Amanda Jack, Policy Director for The Legal Aid Society’s Criminal Law Reform Unit, recently joined The Brian Lehrer Show to discuss the lack of police reform under Mayor Mamdani.

The Mayor campaigned on a fundamentally different vision of public safety, including less criminalization, stronger civilian oversight, and greater reliance on health and social-service responses. Nine months into his administration, many of those commitments remain unfulfilled.

Mamdani promised the City would not return to broken windows policing, but recent data shows that low-level enforcement has continued and even increased under his administration.

“This is a debunked idea: that low-level policing leads to the deterrence of more serious crimes,” Jack said. “We’ve known this for decades; study after study has disproven the 1985 theory of ‘broken windows policing’.”

“A policing approach where we send out specialized units that have high rates of known misconduct and brutality into our communities is not keeping all New Yorkers safe,” she continued. “It doesn’t make sense to over-rely on policing; we have to be willing to move toward a more common-sense approach.”

“A lot of this is about putting resources into community-based programming,” Jack said. “Behavioral health programming, supportive housing, stable and affordable housing, these are things that really help address the instability that often causes people to find themselves in the criminal legal system.”

Listen to the full segment below.