The Numbers Tell One Story. The Mayor’s Response Tells Another

Earlier this month, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani stood at One Police Plaza and acknowledged that anti-Jewish hate crimes comprise more than half of all hate crimes in his city, even though Jews are only about 10% of the population. Yet when asked what message he wanted to send, he offered nothing more than a platitude about everyone belonging and everyone being cherished.

That gap between data and response is not merely political. It may become legal, and could become deadly.

Mamdani has staked his public safety reputation on precision policing, a data-driven strategy that deploys resources where the numbers point. It is a sensible approach, and the overall crime figures reflect it. But precision policing has a logical corollary: if the data shows one community absorbing 55% of hate crimes – more than five times their share of the population — a generic response is not neutral. When a strategy is explicitly driven by data about where crime is concentrated and who is being victimized, a deliberate decision to not respond with equivalent precision begins to look less like oversight and more like selective indifference. Mamdani’s approach presents three overlapping legal problems for the city.

The first is Equal Protection. Although the government may exercise discretion in enforcing the law, it violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment when a motivating factor in its failure to protect people from crime is invidious discrimination against a protected group, such as Jews or Israelis.

Mamdani’s public record already evinces a pattern and practice of such discrimination.

From the first days of his administration, Mamdani made a series of choices all pointing in the same direction: reduced protection for Jews and Israelis against rising antisemitic hate crimes. Mamdani deleted official statements about protecting Jewish New Yorkers, rescinded the city’s IHRA-based antisemitism order, and folded the Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes into a broader Office of Community Safety. He also offers a constant drumbeat of anti-Israel propaganda, complete with false claims of genocide, apartheid, and racism, having the purpose and effect of fomenting hatred against both Jews and Israelis.

The Mayor insists that antisemitism be viewed in tandem with a purportedly equivalent threat to Muslims, his favored religious constituency, while touting a 140% rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes. But that is a false equivalence, reflecting deliberate indifference to the magnitude of the peril faced by Jews in New York. In the first quarter of 2026, Muslims were the targets of 12 (8.4%) confirmed hate crimes, representing an estimated 10% share of the population of New York City. The share of hate crimes did increase for Muslims, but from only five incidents in the first quarter of 2025. In all of 2025, according to the NYPD, Jews in New York were the victims of 324 hate crimes — over six per week — constituting 57.6% of the total, while 26 hate crimes targeted Muslims, 4.6% of the total. To insist that these are equivalent threats bespeaks sectarian bias not fairness.

The second problem for the city is municipal liability for that discriminatory failure to protect under Monell v. Department of Social Services. Under the Monell doctrine, a city can be sued directly when a constitutional violation flows from an official policy or custom. Monell cases are usually slow to build, because a pattern and practice of deliberate indifference usually takes a while to develop. Mamdani is an exception. He is constructing a record against the city, in public, in real time. Every statement minimizing antisemitism, every decision to dilute targeted protections, every press conference where he recites the numbers and then changes the subject, is a tile in the Monell mosaic. The evidentiary foundation for a Monell claim against the city is being delivered from the Mayor’s podium.

The third looming implication for the city is federal liability. Under 34 U.S.C. §12601, the Department of Justice has authority to investigate and sue local law enforcement agencies for engaging in a pattern or practice of conduct that deprives persons of constitutional rights. This statute has been used for decades to go after cities that over-police minority communities. There is no legal reason it cannot work in the opposite direction, against a city that systematically under-protects one. The federal government could also withdraw funding from the city for law enforcement programs (or even more broadly), or seek refunds of prior grants, on the grounds that the city is violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which applies to all federal grant recipients.

A formal complaint to the DOJ Civil Rights Division, grounded in the NYPD’s published hate crime data, calling for an investigation into New York City’s response to antisemitic hate crimes, would be unprecedented. It would also be legally sound. The data and public course of conduct by Mamdani are more than enough to suggest the sort of pattern and practice that warrants the federal scrutiny of an in-depth DOJ investigation.

Of course, the NYPD does not ignore these crimes entirely. Commissioner Tisch, to her credit, has often spoken about the issue. But when the policymaker at the top repeatedly signals that anti-Jewish targeting will be met with indifference and abstraction rather than attention and action or raises “concerns” about even modest efforts to stop protesters from besieging Jewish worshippers, or announces that if he cannot get the Commissioner to agree to dismantle the Strategic Response Group he will simply overrule her, that travels down the chain of command to impact how scenes are policed, and how cases are classified, investigated, prioritized, and deterred.

Nor must the legal record wait until the worst facts arrive. Thankfully, where plaintiffs can show a cognizable threat of ongoing unequal treatment, declaratory and injunctive remedies may be available before irreparable harm is inflicted. If we build the record now, there is still time for a course correction before even more crimes occur.

Mayor Mamdani said the numbers tell an indisputable story. He is right. The story they tell is that Jewish New Yorkers are the most targeted minority in the city he governs, that hate crimes are a rising threat, and that his response has been at best, generic, and at worst, corrosively hostile.

Equal protection means something. Monell means something. Federal authority over civil rights means something. The law does not wait for a mayor to get around to caring, and neither should we.

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Dr. Mark Goldfeder is the CEO of the National Jewish Advocacy Center and a professor at Touro Law School.

Alan Scheiner is Senior Litigation Counsel at the National Jewish Advocacy Center.