New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is expected to announce soon that he will disband the Strategic Response Group within the New York City Police Department.
The unit has two functions — counterterrorism and the containment of violent protests. The second made it a target as Mamdani was campaigning for his office in 2025, when he promised protesters he would no longer make the police a thorn in their side.
According to Politico, Mamdani wants to remove police officers from dealing with violent protests, and instead rely on a civilian unit.
The plan puts police in a backup role in case the softer approach to dealing with violent mobs does not produce peace and harmony as expected.
Mamdani’s Office of Community Safety is a likely home for the unit that will swaddle protesters in de-escalation, Politico quoted a source as saying.
A City Hall representative said Mamdani is going to do what he promised.
“As the Mayor has said, our administration will disband the Strategic Response Group and separate protest response from counterterrorism,” representative Dora Pekec said. “We will have more to share soon.”
Mamdani said in September 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.”
“And what it has eventually become is both dealing with counterterrorism and responses to exercising First Amendment rights. 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,” he said.
City Council member Chi Ossé, a democratic socialist, has introduced legislation to disband the unit.
The New York City Police Benevolent Association pushed back on the decision in a post on its Facebook page.
“Mayor Mamdani has spent years scoring political points by singling out and demonizing one particular group of police officers,” PBA President Patrick Hendry said in the post.
“If he’s now planning to replace them with civilians, he should be honest: SRG’s dual role was never the real issue. He and his radical allies just don’t want the NYPD involved in policing demonstrations at all,” he said.
“Ever since we fought the city’s dangerous federal lawsuit settlement, we have warned that forcing cops to sit on the sidelines until a demonstration has already turned violent puts both police officers and the public at greater risk. No matter what changes he makes, the mayor can’t be foolish enough to believe they will satisfy his base,” he wrote.
The Biden-era settlement he referenced came after rioting in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, when the NYPD was sued for its response to the violence.
“’Disband SRG’ was always code tor ‘Disband the whole NYPD,’ and they won’t stop until they achieve that goal,” he wrote.
In March, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said that of the 4,255 protests at which NYPD officers were present in 2025, the SRG was at 245 of them, which was about 6 percent, according to Fox News.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
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