‘Natural Enemy’: Mamdani Names Radical Cop-Hating Professor To ‘Community Safety’ Post

New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has appointed a university professor who has described police officers as “violence workers” to serve on his community safety committee.

Mamdani announced Monday that Alex Vitale, a sociology professor at Brooklyn College, will advise his incoming administration on community safety matters. Vitale has a long history of disparaging police, calling them the “natural enemy” of the working class, and advocating for defunding law enforcement.

The appointment casts fresh doubt on the mayor-elect‘s attempt to distance himself from his own past remarks calling for the defunding of the New York Police Department (NYPD), which he labeled a “racist, anti-queer and a major threat to public safety.” (RELATED: Blue City ‘Violence Prevention’ Activists Keep Catching Violent Charges)

Vitale referred to individual officers as “class enemies” during a 2020 interview with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) when asked where police fit into the “class struggle.”

His 2017 book, “The End of Policing,” argues that the “problem is not police training, police diversity, or police methods. The problem is policing itself.”

“The whole point is they’re violence workers. You can’t train them not to be violence workers,” Vitale said during a separate 2020 interview in which he argued that police cannot be reformed.

Like Mamdani, Vitale has stated that the “institution of policing exists historically to facilitate racial inequality… emerging out of colonialism, slavery, and industrial capitalism.”

The professor also advocates decriminalizing so-called “sex work” or prostitution and produced a 2025 film titled “Sex Work: It’s Just a Job.”

Vitale is one of roughly 400 advisors who will serve across 17 committees ahead of Mamdani’s January inauguration.

“A love for hard work, a deep belief in the promise of New York City, and a commitment to the affordability agenda that New Yorkers are demanding unite the more than 400 experts we have appointed to our Transition Committees today,” Mamdani said on Monday. “By helping us recruit top talent and develop smart policy, these committees will be instrumental to ensuring we hit the ground running on January 1st — and that our results align with the promises we’ve made.”

Mamdani has insisted in recent months that he no longer supports defunding the NYPD. He also apologized to officers during an October Fox News interview for past disparaging comments, saying he is committed to “representing the men and women of the NYPD.”

“I apologize because of the fact that I’m looking to work with these officers, and I know that these officers, these men and women who serve in the NYPD, they put their lives on the line every single day,” Mamdani said.

Vitale’s views, however, are consistent with positions held by the DSA, of which Mamdani is a member. The group calls on the country to “end the criminalization of working-class survival,” “invest in community self-governance and care, not cops” and provide “freedom for all incarcerated people.”

“For all of the working class to achieve collective liberation, we must constrain, diminish, and abolish the carceral forces of the state — from prisons and police themselves, to their manifestations in all forms throughout society,” the DSA’s website says.

As recently as December 2024, Mamdani called for cuts to funding for the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group, the unit that responded to the killing of Officer Didarul Islam.

Meanwhile, NYPD data shows that misdemeanors, “major” felonies and non-major felonies in New York City have been more frequent every year since 2020.

Neither Mamdani nor Vitale responded to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.