Early Monday, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani convened the press for an announcement. A civilian not privy to Mamdani’s advance schedule might have thought that the mayor would inform the public about the latest subway horror: the noontime Saturday killing of 26-year-old Darrel Rodriguez, commuting home from his job as a Midtown security guard, shot by a disguised, hooded, and masked gunman who, despite ubiquitous Manhattan cameras, has evaded a police manhunt for at least two days. (He is still on the run.) Instead, reporters who attended and members of the public who joined on YouTube to see the mayor were in for a spectacle: a grinning Mamdani bounding up to a podium to campaign-style music, against a backdrop of ebullient toddlers bouncing on an indoor jungle gym. “Good morning, my fellow New Yorkers,” he said to adults cheering and waving bright placards. “Today is an extraordinarily exciting day.”
What was the big news? Twelve thousand new childcare slots for two-year olds . . . beginning nearly a year from now.
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The mayor’s staged joy, only days after a crowd of passengers once again had to cower on a subway platform in fear, may seem like political cluelessness. Typically, a mayor would have prefaced an unrelated press conference with a few sober words about the Midtown shooting and a plea for New Yorkers to keep a lookout for the gunman, whom the police warn is “armed and dangerous,” before launching into his preplanned topic. In addition to using his visibility to bring public attention to the suspect’s surveillance photo, Mamdani might have laid out what he is doing to prevent such killings. If Rodriguez didn’t know his killer—the early narrative doesn’t point to any relationship—then his death would mark the second random, stranger-on-stranger transit murder in just over two weeks; on September 30, an attacker stabbed 59-year-old construction worker Mesias Lojano on a Queens train. We’ve now had seven subway murders this year, continuing a grim trend that has persisted since early 2020: an average of more than seven subway murders annually, compared with an average of just above two that persisted between 1997 and 2019.
Instead, Mamdani waited until a reporter asked him about the shooting before saying mildly that he was “heartbroken and outraged by this shooting” and attributing it to the “scourge of gun violence,” basically just a fact of life.
But the mayor’s response is part of a carefully honed strategy, one that has worked for him so far. He sticks relentlessly to the message and the marketing—and both are almost always about affordability. Each step of his mayoralty is about “making life that little bit more affordable in New York City,” he reminded people of the earlier-childhood pre-K expansion on Monday.
So far, it’s a rational political strategy. The mayor won office on affordability last year, and it’s understandable that voters demoralized by inflation and rent increases turned their attention to his message. Three-quarters of a year into the Mamdani era, voters continue to be “crushed” by the rising cost of living, City & State observed recently, reporting on a Honan Strategy poll. Rent, inflation, grocery prices, and interest rates are all going up.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul, on the eve of her second reelection campaign, benefits, too, from this change in public focus. Almost exactly four years ago, after a spate of subway killings, she stood with Mayor Eric Adams to pledge better protections for commuters. The facts haven’t changed, but the narrative has: Monday, standing beside Mamdani, she apparently felt no need to add her own response about the subway killing.
But the mayor should understand that what’s working now may not work later. He won last year also because voters were less fearful of crime. Headline murder numbers, after spiking by 53 percent between 2019 and 2021, gradually fell back to near record lows in 2025. Candidate Mamdani allayed remaining concerns among swing voters by promising late in the campaign to keep Jessica Tisch, a crime-prevention policy stalwart, as NYPD commissioner. Homicide and overall crime numbers have trended down this year, to 213 murders through mid-October, breaking the 2017 record low of 220 on that date.
Yet this headline number conceals weaknesses. Overall reported felony crime, though down nearly 7 percent this year, remains 21 percent higher than 2019 levels. These mixed numbers indicate an overstretched police department focused rightly on gang crime in hotspot neighborhoods, but without enough officers or political support to maintain order everywhere else, especially when the broader criminal-justice system still regularly releases hard-core recidivists. The suspect in Lojano’s unprovoked Queens subway murder had allegedly pilfered from a Target store just weeks earlier and attempted to flee from police in that incident—but New York State and City put him right back on the street.
Mamdani has also been uninspiring when it comes to incapacitating the severely mentally ill. In May, after no earlier interaction between the two, 32-year-old Rhamell Burke allegedly fatally pushed 76-year-old Ross Falzone down the subway stairs in Chelsea. Police had earlier detained Burke and brought him to city-run Bellevue Hospital for a mental evaluation, but he was soon released—hours before he pushed Falzone. The mayor promised an investigation, but he has yet to explain to the public what went wrong.
The city’s continued failure to incapacitate both recidivist criminals and people with serious mental illness brings consequences on the subway, which disproportionately attracts bad or irrational actors. It’s likely no coincidence that as arrests in the subway fell 4 percent this year through August, and arrests for fare evasion fell 16 percent, assaults in the transit system rose nearly 10 percent. Overall, through the last months of Bill de Blasio’s administration, the entirety of the Adams administration, and the first few months of Mamdani, the city and the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority have failed to control violent crime: violent felonies in transit, through August, remain 27 percent higher through August than in 2019, and 34 percent higher than in 2018. Felony assaults, at 435 through August, are nearly double their 2019 level. Through last week, the NYPD has taken 54 guns off suspects in transit this year, mostly through fare-evasion stops—but it’s not doing enough of this, nor are the people whom it stops staying off the streets for long enough. It’s reasonable to surmise that some voters turned to Mamdani last year partly because, after years of unkept promises from de Blasio and Adams on controlling subway crime after 2020’s surge in violence, they simply gave up.
Mamdani might ask himself, though, what happens if the right candidate comes along next time, one who can sufficiently match him with charisma and personality but who reminds the public that they should remain outraged about what proved preventable between the mid-1990s and 2019: the relentless string of subway assaults and murders, now in their seventh year. No such candidate emerged last year, even if voters had desired one.
And what if such a candidate comes along as voters realize that there’s not that much the mayor can do about broad affordability? Mamdani doesn’t control national inflation. His rent freeze, damaging as it is to housing quality, leaves out more than half of the city’s tenants. He is unlikely to obtain his free buses next year, and such buses could become overcrowded and slower, anyway. A rival candidate could pledge to maintain Mamdani’s childcare rollout, thus neutralizing that issue.
Mamdani can ignore the horrors that persist in the subway only for as long as voters continue to acquiesce.