“I am not running to defund the police,” Zohran Mamdani said in late July, after visiting with the family of the slain police officer Didarul Islam. It was consistent with the stance he’s maintained throughout the New York City mayoral race. His campaign has remained focused on his signature issue—the city’s affordability crisis—and he has not run, in either his successful Democratic primary or the upcoming general election, on a platform of defunding the police.

This fact has not stopped Mamdani’s opponents, chiefly former Governor Andrew Cuomo (whom Mamdani defeated in the primary) and incumbent Mayor Eric Adams (for whom the Trump administration has reportedly dangled job opportunities as incentives to leave the race) from dredging up his past support for the defund movement. In 2020, at the height of the nationwide protests that erupted after the murder of George Floyd, Mamdani posted to social media that the NYPD was “racist, anti-queer and a major threat to public safety,” and that we needed to “#DefundtheNYPD.” At the time, he was running for his current seat in the New York State Assembly.

That he no longer supports defunding the........

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