https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/nyregion/mamdani-police-apology-floyd.html
Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, said on Thursday that he intended to apologize for comments he made in 2020 calling the New York Police Department “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety.”
He said that the remarks, which he wrote in June 2020 in a social media post in support of the defund the police movement, were made after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis a month earlier.
The comments were made “at the height of frustration,” he said in an interview with The New York Times, and were not reflective of his current campaign or “my view of public safety and the fact that police will be critical partners in delivering public safety.”
What? no. I’d say there was strong consensus on the left that Police budgets should be lowered and the funds used for education or literally any other municipal function. “Abollish” the police was more complicated, since even on the far left there’s a lot of disagreement about what “abolish the police” even means. But on “defund” the police, the consensus was from far left to progressive libs. Everyone felt that police budgets should be lowered, and the money used for some good.
The only kvetching I remember was about “defund the police” as a slogan, not as an objective. And the people complaining about it were the ones who managed to convince half of Americans that the police actually got defunded even though that didn’t happen.