by Douglas Murray
Well, New York — we’re going to be in for quite a ride. But then I suppose many voters knew that when they voted in Zohran Mamdani as mayor last month. Even so, the number of radicals he has already appointed should still make New Yorkers gulp.
The Post this week revealed the inept, badly spelled list of appointees to Zo’s transition team. But personally I wouldn’t be surprised if Mamdani headquarters deliberately got the names of their appointees wrong. After all, if you get their names right, it doesn’t require much digging to realize that the people who are going to advise the mayor on this city’s justice system have a certain one-sided expertise. And that side is the wrong one.
Traditionally, experts in criminal justice, policing and safety are people who are opposed to criminals. Not people whose experience is of supporting criminals or actually being criminals.
Take the appointment of Lumumba Bandele to serve on the soon-to-be-mayor’s “Committee on Community Organizing.” As well as being a black nationalist, Bandele has also spent his career supporting people who have killed cops in New York and New Jersey. That’s nice news for all the NYPD officers who put their lives on the line every day in this city.
Advocates for bad guys
Then there’s the appointment of Sarita Daftary from a group called “Freedom Agenda.”
This group describes itself as being “dedicated to organizing people and communities directly impacted by incarceration to achieve decarcerating and system transformation.”
In other words, the group campaigns for people who commit crimes rather than people who suffer from them, and believes prison is the problem with crime rather than the solution to it.
Finally — and worst — there has been the appointment of Mysonne Linen, a rapper who served seven years in state prison for committing armed robberies in the 1990s. Now he is going to sit on the mayoral transition’s “criminal legal system committee,” boasting on Instagram that “we are building something different.” That’s for sure.
Many New Yorkers may think none of this makes any sense. But in the world of radical left politics in which our mayor-elect marinates, it makes complete sense.
Because all these appointments are evidence not just that Mamdani likes to pal around with bad people — we already knew that. The policies are based around Mamdani’s career-long belief that prisons are the problem and that closing them is the solution.
It’s the same thinking that means he will take advice from someone who beat up and robbed cabdrivers, but not from cabdrivers who have been beaten up and robbed. This makes sense only if we understand the kinds of models that Mamdani and his fellow radicals look to.
High up on their list of happy places is the system of justice that has been tried out in South Africa. This is the system known as “restorative justice.”
It emerged out of the post-apartheid era when the remarkable “truth and reconciliation” commissions ensured that the country didn’t fall into an endless series of trials of people who had committed terrible wrongs during the apartheid era.
New, leftist approach
But underneath that, a whole new approach to crime and justice was developed.
Professing to be rooted in traditional, local African customs and traditions, it is inevitable that this Third Worldist hokum would appeal to Mamdani and company.
It is the sort of claims that Mamadani’s father and others have spent their lives pushing from within America’s universities.
The belief system is centered on the idea that criminal justice as most of us understand it is a “white” and — you guessed it — “colonialist” idea.
It suggests that identifying criminals, convicting them for crimes and sending them to prison does not address the “root causes” of violence and that older, pre-colonial traditions are needed to address justice.
Several things need to be noted here.
The first is that there was no golden age of justice before the colonial era.
Most of Africa — including South Africa — was governed by justice as brutal and arbitrary as possible in centuries past.
The idea that incarceration for crime is some kind of white man’s imposition on a previously Edenic society is utter fantasy.
African tribes had their own ways of meting out justice, and I’d be surprised if even Zohran Mamdani and his supporters would support some of those means.
But “restorative justice” doesn’t just blame white, Western systems for processes of punishment and imprisonment (also labeled as “vengeance”).
It claims that in order to get past such “white” systems, it is necessary to involve the perpetrators of crime as well as its victims.
This is meant to “unlock” the cycle of violence.
It is why the mayor-elect has talked about the importance of replacing cops with mental health outreach workers.
Certainly it is the case that this city and state needs far better facilities to address the mainly drug-driven mental-health-disaster cases that we can see on our streets every day.
But turning roles that should be carried out by cops into situations overlooked by health workers puts the whole thing the wrong way around.
The purpose of convicting, punishing and imprisoning people who commit crimes is not because it is fun to do so.
Nor is it because it is some “white” tradition.
It is because policing crime should primarily be about protecting victims and stopping there from being more of them.
Imprisoning dangerous offenders like Mysonne Linen is necessary because it is necessary to prevent other cabdrivers in the city from being held up and violently robbed.
Expect suffering
But expect Mamdani and his new appointees to take a very different approach.
And expect the whole city to suffer as a result.
Why can I say with confidence that we will suffer from this approach?
Well you only have to look at that great hope of Mamdani and company: South Africa.
Unfortunately, South Africa happens to have one of the highest crime rates of any nation in the world. I just checked our own State Department’s travel advisory for the country: “Violent crime is common and includes robbery, rape, carjacking and mugging.”
Other advice includes “avoid walking alone, especially after dark.”
As they say: coming to a city near you.
Very soon.
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