Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani reversed course Wednesday on his earlier stance regarding police involvement in domestic violence incidents, saying the NYPD will continue to handle those calls.

The shift came during his first public appearance with incoming Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who will remain in her role under Mamdani’s administration.

“That has not been part of the proposal we have put forward over the course of the campaign,” Mamdani said when asked if his planned Department of Community Safety would take over such 911 responses. “What we did say is it’s untenable for officers to be asked to respond to 200,000 mental health calls that are received every year.”

The socialist Queens assemblyman, 34, faced sharp criticism during the campaign after a 2020 podcast resurfaced in which he suggested police should not respond to domestic violence cases due to potential “escalation.”

“If somebody is surviving, going through domestic violence… there are so many different situations that would far better be handled by people trained to deal with those specific situations as opposed to an individual with a gun,” he said at the time on the *Immigrantly* podcast.

Mamdani’s central public safety proposal remains the creation of a Department of Community Safety, aimed at shifting homelessness and mental-health responses away from police and toward civilian crisis teams. However, he now says domestic violence incidents will stay under NYPD responsibility.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)