New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani faced a hostile crowd on Staten Island on Tuesday. Sustained boos and chants of “get out of here” cut short his remarks at a police community event. This was quite different from the usual cheery reception of the democrat.
Zohran Mamdani leaves stage after getting booed at Staten Island
The incident happened at the NYPD’s 43rd annual Patrol Borough Staten Island National Night Out Against Crime. It’s an event built around goodwill between officers and locals. Roughly 3,500 people had turned out at Turtle Circle on the Midland Beach Boardwalk when Zohran Mamdani took the podium, and the mood shifted almost instantly.
Boos broke out as soon as Mamdani began speaking, and pockets of the crowd started chanting for him to leave. He pressed on for a few seconds, but his voice was lost under the noise. Rather than push through it, he cut his remarks short, gave a wave and a hand-over-heart gesture toward the crowd, and stepped away from the microphone still smiling. The jeering didn’t stop as he left; several attendees shouted curses in his direction, and an organizer’s reported attempt to settle the crowd went nowhere.
Hours earlier, the NYC Mayor had joined NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch for National Night Out stops in Brooklyn and Manhattan, where he pointed to falling shooting and murder numbers under his watch. It was a warm reception, nothing like what awaited him on Staten Island.
Of the five boroughs, Staten Island is the one place Mamdani failed to win in November’s mayoral race. He only got about 23% of the vote against Andrew Cuomo’s 55% and Curtis Sliwa’s 21%. The borough has stayed cool toward him ever since. Additionally, his past comments about wanting to “defund” the NYPD kept surfacing throughout the campaign as a point of attack.
Budget decisions this year did little to ease that tension. In May, Mamdani had floated hiring 580 additional NYPD officers, but the plan was scrapped before the final budget passed. He pointed to cost savings as the reasoning.
