Democratic New York mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani could have responded to the murder of a New York City Police officer in any number of ways. He chose to go the shameless route, pretending that he wasn’t using the death of a police officer to rewrite his history of hating the police.
Mamdani held a press conference on Wednesday after NYPD Officer Didarul Islam and three others were shot and killed. Mamdani said his anti-police posts were from way back in the year 2020, made “amidst a frustration that many New Yorkers held at the murder of George Floyd.” He also pointed out that he wasn’t even a New York assemblyman when he made them. He is not running to defund the police, he claimed, instead pretending that he cared deeply about police and policing. He even used his meeting with Islam’s grieving family as a cudgel to wield against his opponents.
There are several points of clarification to be made here. For one, in the far-off year of 2020, Mamdani was 28 years old, not a child, nor some naïve college student, but a full-grown adult. And, while it is true that he was not a New York assemblyman at the time, he began his campaign in October 2019. He won the Democratic primary in June 2020, just one month after Floyd’s death. His anti-police comments are undoubtedly tied to his political career…