Mayor Zohran Mamdani has quietly scrapped plans for a major public safety training complex that was intended to bring together officers and agents from more than a dozen city agencies.
The initiative, first proposed under former Mayor Eric Adams, was abandoned after Mamdani “decided not to move forward with the proposed public safety training facility and there is no funding for it in our budget,” a City Hall representative said.
“Police officers, correction officers and other law enforcement personnel have distinct responsibilities and training needs, and we determined that spending $225 million to consolidate their existing training facilities was neither necessary nor a good use of public resources,” Mamdani spokesman Sam Raskin said.
It was not immediately clear when Mamdani made the decision. City & State was first to report the cancellation.
The complex had been expected to break ground earlier this year. Supporters said it could help eliminate the silos separating city agencies with law enforcement responsibilities.
The project’s funding had already been set aside in 2021 by then-Mayor Bill de Blasio. At the time, however, the money was intended only for a new Department of Correction training facility on the NYPD academy campus.
City Council Republican Minority Leader David Carr condemned the decision to abandon the training center, while also taking aim at Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
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“While this is on brand for the defund-the-police, pro-decarceration DSA mayor, cancelling this facility is not just going to hurt policing, it’s going to have a detrimental impact on public safety and array of city services as well as kill hundreds of jobs,” he said.
“It’s a reckless and frankly dangerous move to fulfill a campaign pledge to a bunch of radical zealots.”
During his campaign, Mamdani pledged to eliminate NYPD overtime and opposed adding more officers to the department’s headcount.
He also faced repeated criticism over earlier remarks about defunding the police and sought to moderate many of those positions while campaigning.
Mamdani, like nearly every other Democratic candidate for mayor, criticized the proposed 16-agency facility during last year’s primary. At the time, he compared it with Atlanta’s controversial “Cop City,” which was drawing national attention.
Adams responded that the candidates’ remarks reflected a lack of the “full understanding of how to ensure the city’s No. 1 issue: public safety.”
“[T]his administration took one of the goals of the law-enforcement academy and turned it into the use for several of our agencies — park police, sheriffs, corrections, all of them coming together, dismantling the walls that we had in our law enforcement community previously to unify our law enforcement communities,” he said.
