Mayor Zohran Mamdani quietly cancelled a massive planned public safety facility that would have combined the training of officers and agents across more than a dozen agencies.
Hizzoner pulled the plug on the initiative — which dates back to former Mayor Eric Adams’ administration — after Mamdani “decided not to move forward with the proposed public safety training facility and there is no funding for it in our budget,” according to a City Hall rep.
“Police officers, correction officers and other law enforcement personnel have distinct responsibilities and training needs, and we determined that spending $225 million to consolidate their existing training facilities was neither necessary nor a good use of public resources,” Mamdani spokesman Sam Raskin said.
It was unclear when Mamdani decided to make the move, which was first reported by City & State.
The facility had been expected to break ground earlier this year as a way to break down the silos between various city agencies that all have some sort of law enforcement arm.
The funding was actually already earmarked in 2021 by then-Mayor Bill de Blasio; however, that was only expected to create a new training facility for the Department of Correction on the NYPD academy campus.
City Council Republican Minority Leader David Carr decried scrapping the training spot and took a dig at Mamdani, a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
“While this is on brand for the defund-the-police, pro-decarceration DSA mayor, cancelling this facility is not just going to hurt policing, it’s going to have a detrimental impact on public safety and array of city services as well as kill hundreds of jobs,” he said.
“It’s a reckless and frankly dangerous move to fulfill a campaign pledge to a bunch of radical zealots.”
The mayor had campaigned on eliminating NYPD overtime completely and refused to add any more cops to the headcount.
He repeatedly faced blowback for his prior comments around defunding police and tried to walk back much of those statements on the campaign trail.
Mamdani, along with nearly every other Democratic mayoral contender, decried the proposed 16-agency facility during the primary last year and compared it to Atlanta’s controversial “Cop City,” which was making headlines at the time.
Adams said at the time that the candidates’ comments showed that they lacked the “ full understanding of how to ensure the city’s No. 1 issue: public safety.”
“[T]his administration took one of the goals of the law-enforcement academy and turned it into the use for several of our agencies — park police, sheriffs, corrections, all of them coming together, dismantling the walls that we had in our law enforcement community previously to unify our law enforcement communities,” he said.
