In the last week of December 2014, New York City police officers made 66 percent fewer arrests than the same week a year earlier, and traffic tickets fell 94 percent, from 10,069 to 587. Summonses for offenses like public drinking fell from 4,831 to 300, and parking tickets fell 92 percent. The New York Post obtained the department’s own enforcement figures and reported them as a work stoppage in all but official declaration. On Jan. 9, 2015, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton confirmed in a radio interview that officers had deliberately stopped the discretionary part of the job. He said they kept answering 911 calls and making the arrests that had to be made, and that through those weeks “crime continued to go down.”

I went back to that record because of how this month’s coverage describes the choices in front of Mayor Zohran Mamdani. On Sept. 24 the NYPD arrested dozens of protesters outside the United Nations during Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit, some of them elected officials from the Democratic Socialists of America, with the Strategic Response Group among the arresting units. On Oct. 8 an ICE agent shot 28-year-old Oscar Belgal in Marble Hill, and at the protests that followed, officers knocked down congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier. The national DSA then demanded that Mamdani fire Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch and abolish the Strategic Response Group.

Mamdani answered on Oct. 12 with a use-of-force review, the first of its kind in a decade by City Hall’s account, and $2.6 million more for the Department of Investigation’s oversight of the NYPD. On Oct. 13 he said Tisch stays. Patrick Hendry, president of the Police Benevolent Association, the union for NYPD patrol officers, said the review was an attempt to appease a base that “wants a wholesale dismantling of the NYPD.” Political analyst Michael Lange, whose newsletter covers New York City politics, wrote on Oct. 15 that the standing fear at City Hall is that firing a commissioner provokes the rank and file, “prompting sick-outs and slowdowns.” Tisya Mavuram, The Nation’s engagement editor, wrote on Oct. 19 that Mamdani keeps his distance from the department because “a police strike could derail his administration.”

That fear names a specific act: officers withhold work until the mayor backs down. The NYPD rank and file have carried it out at scale once, so the record of that episode is the test of what the threat is worth. The 2014 slowdown began on Dec. 22, two days after Ismaaiyl Brinsley shot Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu to death in their patrol car in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and three weeks after a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the chokehold death of Eric Garner. A memo circulating among officers that weekend said no arrests or summonses were “to be taken unless absolutely necessary.” The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association denied writing it and denied sanctioning any slowdown. The numbers above are what followed. By the third week, the city’s Independent Budget Office put the loss at $10 million a week in parking ticket revenue alone.

The best-known analysis of those weeks is a 2017 paper in Nature Human Behaviour, the peer-reviewed social science journal of the Nature group, by Christopher Sullivan, a political scientist at Louisiana State University, and Zachary O’Keeffe of the University of Michigan. They took weekly NYPD data from 76 precincts and compared enforcement and civilian complaints of the seven major felonies across the slowdown weeks with the same weeks a year earlier. Complaints of major crimes fell 3 to 6 percent during the slowdown, with the drop concentrated in felony assault and burglary, and the effect faded in the spring of 2015 as enforcement returned. Their total came to about 2,100 fewer major crime complaints. Their explanation is that aggressive enforcement of petty offenses erodes residents’ willingness to comply with the law, so taking it away improved compliance.

The paper has a published challenge. In August 2024 Aaron Chalfin and David Mitre-Becerril, criminologists at the University of Pennsylvania, and Morgan Williams Jr. of Barnard College re-analyzed the same data in the Journal of Comments and Replications in Economics, a journal built for re-checking published results. Their central finding is that the slowdown varied a great deal by precinct, and the largest drops in major crime came in precincts other than the ones where enforcement fell most, which they call “a quintessential fallacy in statistical reasoning” in the original analysis. They conclude the slowdown changed major crime very little in the short term, in either direction.

The dispute between the two papers is over the cause of the drop. Sullivan and O’Keeffe credit the seven weeks without broken-windows enforcement. Chalfin’s team credits the citywide decline already underway, the one that closed 2014 with 332 homicides against 335 the year before. The union’s threat is a third claim, that the city becomes dangerous when officers stop writing summonses, and both papers contradict that claim. The one time the NYPD tested that claim at full scale, major crime complaints fell and the city lost ticket revenue.

On Oct. 6 the NYPD reported major crime down 6.6 percent citywide this year, with the fewest murders and shootings in the city’s recorded history through nine months. Those are Tisch’s numbers under Mamdani. If the PBA answers the use-of-force review or the end of the Strategic Response Group with another slowdown, the count starts the first week: complaints of the seven major felonies in each precinct against the same weeks of 2025, matched this time against how far enforcement fell in that precinct, which is the comparison Chalfin’s team demanded.

What I learned going back through this is that the slowdown Lange and Mavuram describe as the danger to Mamdani’s administration has already happened, and the city came out of it with lower crime and less parking revenue. The Strategic Response Group and the gang database are his decisions to make on the merits. Two council members, Julie Won and Carmen De La Rosa, asked Mamdani this month for a new commissioner, and the answer to any official who says the union will shut the city down is seven weeks of the NYPD’s own numbers.

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CALL TO ACTION

Mamdani pledged during his campaign to disband the Strategic Response Group, and that decision is his. New Yorkers who want it made can say so through the Contact the Mayor page and to their own representative through the City Council’s district lookup, and the message is the record above: in the seven weeks the NYPD last withheld work, arrests fell 66 percent and major crime complaints fell with them. Readers in any other city where the police union has made the same threat can put the same record in front of their own mayor, and this article is free to forward to anyone who has heard that threat.

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