Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently visited the family of Jabez Chakraborty, the man shot by a police officer in Queens as he attacked him and his partner with a 13-inch carving knife.
After his thorough legal, medical and psychological analysis of the case, the mayor opined that Chakraborty should not be arrested or prosecuted, that he needed mental-health treatment rather than jail and that his handcuffs should be removed.
Thankfully, Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz and a Queens County grand jury disagreed, and had Chakraborty arraigned on an indictment charging him with first-degree attempted assault and possession of a weapon.
The mayor then repeated that Chakraborty should not be charged.
Mamdani’s statements and actions here display a disturbing lack of knowledge about reality and how the criminal-justice system works.
The mayor doesn’t get to decide who gets prosecuted; the district attorney does.
The mayor doesn’t get to decide what caused Chakraborty to act as he did; that’s for the police and DA to investigate.
The mayor doesn’t get to deem Chakraborty no longer a threat to others or himself based upon his conversation with Chakraborty, an apparent paranoid schizophrenic, and his grieving family.
Katz was right to present this case to a grand jury. This will give the court system a degree of control over Chakraborty.
His case will be handled in the Queens County Mental Health Court, where legal and clinical professionals, along with prosecutors and his attorney, will assist in determining the best outcome.
This case is a tragedy — for Chakraborty, his family and the officers involved.
The mayor spoke to Chakraborty and his family, and then spoke up on his behalf.
Did he speak to the officers involved? They are his employees. Did he even wonder how they’re doing?
We send our police into the street to put themselves in perilous situations.
We ask them to risk their lives for us, but we can’t ask them to commit suicide by not defending themselves.
On Mamdani’s watch, through Sunday, 24 people have been murdered, 58 shot, 3,118 feloniously assaulted and 1,500 robbed, among other victims. How many of these people has he visited?
Oh, and did anyone on his staff advise him that maybe he shouldn’t be talking to a potential defendant who attacked two of his police officers? Is he ready to testify about what Chakraborty told him?
I understand: The mayor dislikes cops, and his knee-jerk reaction to any incident where they use force is to be overly suspicious of their actions.
But as usual with police incidents, knee-jerk, ideological reactions by the left often fly in the face of reality.
In 2024, the NYPD responded to 6.9 million 911 calls. Of those, 162,961 responses involved an emotionally disturbed person.
Only 355 of those (0.2%) required the use of force by police, and 353 of those involved tasers.
In other words, in all of 2024, only two of the 162,961 emergency calls that involved EDPs resulted in police discharging firearms. That’s 0.0012% of all police EDP responses.
In one of those two responses, an EDP attacked the officers with a machete; in the other, the officers’ tasers did not stop the EDP as he attacked with scissors.
I get it. The mayor is playing to his base. To push his plan to send social workers to cases like these, he irresponsibly injected himself into this one.
Far better for him to look into what happens to the mentally ill once they become a known public-safety problem: It’s very difficult to keep mentally ill people in a psychiatric hospital against their will — legally and logistically — unless they’re charged with a crime and held on bail.
That is where the mayor should focus his attention.
But this is what progressives do. They exaggerate a problem, usually distorting an outlying incident, propose ridiculous solutions, cite some ideologically driven study that supports their program and then ignore the consequences of their actions.
Remember the 2019 bail reform? Progressives claimed almost half the people in Rikers had mental-health issues and shouldn’t be in jails. Their solution was to release them under the 2019 law.
Result? Thousands of mentally ill career criminals were set loose on city streets with no controls or support systems.
Predictably, crime rose 40% almost immediately and remains almost 25% higher today.
The mayor should step back, review the body-cam footage of this incident and ask himself what a social worker would have done differently.
Mr. Mayor, this is real life. It’s one thing to send armed and trained police officers to deal with situations like this; it’s quite another to ask an unarmed social worker to talk down a man charging at them with a 13-inch knife — and having just seconds to decide what to do.
Leave prosecution to the professionals. People are going to get hurt.
Jim Quinn is a retired career prosecutor in the Queens District Attorney’s Office, where he served for 42 years.
