them stay on the job longer. It would also boost pensions by allowing officers to base them on any of their last three years of work, rather than just their final year on the job.
Mamdani on Wednesday issued a last-minute “letter of necessity,” lowering the vote threshold for how much support the bills needed in the council in order to pass muster.
A spokesperson for Mamdani said the mayor sent his support at the council’s request. Council sources said NYPD union leaders had also pressed him to intervene.
In 2022, left‑wing council members, led by Mamdani’s fellow DSA member Tiffany Cabán, successfully killed similar measures by abstaining, leaving the legislation four votes short of passage, according to a City & State report from the time.
Then‑Mayor Eric Adams had not issued a letter of necessity to help push the bill over the top, citing budget concerns.
Still, the NYC‑DSA, during Adams tenure as mayor, accused him of inflating the NYPD’s budget at the expense of other social services programs.
But when Mamdani signaled his support for the bills, many of the council’s progressives followed his lead. Council members voted to back the pro-police home rule messages so overwhelmingly, that the lower vote threshold from Mamdani’s letter of necessity didn’t even matter.
“They’re realizing that opposing everything related to the NYPD for the sake of opposing accomplishes nothing,” one anonymous council member said.
The council approved support for a higher mandatory retirement age for officers by a 47-2 vote, with Council Members Cabán and Althea Stevens voting no, one abstention by Jennifer Gutiérrez and Chi Ossé absent.
The council also approved support for more generous NYPD pensions by a 42-5 vote, with no votes from Council Members Cabán, Stevens, Alexa Avilés, Crystal Hudson and Lincoln Restler and abstentions by Gutiérrez, Sandy Nurse and Julie Won; and Ossé again absent.
Both bills required home rule requests from New York City in order to advance in Albany.
Mamdani, during the mayoral campaign last year, distanced himself from the “defund the police” stance he championed when he was a state assemblyman — parroting similar rallying cries as his fellow socialists for cuts to the NYPD’s budget.
One of his campaign pillars was to fully eliminate police overtime and use the funds to prop up a new agency that would replace cops with social workers in responding to mental health calls. That agency has yet to come to fruition.
Mamdani also faced heat while running for mayor over his past comment against the NYPD, including calling cops racist and anti-queer.
A spokesperson for the mayor said the administration backed the two-bill package to keep on veteran cops longer, adding that the measures would save the city money long-term, without going into detail.
But Restler, a member of the council’s Progressive Caucus, who split with the mayor over the police pension bill, told The Post it would do the opposite.
“The second bill continues a system with perverse incentives where city workers try to pad overtime at the end of their career, and I didn’t think it was fiscally responsible policy,” he claimed.
The mayor’s reversal left some City Hall insiders questioning whether he’s willing to toss aside his past rhetoric whenever it’s politically convenient.
“It’s like, are we defunding the police or are they a necessity? I can’t remember — maybe the mayor can tell me,” quipped a council member.
The mayor previously broke with his DSA allies when he re-appointed Jessica Tisch as police commissioner.
Tisch, a prominent Jewish New Yorker and Zionist, has been at the center of attacks from the city’s socialist club, including because of her calls to roll back a number of state criminal justice reforms from 2019.
