Mayor Zohran Mamdani is facing growing criticism from civil rights leaders over his response to a viral video showing NYPD officers beating a man during a mistaken-identity arrest.
The backlash intensified this week after the Rev. Kevin McCall, a prominent Brooklyn clergy leader, said Mamdani had not done enough in the days since the April 14 incident.
“All he’s doing is smiling and not getting results,” McCall said after meeting Monday with NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch.
McCall said Tisch acknowledged problems with Brooklyn North Narcotics, telling him that “the units have gone rogue,” according to a report by 1010 WINS.
The meeting came after an eight-minute video circulated online showing a pair of plainclothes detectives punching and kicking a man, later identified as Timothy Brown, inside a Brooklyn liquor store last week.
Police later acknowledged that Brown was not the suspect they were seeking, and charges against him were dropped.
In response to the incident, Tisch disbanded the narcotics team involved and reassigned at least eight of its officers.
Four officers directly tied to the arrest were placed on modified duty.
At the time McCall made his comments Monday afternoon, the Mamdani administration had said only that the NYPD was investigating the incident and no additional steps had been announced.
“The violence used by NYPD officers in this video is extremely disturbing and unacceptable. Officers should never treat a person this way. The NYPD is conducting a full investigation into this incident,” Hizzoner wrote on X last week.
Other activists also criticized Mamdani’s restrained response.
Hawk Newsome, co-founder of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York, said the video reflected broader problems in the NYPD’s narcotics units and called for accountability.
Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner, said the video brought back “déjà vu” from her own experience with police violence.
Mamdani addressed the case Monday night at an unrelated event with WNYC, saying his administration had a “tapestry of responses” to the video.
But he largely described steps Tisch had already announced earlier in the day, including reassigning the officers.
“In that video, it was incredibly disturbing, but also unacceptable,” Mamdani said. “There were the immediate actions that we took to reassign these officers.”
Mamdani has long had a tense relationship with the NYPD, but the backlash over this case has put him under a new kind of pressure from both activists and police critics.
“We have heard from multiple constituents that this is part of something larger, something that troubles them,” Mamdani said. “That means we in city government need to look deeper than just this one case, and as we reflect on that, we will share with New Yorkers the steps we are going to take.”
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