Mamdani Wants to Shut Down NYPD Counterterrorism

Open season for Muslim terrorists on New York City

Oct 28, 2026

When Islamic terrorists strike, when there’s an active shooter or a riot in progress, the elite members of the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group are there as the tip of the spear.

The SRG is more than a SWAT team, it’s a rapid response group made up of hundreds of officers that can be deployed anywhere in New York City to deal with crisis situations. Created in response to the Bataclan massacre carried out by Islamic terrorists in Paris, members of the SRG receive advanced counterterrorism training, have special equipment and are ready to jump into action.

SRG replaced the NYPD’s Hercules teams that were set up after the Muslim terrorist attacks in Mumbai meant to provide “an effective fighting force if challenged by terrorists”. The SRGs were trained to deal with suicide bombers, heavily armed terrorists and violent insurgencies.

When running for office, Zohran Mamdani, the Muslim foreign politician, promised to defund and abolish the SRG after various members of the pro-crime movement and terrorist defense lobbies in New York City, including the NYCLU and the Vera Institute for Justice, had clamored that the SRG was violating ‘civil rights’ and restraining BLM and pro-Hamas rioters.

Mamdani has not yet been able to fulfill his pledge to abolish the SRG, but he has crippled the elite unit by ordering that it can only be deployed with his approval. This eliminates much of the useful of a rapid response team that can respond immediately to a crisis without having to get the approval of a politician who seems to spend most of his time at rallies and doing TikTok videos.

SRG deployments can occur in response to early intelligence warnings of an Islamic terrorist attack. Mamdani’s security clearance took a great deal of time to approve, likely because of his ties to Islamic terrorists and their political allies. His pick for Chief Counsel had been the lawyer for the 20th hijacker. There is an obvious conflict between an elite counterterrorism unit that is meant to act on intelligence about possible Islamic terrorist plots having to get pre-approval from a politician with Islamic terrorist ties who struggled to get his security clearance approved.

The problem is even more urgent because, as Freedom Center Investigates found earlier this year, Islamic terrorist attacks are up 243% in Mamdani’s first year occupying Gracie Mansion and “3 out of 4 Islamic terrorist plots in New York City in the last three years took place after Mamdani’s election ‘victory’.” The last time that there were this many Islamic terrorist attacks in New York City in one year was nearly a decade ago in 2017 during the ISIS boom.

This shows why the SRG is needed more than ever even as Mamdani is trying to eliminate it.

The official objections have been to SRG’s riot response, but the massive Muslim-Marxist riots in Paris, which have been spreading across Europe, show exactly why that’s also needed.

Mamdani’s jihad against the NYPD’s Special Response Group continues the dismantling of what had been the most elite counterterrorism police force in the country. The NYPD’s counterterrorism intelligence capabilities are a shell of what they once were when the police force was able to disrupt Muslim terrorist plots before they happened.

Under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, a close political ally of Mamdani’s mentor Linda Sarsour, much of the NYPD’s counterterrorism intelligence operations, which monitored terror mosques, were shelved, and instead the NYPD launched the useless Racially and Ethnically Motivated Extremism unit (R.E.M.E.) to combat ‘right-wing extremism’ in a city far to the left of the country.

R.E.M.E., created after a black nationalist massacre of Jews in Jersey City, was hailed by the media as a way to stop “right-wing extremism”. The only significant mention of the unit, which had been billed in one story as “seeking out antisemitism before it occurs”, making actual arrests, was the recent arrest of a man for supposedly plotting to firebomb the home of terrorist supporter Nerdeen Kiswani who had celebrated Hamas and whose rallies featured the burning of American flags. This follows the transformation of the NYPD’s counterterrorism and intelligence capabilities from stopping Islamic terrorism to running cover for Islamic terrorists.

Mamdani’s plot to dismantle the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group would further cripple the ability of the police to resist Islamic terrorism and the Marxist-Muslim riots of the Left.

The reasons for that are unfortunately all too obvious.

Despite the ongoing threat of Islamic terrorism, Islamic groups and radical leftist organizations waged a sustained campaign to smear any counterterrorism, at either the local or national levels, as ‘Islamophobic’ and to castigate any efforts at riot control as vicious and abusive.

The unstated goal is to leave New York City open to Islamic terrorism and to major riots.

If Zohtan Mamdani succeeds in dismantling the SRG, that will send a clear signal to everyone from ISIS to the rioting mobs that it’s open season on New York City. And that will cost lives.

But the same pro-crime movement fighting to shut down the SRG has never flinched from the devastating consequences of its pro-crime policies, like eliminating bail so that violent criminals are cut loose within hours of their latest assault, and much of the New York Democrat Party has embraced those policies and refused to back away from them despite the heavy toll on crime victims. The pro-crime movement still seeks to free all criminals by eliminating prisons and to eliminate the police and replace them with social workers. Naturally, the SRG has to go.

And for Zohran Mamdani and his Islamic terrorist allies, the SRG is an even bigger problem.

When two Muslim terrorists targeted critics of the Muslim politician outside Gracie Mansion, a massacre might have happened if their bombs had worked properly. The two teenage terrorists were reportedly recorded calculating that their bombs were “going to kill about 8 to 16 people,” or as many as 60 people if the area were crowded. In this kind of scenario, the NYPD’s SRG isn’t protecting Mamdani, it’s protecting his opponents from his supporters.

And so dismantling the NYPD’s counterterrorism capabilities can only politically benefit Mamdani even as it opens the door for Muslim terrorists to massacre New Yorkers.

This article previously appeared at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s Front Page Magazine.

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