We live in a society
Everyone start acting like it NOW!!!!
Zohran Mamdani has been mayor for two weeks now, and by all accounts it is going quite well. Two weeks in and we have a commitment from the governor to fund universal childcare for every two-and and three-year-old in New York over the next two years. We have a new Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, run by a longtime tenant organizer in New York State. His newly appointed Commissioner of the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, an alum of Lina Khan’s FTC, has already uncovered more than $550 million in tips that DoorDash and Uber have stolen from delivery drivers. I can’t complain!
It feels novel to get exactly what I voted for. This isn’t the first time I’ve been represented by a socialist—my state senator is DSA, and so were my state representative and some of my city councilors when I was living in Greater Boston—but their hands are tied as legislators, as virtually every legislative body in America is decrepit and deadlocked. To have a socialist executive who can deliver! I can’t get enough of it. I want to know about every single thing this administration is doing, big or small, trivial or ambitious. His press conference on fixing the bump in front of the Manhattan entrance to the Williamsburg Bridge delighted me because on a fundamental level, I think this is the kind of business that mayors should be getting into, like a politician in a cartoon. Retail politicking matters! A mayor should be present at the opening of an envelope. A mayor should attend all parades. (Not literally, but you know what I mean.)
I hope this is the beginning of a new sort of relationship the public has to its government, where public life is treated with the seriousness it deserves, and civic engagement becomes a part of daily American life for everyone. I was thinking about this the day of the inauguration, which felt monumental despite less than ideal conditions for most of the people who attended. I grew up in the suburbs but spent all of my adult life in or just outside of dense major cities along the Acela corridor, and I recognize a certain collective sense of civic responsibility from them that I did not grow up around or fully understand until I left home for the first time. A not-insignificant factor in this is my social circle, which trends fairly left-wing and community-oriented. Some of this is because proximity breeds familiarity, and it is impossible to escape your neighbors when you live in a city. Still, this is America, and for the most part you’re on your own. That makes events where people come together all the more special.
The day of the inauguration was, as some of you probably experienced yourselves, extremely cold. I couldn’t shake the chill for several hours after I had gotten home, even after changing into inside clothes and cranking the heat up beyond financially prudent levels. I’m not a doctor but I think I may have gotten mild frostbite. This isn’t the first time I’ve had a weather-related health issue over the course of this mayoral election. On primary day, after hours of talking to voters at a poll site in Bed-Stuy in hundred-degree weather, I got mild heat stroke. Anything for the cause! I hope the next time we elect a democratic socialist to run the world’s greatest city, we get to do it in more temperate conditions.
I got there around 11:30, relatively early but not early enough to avoid the lines. The NYPD had closed off the intersection that the Mamdani team had notified attendees was the entrance to the block party. I asked an officer where we were supposed to go instead. He ignored me. I asked again, a little louder this time. He turned to me, annoyed, and said he didn’t know. I followed the crowds and the advice of a volunteer posted up nearby telling us to go to Wall Street. After several blocks of walking in the same direction as everyone else I reached our destination; it was the other side of the street of the entrance the Mamdani team had told attendees to enter at. Any of the cops blocking half the intersections in the area could have told attendees where to go, but instead large crowds of people were forced to walk in a big circle only to end up right around where they started.
If I had to guess I would say I spent about an hour and a half in line, with very little room to move around. The crowd in front of the security checkpoint was tightly packed and moving very slowly, in fits and starts. A few steps forward, five minutes in place. Two cop cars were parked in the middle of the road, taking up space that people could have stood in and preventing anyone from having any breathing room. As we got closer to the checkpoint I could see there were three cops checking bags and scanning attendees, each with their own line. Another cop was directing people in the amorphous crowd into one of the three lines. He told a reporter standing near me that he couldn’t bring his backpack in. “Backpacks weren’t on the list of prohibited items,” the reporter protested. “You can’t bring that in,” he repeated. There were quite a few people the crowd wearing backpacks, so if they were actually prohibited it appears no one got the memo.
The cops at the checkpoint were moving in slow motion. I saw someone in front of me get body scanned four times for no apparent reason. Alex, a Londoner on holiday in the city who was standing near me on line, joked that he was getting the “full New York experience” watching the cops behave the way they did. He’s correct about that. The NYPD is so bad at crowd control and most other aspects of their jobs that this basically is the typical New York experience.
Of course when I finally got through security I found that the block party had plenty of space for attendees to move comfortably. The cops had blocked off the entire sidewalk for several blocks, so you couldn’t leave for any reason unless you were willing to get back in the security line. If you wanted to use the bathroom, or warm up for a bit indoors, you had to jump over the barricades and hope a cop wouldn’t see you. I did this a couple of times. A very nice doorman at St. Paul’s Chapel let me stand in the doorway with him for a few minutes to stave off my aforementioned frostbite, although he said I couldn’t stay longer than that. “So much for the church being a place of refuge,” I quipped. He smiled and shrugged. “Well,” he said, “You can’t give just anybody refuge in Lower Manhattan.”
An hour later, being a total baby about the weather, I walked into a CVS to warm up and watched the inauguration proceedings for about 20 minutes on someone’s phone with a group of middle-aged men who did not speak much English. They mostly ignored me but for one funny moment, when the MC announced that Lucy Dacus would take the stage, and one of the men looked up right at me and asked, “Who’s that?” Something I love about this city is that sometimes, in the eyes of strangers, you will feel so seen.
I have a lot of complaints, but this isn’t to say that it wasn’t a memorable experience. It felt incredible to to watch someone I believed in and spent so much time trying to elect take on this monumental responsibility, to feel hopeful for a better future, and to be able to share that with tens of thousands of other New Yorkers from all walks of life. And all things considered, I was early enough to get lucky—I heard reports that the security line, at one point, was several blocks long. But the underreported story of this inauguration is that the NYPD’s incompetence and stupidity made the experience significantly worse for the 40,000 people who braved the cold for hours to witness the new mayor make history.
I am, to put it mildly, not a fan of the police, but I still could not believe just how much of a shitshow their operation was. It is plausible that this complete lack of judgment or care for the tens of thousands of people participating in civic life is actually the fault of the transition team and not the NYPD, but Mamdani’s team has held high capacity events before—multiple rallies, the scavenger hunt. Besides the occasional minor hiccup that is unavoidable at any large event, they went fine. Compare to this the track record of the NYPD. I don’t think even their biggest defenders would describe them as scrupulous or efficient.
Not to be a lib about the whole thing, but the level of condescension and disrespect the NYPD showed towards the public in their complete lack of competence was disgusting. Participating in civic life is every New Yorker’s right; the inauguration is an event important to the city and the people who live in it, and everybody involved should act with a sense of civic responsibility. We live in a society! It infuriates me that the cops don’t ever act like we have one.
There are obviously bigger problems. ICE is deporting innocent people and shooting mothers in the face and dragging people out of their cars to beat them up, for no other reason than that they can. Making everybody stand around in the cold for longer than they had to is relatively low on the list of the NYPD’s crimes against society, of which there are many. But I think this is all related. The NYPD doesn’t have enough respect for the public to do their jobs correctly at a large-scale public event, and they don’t have enough respect for the public to refrain from beating up college students for protesting a genocide, or conducting sweeps of homeless encampments where people with nowhere else to go are desperately holding onto what they have left. They don’t believe we owe each other decency and dignity, but that’s precisely what any society needs to function. I don’t think we should give billions of dollars every year to a paramilitary force that gives us nothing in return. We can do better than that. I hope to see it in my lifetime.
Thanks for reading Terms and Conditions! If you liked this newsletter, consider upgrading to a paid subscription, or forwarding this to a friend. xoxo TM