Mamdani Plans to Disband NYPD’s Protest Unit Monday, but a City Official Calls It ‘a Rebrand’
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is expected to announce Monday that he will disband the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group, the specialized unit that handles both protest response and counterterrorism, according to multiple people familiar with the plan.
City Hall has already confirmed the intent. “As the Mayor has said, our administration will disband the Strategic Response Group and separate protest response from counterterrorism,” spokesperson Dora Pekec said in a statement to Politico. “We will have more to share soon.”
Mamdani reiterated the pledge Friday when a reporter asked, “Who responds to terrorist threats if the Strategic Response Group is disbanded?” The mayor said he is “committed to disbanding the Strategic Response Group,” Fox News reported, and did not spell out who would take over those duties.
“I have made very clear that the focus of the conversations that have taken place since being in office has been to do this in a way that keeps New Yorkers safe and protects their First Amendment rights,” Mamdani said Friday, NBC New York reported.
The democratic socialist made disbanding the unit a core promise of his 2025 campaign, saying on social media that it had “cost taxpayers millions in lawsuit settlements + brutalized countless New Yorkers exercising their first amendment rights,” The New York Times reported. He has been in office nearly a year without doing it, drawing pressure from his base in the Democratic Socialists of America.
A city official told the New York Post the Monday announcement will have little effect on the ground. “This is not a disband, this a rebrand,” the official said. Insiders told the paper the unit would keep operating under a different name and would still respond to active shooters and other potential mass-casualty or terrorism-related events.
City & State reported that Mamdani’s proposal would create a civilian de-escalation unit in the mayor’s Office of Community Safety, which would work with the NYPD’s “First Amendment units” as the first line of response at protests, plus a new “Patrol Support” unit that would inherit much of the SRG’s protest duties, including mass arrests. Two people briefed on the plan told the outlet that the Patrol Support unit was a condition of support from NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, and that the department now backs the plan. Police-reform advocates are already privately warning that Patrol Support could be the SRG under a new name, the report said.
The New York Post reported that the civilian workers have not been hired or trained, that the Office of Community Safety currently has only two employees, and that one source predicted the civilian piece is “at least a year out.” The civilians would not respond to protests without armed officers, insiders told the paper.
Mamdani is also expected Monday to endorse the CURB Act, a City Council bill sponsored by Council Member Chi Ossé that would bar the SRG from protest duty and ban officers from using kettling, tear gas, pepper spray, bicycles and long-range acoustic devices while policing demonstrations, City & State reported. The bill has not had a hearing. Council Speaker Julie Menin is quietly opposed, and Public Safety Committee Chair Oswald Feliz has not allowed it to advance, sources told the outlet.
Police Benevolent Association President Patrick Hendry doubted the plans would satisfy the mayor’s base. “No matter what changes he makes, the mayor can’t be foolish enough to believe they will satisfy his base,” Hendry said, the New York Post reported. “‘Disband SRG’ was always code for ‘Disband the whole NYPD,’ and they won’t stop until they achieve that goal.”
The SRG was created in 2015 and has about 500 officers, according to City & State and the New York Post. NYPD leaders have described the unit as highly trained and able to make arrests safely during large, chaotic demonstrations, Politico reported. At a March City Council budget hearing, Tisch said the SRG does not typically handle peaceful protests and is deployed when protests involve criminal activity. She said the NYPD facilitated 4,255 protests in 2025 and the SRG was available at 245 of them, or about 6%, Fox News reported. The Post said the unit has handled violent demonstrations fewer than 20 times this year and made around a dozen arrests.
Mamdani has long argued the unit’s two missions should be split. “The SRG were created a little more than a decade ago with an intention first of dealing with threats, terroristic threats to the city,” he said at a September news conference, Politico reported. “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.”
Supporters of the unit say it is a critical asset for civil disorder, major events and counterterrorism. NBC New York noted that a gunman killed four people in a Park Avenue office building last year in the city’s deadliest mass shooting since 2020, and that Mamdani did not elaborate Friday on how terrorism responses might change. The formal announcement has not been issued and is expected Monday.
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