Money is the root of all political power, and the police need to have their budget slashed in almost every municipality in the US. Mamdani has been playing footsie with 70 million dollars which is frankly a joke compared to the NYPD's budget which is over 6 billion. I understand that he can't just come out and say "I'm going to cut it to 10% of its current amount", but he should come out of the gate with an opening bid of something like reducing the budget by 1 billion dollars by retiring all of the expensive military equipment that they have stockpiled, reducing officers and reducing hours, etc.

Personally I would also like to see a rhetorical shift towards the police's role in society, something like "more accounting, less patrolling", with the message being that we should be spending more money getting people's stolen wages (the number one form of theft in terms of dollars stolen and it's not even close) back and fighting white collar crime in general. Then the remainder of the budget could be put to useful things instead of paying overtime for bored thugs to stand around in the subway browsing their phones.