New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani has ordered the city’s first review in a decade of police use of force, alongside a package of measures intended to strengthen accountability within the New York Police Department (NYPD).
The review comes as progressive politicians press the administration to take a tougher approach to alleged misconduct by officers. City officials said the reforms would include additional oversight and changes designed to prevent disciplinary cases being abandoned when officers retire.
The mayor’s office said the measures followed the retirement of an officer involved in the 2024 shooting death of 19-year-old Win Rozario during a reported mental health crisis. “That officer retired before a disciplinary trial could take place,” it said.
Mamdani has allocated an additional 2.6 million dollars (£2 million) to the Office of the Inspector General, which examines NYPD policies and investigates alleged misconduct.
The package also proposes a notification system to ensure disciplinary hearings are completed before an officer retires. It includes a renewed effort to make the department comply with state reporting requirements concerning deaths involving police.
Pressure over New York police use of force
The NYPD, the largest police force in the United States, has recorded a sharp rise in reported use-of-force incidents since it began collecting the figures in 2016.
There were 12,348 such incidents in 2025, compared with 4,087 in 2016. The figures include physical force, firearms and electrical weapons such as Tasers.
Progressive pressure has focused in particular on the Strategic Response Group, an NYPD unit deployed for protests, major events and what the department describes as “civil disorder”.
Earlier this month, 17 state politicians and political nominees called for the unit to be disbanded, citing its response to demonstrations against a recent US Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation. The group included congressional candidates Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, both of whom were endorsed by Mamdani.
The protests followed the shooting of 28-year-old Oscar Belgal by an ICE officer on October 8 while he was inside an SUV with his five-year-old son in New York’s Marble Hill neighbourhood. Mamdani condemned the shooting and called for Belgal to be released from federal custody.
Chevalier said on social media that she had been “shoved to the ground by an officer” during the demonstrations. She also alleged that she saw police escalate the violence and that unmarked law-enforcement vehicles struck protesters as officers moved people out of their path.
Critics have also called for Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch to resign. Tisch was appointed by Mamdani’s predecessor, Eric Adams, and can be removed by either the mayor or the governor of New York State.
Despite the criticism over policing, New York officials have reported falls in crime. The city said the first nine months of the year and the third quarter saw the fewest shooting incidents, shooting victims and murders in recorded history.
Major crime, including murder, rape, felony assault and grand larceny, fell by 9.4 per cent in the third quarter and by 6.6 per cent compared with the same period the previous year.
A City Hall spokesperson said the use-of-force review had been in development before the ICE shooting and the protests that followed.
