New York's mayor is closing in on a long-promised change to a specialized police unit.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani is reportedly preparing to announce a plan to disband the NYPD's Strategic Response Group, fulfilling a campaign pledge that has drawn pressure from his base. The move has also raised questions about how the unit's duties would be replaced.
Fox News reported that Politico first detailed the preparations, describing Mamdani, a democratic socialist, as ready to dissolve a force that responds to protests, civil disturbances and major events while also handling counterterrorism operations. Mamdani has said he wants to decouple those protest and counterterrorism functions.
At a March City Council budget hearing, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said discussions with the mayor concerned "the future of how we police protests generally," not disbanding the unit. The department says the Strategic Response Group is a "critical asset" during parades, protests and the papal visit.
Department materials say the group's officers are "also deployed to areas requiring an increased police presence due to increased crime or other conditions" and "mobilizes for shootings, bank robberies, missing persons, demonstrations, or other significant incidents." According to her testimony, the unit does not typically deal with peaceful protests and is sent when protests involve criminal activity.
She also noted that in 2025 the NYPD facilitated 4,255 protests and the Strategic Response Group was available at 245 of them, or roughly 6%. Sources familiar with the plan told Politico that City Hall has been considering placing the unit under Mamdani's new Office of Community Safety, which launched earlier this year.
Those sources also said the plan could be formalized through an executive order. "I've been clear that my vision is for the disbanding of the SRG. And the reason for that vision is that the SRG were created a little more than a decade ago with an intention first of dealing with threats, terroristic threats to the city," Mamdani said during a September press conference.
"What it has eventually become is both dealing with counterterrorism and responses to exercising First Amendment rights," the mayor continued. "I do not believe that those purposes need to be dual purposes. I believe that we should have a focus on counterterrorism that is separate from our response to the use of First Amendment [that] continues to be a conversation I'm having with our police commissioner."
The outlet reached out to City Hall for confirmation and comment on the mayor's reported plan, but did not hear back in time for publication. "As the Mayor has said, our administration will disband the Strategic Response Group and separate protest response from counterterrorism," spokesperson Dora Pekec told Politico. "We will have more to share soon."
The same report said the outlet also reached out to the NYPD for comment. City Hall's public confirmation of the disbanding plan has, so far, come through Pekec's remarks to Politico.
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