Mamdani’s red guards take shape

We reported some time ago on New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plan to create a “Department of Community Safety.” This is the initiative that gets characterized misleadingly as simply a plan to replace cops with social workers. It is much more than that. It is much more frightening than that. It is the ultimate fulfillment of the leftist vision of abolishing the police and substituting for them a cadre of individuals who will be empowered to forge the new society Mamdani and his Marxist supporters envision.

The first step in this effort has been the creation of something called the Office of Community Safety. It has an initial budget of a quarter of a billion dollars. Mamdani established the office in a March 19 executive order. The Office of Community Safety is intended as a precursor to a larger Department of Community Safety, which would have a total yearly budget of $1.1 billion, with more than $600 million coming from undefined “transfers of existing programs.”

The language in Mamdani’s executive order places the Office of Crime Victim Services, Office for Neighborhood Safety and the Prevention of Gun Violence, Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence, Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes, and Office of Community Mental Health under the control of the new agency. Renita Francois is the head of this new office with the status of deputy mayor.

Francois, 42, spent the past four years working for West Hollywood, California-based Beyond Impact, most recently as its chief program officer. Per the New York Post, the group’s programs include:

“Dream Defenders,” a “black-led, feminist, socialist, abolitionist, and internationalist political formation fighting for a world without prisons, police, capitalism, and imperialism.”

“Movement for Black Lives Action,” which embraces the “Defund the Police” movement, supports abolishing prisons and providing reparations for slavery descendants. Beyond Impact has received more than $51 million over the past decade from Soros’ Open Society Foundation.

Originally published by AND Magazine