Amid mounting pressure from his base, Mayor Zohran Mamdani is expected on Monday to announce that he is overhauling a contentious Police Department unit that has been criticized for overzealous management of protests in New York City, according to several people familiar with the plan.
Mr. Mamdani had vowed during his mayoral campaign to eliminate the unit, known as the Strategic Response Group, saying on social media that it had “cost taxpayers millions in lawsuit settlements + brutalized countless New Yorkers exercising their first amendment rights.”
After becoming mayor, he spoke as often about “decoupling” the unit’s protest response from its counterterrorism role. But the mayor’s deliberative approach sparked frustration among some members of his base.
The mayor’s new policing model seems to fulfill the latter promise. The extent to which it fulfills the first one is up for debate.
The model draws inspiration from the law enforcement approach used in Columbus, Ohio, according to two sources briefed on the mayor’s plans. In April, several high-ranking City Hall and Police Department officials traveled to Ohio to get a firsthand look at the Dialogue Unit of the Columbus Division of Police.
That unit focuses on communicating with demonstrators, rather than physically controlling the crowd. The idea, according to Andrew J. Ginther, the mayor of Columbus, is for officers to act as mediators, communicating with demonstrators about what they and the police expect from each other, all with the goal of ensuring that protesters can express their First Amendment rights.
For a typical protest deployment, the dialogue group reaches out to activists before and after the event, and remains on scene in specially marked vests throughout. The unit rarely makes arrests, and its members have never discharged a weapon, though they are armed like all other officers in the force. A more conventional police unit steps in if officers believe the situation is spiraling out of control.
By next year, New York City’s Civilian Dialogue Unit is expected to take shape. It will be staffed by civilians and housed within the Office for Community Safety, several people briefed on the plan said. Its members will not be armed, but it will continue to work with the Police Department’s First Amendment team, which does carry weapons.
As in Columbus, the unit is not expected to make arrests, and if a protest escalates, a more standard police team will be called in.
The Strategic Response Group’s counterterrorism function will be transferred to the department’s Counterterrorism Bureau, four people said. The rest of the group’s responsibilities — helping to search for missing people, patrol major events like the Thanksgiving Day Parade and respond to large-scale crime scenes, such as last year’s mass shooting at a Midtown skyscraper — will still be performed by a police unit that will have a different name, according to two of the people briefed on the matter.
A spokesman for the mayor declined to comment on the plans, elements of which were first reported by Politico.
Asked about his plans at an unrelated news conference on Friday, Mr. Mamdani said, “I do not believe that the responsibilities of counterterrorism and enforcement and First Amendment response are one and the same. We will have more information to share soon.”
During the protests after the 2020 killing of George Floyd, the Police Department engaged in what a city oversight agency later called “excessive enforcement” that violated protesters’ First Amendment rights, and the Strategic Response Group played a “central role” in policing large protests at the time.
In 2023, a barrage of lawsuits prompted the department to promise significant changes to its protest policies. In an agreement with the state attorney general’s office, the department said it would stop boxing in protesters to arrest them, sometimes after rushing at them with bicycles or batons. It also agreed to a four-tiered system of protest response, in which the policing intensity correlated to the perceived danger and illegality of the protest.
For so-called tier one protests, the department could deploy “specially qualified protest liaisons from the Police Department’s Community Affairs Bureau, whose primary role is to communicate with protesters and help facilitate the protest.”
Patrol officers could be used to manage traffic in such scenarios, but they could not be drawn from the Strategic Response Group. At more chaotic protests, commanders on the scene would be required to get a supervisor’s approval before moving to disperse the crowd.
The agreement with the attorney general is expected to expire in 2029, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union, which is a party to the agreement.
Police officials have argued in the past that the Strategic Response Group has already been sufficiently revamped, and it plays only a limited role in protests. Between Jan. 1 and Oct. 19 of this year, the unit deployed to only 22 of the 2,730 protests during that period, arresting 18 people, the Police Department said.
But the unit remains a potent issue on the left, particularly among protesters, and particularly in light of Mr. Mamdani’s decision to retain Jessica S. Tisch — a pro-Israel, technocratic, billionaire heiress — as police commissioner after she took over the department in 2024.
Under Ms. Tisch, who worked with the mayor on the overhaul of the Strategic Response Group, Mr. Mamdani’s Police Department has continued to incite the ire of the left. And over the course of his first 10 months as mayor, Mr. Mamdani has softened his criticism of the unit.
Recent events, however, have renewed scrutiny of the group’s tactics. The most recent flashpoint occurred in October, after federal immigration officials shot Oscar Belgal, an undocumented resident, in front of his 5-year-old son.
Though police officers rushed the father to the hospital, they angered protesters by setting up a cordon there as immigration officials waited to take Mr. Belgal back into custody. During the ensuing clashes between demonstrators and the police, an officer pushed Representative-elect Darializa Avila Chevalier, then still a Democratic nominee, to the ground.
“The NYPD’s Strategic Response Group must be disbanded as quickly as possible, and Commissioner Tisch must step down,” Ms. Avila Chevalier wrote on social media the next day.
Accounts differ as to whether the Strategic Response Group played a role in policing those protests. Ms. Avila Chevalier said it did; police officials said the group was merely on standby.
But the protests further fueled calls for Mr. Mamdani to fulfill his campaign promise to disband the unit. His delay in doing so is expected to be a topic of discussion at a Democratic Socialists of America convention in the city on Saturday.
Maria Cramer contributed reporting.
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