Alex Vitale, who calls police officers ‘violence workers,’ authored the ‘bible of the movement to defund the police’
New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s transition team has a new “community safety” adviser: Alex Vitale, an outspoken supporter of defunding or abolishing virtually every facet of law enforcement from the local to the federal level, including police, prisons, Border Patrol, ICE, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the FBI, among others.
Alex Vitale is the author of The End of Policing, described as the “bestselling bible of the movement to defund the police.” He has panned police officers as “violence workers” and “the natural enemy of the working class.” He has also called to “abolish prisons,” “abolish the Border Patrol,” “Abolish the FBI,” “Abolish the DEA,” “Abolish the Texas Rangers,” and implement “open borders.”
Mamdani himself has called to “defund” and “dismantle” police. He’s also described the NYPD as “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety,” saying in 2020, “Queer liberation means defund the police.”
Mamdani attempted to walk back those positions during his campaign. He apologized to NYPD officers during a pre-election interview with Fox News, acknowledging that “these men and women who serve in the NYPD, they put their lives on the line every single day.” After his election victory, he announced he would keep New York City police commissioner Jessica Tisch, an ally of rank-and-file cops, in her role.
Vitale’s role on the transition team calls into question the sincerity of those moves. While Mamdani backed away from his calls to defund police, he also proposed the creation of a Department of Community Safety that would replace police with “crisis responders” in “mental health” cases and fight hate crimes through a “restorative justice process.”
Vitale and the Mamdani transition team did not respond to requests for comment.
Vitale is not the only far-left activist named to the team, which is tasked with helping staff New York City’s gargantuan bureaucracy and develop policies so that the new administration can “hit the ground running on January 1st,” as Mamdani put it. Also on the team is Hassaan Chaudhary, who has used the word “Jew” as a slur, called Israel a “bloody country,” and praised former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for saying Israel is a “cancer which will be eliminated very soon.” Chaudhary has described himself as the transition team’s political director.
Mamdani has also waded into local races in the wake of his win, endorsing far-left candidate Aber Kawas for New York State Assembly. Kawas has argued that the 9/11 terrorist attack was a manifestation of America’s “system of capitalism,” “racism,” “white supremacy,” and “Islamophobia.”
“The idea that we have to apologize for, like, a terror attack that, like, a couple people did, and then there is no apologies or reparations for genocides and for slavery, um, et cetera, is something that I kind of find, like, reprehensible,” Kawas said in 2017.
