By Edward-Isaac Dovere, CNN
(CNN) — As Zohran Mamdani was asleep on another continent, his top campaign aides wrangled over how he should sound in his statement about an off-duty police officer who had just been shot and killed in Midtown Manhattan along with three other people.
Drafts went back and forth as the news dribbled in, people familiar with and involved in the conversations that night tell CNN about the previously unreported moment. Lines were suggested, pushed back on, tweaked.
This was a tragic moment with a lot of eyes on a measured response, some on the campaign were saying. Not at the expense of their values, others responded. Their candidate had already been navigating how to explain years of speeches, statements and social media posts calling for defunding the police or abolishing them entirely.
Tempers flared. At one point, as the hours ticked by while Mamdani’s small inner circle debated what to say and whether to call the candidate and wake him up, some aides panicked that they weren’t taking the situation seriously enough. A few outside the inner circle even started spit-balling ideas like having someone enlist former Mayor Bill de Blasio to call Mamdani.
The timing of the July rampage, at the end of Mamdani’s two-week vacation in Uganda to celebrate his wedding, challenged a campaign still wrapping its collective head around actually having won the Democratic mayoral primary a month earlier. Mamdani’s absence from New York, which he had announced via a social media video mocking those who’d attack him for it, felt for a moment like a liability.
Officer Didarul Islam’s death laid bare what Mamdani could be facing if he wins the November election and takes over the nation’s largest metropolitan police force after intensely and extensively criticizing the police for years.
Mamdani’s campaign chalks up the critiques he was writing, speaking and posting about the last five years while serving in the State Assembly as from a different political moment than the one he’s in now. But the discussions during what his advisers consider a crucial leadership moment demonstrate how present the thinking behind his longstanding anti-police positioning still is.
Elizabeth Glazer, who served as a criminal justice adviser to de Blasio and current Mamdani opponent Andrew Cuomo when he was governor before starting the group Vital City, told CNN that trying to understand where Mamdani stands is like “Kremlinology watching the reviewing stand and seeing where people are.”
“As he gets closer to actually winning this race, he’s going to have to be able to mediate the reality of what’s happening on the ground in order to govern,” said Glazer, who recently attended an hourlong session on public safety with Mamdani that her group hosted at Columbia University. “That will by necessity mean finding middle ground.”
Jeff Dinowitz, an assemblyman from the Bronx who has served with Mamdani and chairs the Codes Committee, which oversees police, said he is willing to have an open mind about why the candidate’s positions are so different now that he’s running for mayor.
“Some people are smart enough to know that what’s true then may not be true today,” Dinowitz told CNN.
Asked if he would count Mamdani in that group, Dinowitz said, “There’s no way to know.”
Campaign aides declined to have Mamdani or others discuss how his positions on policing changed, or to answer specific questions about whether he still believes in what he said previously. They instead provided a statement from the candidate.
“I will govern on my clear campaign agenda — one New Yorkers have voted for in historic numbers. Leading a city of 8.5 million people requires listening to them to understand their safety concerns, and working with police officers to determine effective solutions,” Mamdani says in the statement. “What I’ve repeatedly heard from rank-and-file officers is that we’re making it too hard for them to perform their primary responsibility: addressing violent crime. They’re overworked and often tasked with responsibilities beyond policing. I’m preparing to face this reality head on, invest in a whole-of-government approach to public safety, and prove that safety and justice are not mutually exclusive.”
Long an advocate of police abolition and a critic of reform
Mamdani a few years ago delivered a searing critique of what Mamdani wants to be as a candidate now.
Running for mayor, Mamdani has proposed a Department of Community Safety, and though he has been vague on both the details and the funding sources for it, the idea is the department would do the kind of community and mental health work that law enforcement are in part doing now and was what the “defund the police” slogan was originally meant to be about.
Five years ago, Mamdani was on a Zoom discussion forum organized by the Democratic Socialists of America’s New York chapter, wearing headphones and a light red T-shirt. As organizers cycled photos of social justice protests on the screen, he dismissed body cameras as proven to have been ineffectual in stopping a Minneapolis police officer from killing George Floyd. He shrugged off “half-assed reforms in response to a system that is built on punishment of Black people.”
“The answer here is not reform. It is replacement. Every time the system is threatened, it will attempt to co-opt critique through the implementation of reform,” Mamdani said, in a video of the session obtained by CNN.
Mamdani went on to call for a “wholesale replacement” of the political class of New York City, and for New York State to “not accept anything less than what we are demanding,” explaining of police, “we really do not need reform, we need replacement. We need the abolition.”
In noting that he got an opponent to return campaign donations from one of the city’s police unions, Mamdani said that the standard should be refusing all such donations because “cop money, law enforcement money, this is money that is coming from unions whose power is built on the murder of Black people across this city and across this country.”
During his first run for assembly in 2020, he said, “police do not create safety for many, many people across this city in this state. Police actually create and amplify violence.” He said of how prisons “are set up in our society, I would argue that they do not work. They do not make us safer.”
Mamdani now says he no longer believes in defunding the police. He told The New York Times earlier in September that he only called police “racist” in what he called “the height of frustration” after Floyd’s killing and that he would apologize.
Mamdani’s campaign did not answer a CNN question about whether he had formally apologized or if his comment to the Times was itself the apology. He also did not address what he now makes of his 2020 comments about not accepting smaller reforms.
Mamdani had his first conversations about running for mayor in the spring of 2024. He scrubbed his campaign and official websites of positions that had previously been listed there. By May 2024, he had replaced the campaign website from those runs with its DSA red-rose icon with just a photo of himself smiling and holding a cup of tea. Later that year he set its content fully to private.
But some of the website’s content remains visible through the Internet Archive, including that Mamdani was calling the New York police “racist” online at least through December 2023.
“We can’t reform our way out of a racist police system that’s working exactly as designed – as a means of control over black & brown New Yorkers. We need to dramatically curtail the power and presence of the NYPD,” the archived website reads.
Mamdani returned to meet with Officer Islam’s family
Mamdani’s ultimate post on X about Officer Didarul Islam was mostly biographical, about the pregnant wife and children the officer left behind and how he told his mother that he joined the force to leave behind a proud legacy. Like Mamdani, Islam was a South Asian immigrant and a Muslim.
“He has done that, and more,” the much worked-over tweet read. “I pray for him, his family, and honor the legacy of service and sacrifice he leaves behind.”
By the time that was posted just after 6am the morning after the shooting, Mamdani was preparing to board a plane back to New York. In part out of genuine concern and in part out of seeing an opportunity to distract from the fact that he was still not back, several aides spread word that Mamdani might be waylaid at the airport at the direction of someone in the Trump administration looking to harass him, two people familiar with the conversations tell CNN.
The aides’ concerns were real enough that they had been in touch with both the New York attorney general’s and governor’s offices in advance to prepare, and had worked out a code for Mamdani to quickly text them if he was being detained.
In the end, Mamdani changed into a suit in the airplane bathroom before he landed, was quickly through customs, and went right to visit the first of the mourning families. He said afterward his criticism of the police didn’t come up when he sat with Islam’s family, and in the long press conference he had afterward pledged, “what I will be as the mayor is someone who recognizes the work that these officers do.”
Dinowitz, the assemblyman who served with Mamdani, has not made an endorsement in the race but he thinks there might be a gap between Mamdani’s mayoral platform and what he truly believes.
“When people say negative things,” Dinowitz added, “I think most reasonable people would want to see more than just your word that you’ve changed.”
CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski contributed to this report.