A lieutenant with 19 years on the job remembers hearing nervous laughter when he walked into his New York Police Department command post the morning after Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic mayoral nomination in June.

“Everyone was like, ‘Get ready to retire,’ ” he told me. “It was definitely like the sky was falling.”

The lieutenant said that he always thought he would stay on the police force for at least 25 years. Many cops say that if you stay for 25 or 30 years, you might never have to work another day in your life. The pension is that good. Now, he isn’t sure if it’s still worth it.

“It’s shaken me to my core,” he said of Mamdani’s unexpected victory in June. “The absolute dread I feel is palpable.”

Some days, his mind races with worst-case scenarios: “Is he going to cut a billion dollars out of our budget?” he wonders. “Will my caseload keep piling up while we just get more and more short-staffed?”

“Who will even want this job anymore?” he asked. “Will I?”

“Is he going to cut a billion dollars out of our budget?” the lieutenant wonders.

Other NYPD cops also told me that they are considering retiring if Mamdani, who once advocated for “a socialist city council to defund the NYPD,” wins the election. Polls show Mamdani with a double-digit lead. Former New York governor Andrew Cuomo raked in nearly $400,000 in the days after incumbent mayor Eric Adams dropped out of the race, but that’s still far less than Mamdani has.

The NYPD is the largest police department in the United States, with 33,740 uniformed officers, but it’s facing a manpower crisis that has grown even worse in recent months, said Bill Bratton, who was police commissioner for mayors Rudy Giuliani, a Republican, and progressive Democrat Bill de Blasio. That is the fewest number of officers in the department since 1994. This year is on track to have one of the highest attrition rates of the past decade, according to data from the Police Benevolent Association, the largest NYPD union.

Over the past year, the NYPD has lowered its selection criteria, temporarily waived application fees, and cut the minimum age for recruits from 21 to 20 years and six months. Those moves show how hard it has become to fill the ranks. Bratton, who might be best known for advocating “broken windows” policing—in which cops target minor crimes such as vandalism and fare evasion—told me that a Mayor Mamdani would only accelerate the police force brain drain.

“There will be a very significant exodus from the NYPD very soon after his election, if he is elected,” said Bratton. “They’re going to leave. And that’s a reality.”

Law-and-order believers will hate that reality, but in truth, progressives should as well. If there is anything to learn from other American cities that elected progressive mayors, it is that any increase in crime has the potential to set the entire progressive project backward by convincing voters that liberals and disorder go hand in hand.

“It’s shaken me to my core,” a lieutenant said of Mamdani’s unexpected victory in June. “The absolute dread I feel is palpable.”

Voters turned against leaders in Chicago, San Francisco, and elsewhere who were aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the fast-growing political organization that has helped supercharge Mamdani’s campaign in New York City. For example, Chesa Boudin was elected San Francisco’s district attorney in 2019 on a decarceration platform that included eliminating cash bail. By 2022, he was out of office, recalled by voters due to spikes in property crime, murder, and theft.

Not too long ago, Mamdani sounded just like Boudin—and other DSA-backed candidates. In 2020, during his run for the New York state legislature, he frequently advocated “defunding” the NYPD, which he described as “racist,” “violent,” and “anti-queer.” As the front-runner in the mayor’s race, he has attempted to moderate his past positions. Last month, Mamdani even said that he planned to apologize for jabs he made at the NYPD during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement. But when a co-host of The View later asked Mamdani if he had fulfilled that promise, he dodged the question.

“These are conversations that I’m having individually with officers,” he replied. “It’s through those conversations with rank-and-file officers that I’ve learned more about the difficulties of this job.”

Scott Stringer, the former Manhattan borough president and city comptroller who unsuccessfully ran for mayor in 2021 and this past fall, told me Mamdani has an opportunity to “shock and awe” his detractors in the New York Police Department.

“The challenge that the next mayor has is how to convince the NYPD that he has a plan that can change their day-to-day quality of life,” said Stringer. “How do we attract more people when more applicants are taking the sanitation test than the police test? You have to peel back the onion and say, why is this happening? The answer is not to dumb down the department but to actually raise the academics, and you need to be a cheerleader for people to take the test.”

What happens to the NYPD under a Mamdani administration could also become a bellwether for the Democratic Party in next year’s midterm elections. If Mamdani keeps current police commissioner Jessica Tisch in her position, or appoints an insider like former Chief of Department Rodney Harrison, it will be a strong sign that Mamdani and the Democratic Party’s far left are evolving beyond the social justice movement.

But Robert Holden, a Democratic member of the New York city council representing western Queens, said he is worried that many police officers will not wait to find out what Mamdani does.

“We’re hemorrhaging cops now,” Holden said, many of whom are “the best and the brightest.” He added, “Mamdani is just going to exacerbate that. We’re going to be hard-pressed to get enough cops.”

Holden said that he plans to cross party lines to vote for Curtis Sliwa because of the Republican candidate’s tough-on-crime stance. “I see a difference in the leadership [of the police force]. We don’t have the quality we used to have,” Holden told me. “If you lose that experience—if every cop leaves at 20 years when they’re eligible for a pension—it’s hard to replace experience.”

Most major crimes—except for rape—have fallen over the past year in New York City. Still, some categories, including vehicle theft and felony assaults, remain elevated far above pre-pandemic levels.

The Mamdani campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

Another NYPD officer who hit the 20-year mark over the summer and is a lifelong resident of Queens told me the job had already changed for the worse under Mayor de Blasio, who expanded the powers of the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB), which recommends disciplinary actions to the police commissioner.

The NYPD officer from Queens said that he “would give an extra five, 10 years to this agency if they just let us do our job.”

“Why is it even worth getting out of the car and taking police action?” the officer said he sometimes asks himself. “Why do anything when I can lose five vacation days for the smallest infraction?”

The officer said that he is a Republican but planning to vote for Cuomo because he has the best shot of beating Mamdani.

Last week, Mamdani told reporters that he plans to embolden the CCRB by taking final decision-making authority away from the police commissioner and giving it to the 15-person civilian panel. Mamdani also has proposed a Department of Community Safety, which would hire “gun violence interrupters” and expand “housing-first” programs for the homeless. Mamdani has said that he wants to free officers from having to “respond to every single failure of the social safety net.”

The NYPD officer from Queens said that he “would give an extra five, 10 years to this agency if they just let us do our job.”

Cops that I talked to repeatedly mentioned another big fear about Mamdani that gets relatively little attention outside the NYPD.

“We need to bring down the NYPD’s near-billion-dollar overtime,” Mamdani told the New York Editorial Board, a group of veteran journalists, in February. “We need to eliminate that overtime.”

To get by with fewer officers, the NYPD relies on overtime, which is often mandated for officers even if they have already worked a full shift. Last year, the NYPD spent $1.1 billion on overtime wages, and the city council warned this year that the department is on track to surpass its overtime budget by over $100 million. Officers told me that they depend on overtime to live in New York City, where a family of four needs $318,406 to live comfortably, according to a survey last year.

“We’re hemorrhaging cops now,” said Robert Holden, a Democratic member of the New York city council.

A starting NYPD officer’s salary is $60,884 a year—and it climbs to $126,410 after five-and-a-half years. Some officers told me that they are able to earn $200,000 or more with overtime.

“You cannot live a good life in New York City without overtime,” said one NYPD officer who is a native of Staten Island and recently hit the 20-year mark. His father also was a cop. “People don’t realize that to make our overtime, we have to stand in the subway when it’s freezing. We have to show up to protests and get screamed at. We’re working for a little extra money just to be able to get a pizza for our kids on Friday night or buy a used car.”

Any cuts to overtime under Mamdani would also reduce future pension payments for NYPD officers who are close to retirement, because the department calculates those payments based on an average from their last few years in service, the officer told me.

On a recent Tuesday night, I met a 33-year NYPD veteran at O’Hara’s, a cop bar near the World Trade Center that is covered with thousands of patches from emergency responders who came into the bar after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack.

As he drank a Stella Artois beer, the NYPD veteran told me that he is three years away from the department’s mandatory retirement age of 63. He dreams about opening a place just like this in his Long Island neighborhood.

“I want to open up a place for civil servants,” he said. “A place where a midnight cop can get in after their shift and maybe get something to eat. I want American flags, country music. The kind of place where you don’t have to pay your tab, just get it next time.”

The life of a cop has been changing for a long time, he said. “It already is becoming more like a 9 to 5,” he shrugged. “We’re losing that culture of brotherhood. Not all the newer officers get that we’re a family. The guys that have time on them, who know all of our traditions, are leaving in droves.”

At least for now, he has decided to stay. He told me that too much is on the line. Someone has to teach the next generation of officers about the glue that holds the NYPD together. When someone gets sick, hundreds turn up at the hospital. When someone’s house burns down, officers hold a fundraiser. Once, he said, his fellow officers raised $40,000 to cover the cost of a medical procedure for his son.

“I don’t want to bail,” he said. “I want to try as much as I can to keep things with the police department the way they’ve always been.”