Legislative push to disband NYPD’s Strategic Response Group heats up beyond Mamdani

The Communities United to Reject Brutality (CURB) Act needs just one more co-sponsor for a council majority to back the bill to disband the NYPD’s controversial Strategic Response Group (SRG). All roads lead back to Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who vowed to dissolve the unit during his campaign and would have to sign the legislation into law if it passes. 

Twenty-five of the 51 City Council members currently support the bill, including many representing majority or historically Black districts. Public Advocate Jumaane Williams also cosponsors the bill but does not count towards the voting majority. 

While Mamdani can disband the unit himself through his mayoral authority over the NYPD, the CURB Act also establishes a distinct “backstop” to prevent the department from resurrecting a similar squad under a different name or pretense. Advocates say this measure is crucial and would ensure protections even if a progressive mayor like Mamdani is not in office.

“We’ve seen there’s real growing support for the CURB Act, and for these calls to disband the SRG, get them out of protests, and ensure that protests are protected by targeting the abuses that we’ve seen the SRG long deploy when they respond to protests,” said Michael Sisitzky, NYCLU assistant policy director. “There’s continued momentum in the right direction for the legislation. In terms of the executive front, the mayor ran on a platform that included disbanding the SRG. He has yet to deliver on that pledge so far, but he has still reiterated his support for making sure that the SRG is out of protest, and that is a pledge that we look forward to him following through on. It is one that we don’t need to wait for because the council also has the ability to act by passing the CURB Act.”

For roughly a decade, police reform advocates documented SRG misconduct, particularly at protests and other large, unplanned gatherings. Critics long accused the unit of suppressing free speech and operating with little oversight, while former Mayor Eric Adams defended it as “the elite of the department.” 

When Black Lives Matter demonstrators took to the streets in summer 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, many were met with the SRG’s bikes, shields, and batons. Those incidents led to Payne et al. v. City of New York, a class action settlement brought by civil rights groups like the NYCLU and the State Attorney General’s Office, which led to court orders limiting the unit’s deployment to a tiered system. 

“For Black New Yorkers in particular, we are not unfamiliar with tactics that would silence our advocacy [and] our right to protest,” said Donovan Tavares of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. “We’re always going to have to do work to attain the same level of rights as everybody else in this country, like many minority groups … and the NYPD should not have the right, void of accountability, [to] control, dictate, and suppress these protests.”

Beyond protests, the SRG was also involved when the NYPD killed Saheed Vassell, a Black Brooklyn man diagnosed with bipolar disorder, in 2018. Isabelle Leyva, a NYCLU senior organizer who long led the civil liberties group’s efforts to disband the unit, said a lack of transparency remains after all these years. Headcount numbers, deployment areas, and exact parameters for what SRG is responsible for are still a mystery to this day.

Credible information often stems from hearings and reports from the NYPD’s inspector general, which boasts subpoena powers and looked into police misconduct during the George Floyd protests. Little of what is known points to the SRG starting as a counter-terrorism unit. Projections indicate the unit’s budget grew by a hundredfold between its inception in 2015 and 2024. 

“We have this militarized entity that essentially can be deployed at will, and we actually do not know, despite us asking many times, is the SRG present in plain clothes in communities?” said Leyva. “[In] the horrific case of Saheed Vassell, he was very well-known to the local officers in his community, but when SRG officers were deployed to that neighborhood, they did not know him. They were not familiar with him and any of the kind of struggles that he was having … [The SRG] can come into communities, with no relationship to that community, trained with militarized crowd control tactics, where they treat protesters and people like enemy combatants, so they’re a danger across the board in and out of protests, and until we really get a handle on removing them from those spaces, part of our goal is to get more answers around where they are right now.”

“Vassell was one example, but no New Yorker benefits from a police department that is rogue and void of accountability,” added Tavares. “That’s just not how public safety works.”

A Mamdani spokesperson pointed to previous comments made by the mayor affirming his stance on disbanding the SRG. “I continue to believe in the importance of decoupling our response to protest from our response to threats of terrorism, and that’s something that I am continuing to work with the commissioner on — to disband SRG and ensure that we have responses that are separate from each other,” Mamdani said last month. “We’re doing so on a timeline that will ensure we keep New Yorkers safe as we deliver that.”

His office did not comment on whether he would sign the CURB Act into law if it were passed by the City Council. Of course, the bill still requires an initial hearing to pass committee. During the bill’s potential journey to Mamdani’s desk, the council — which is more moderate than when Councilmember Chi Ossé first introduced the bill during the Adams administration — may amend the language significantly. However, a recent victory holding Mamdani to a campaign promise regarding a flat NYPD headcount spells confidence for police reform advocates whom former Mayor Eric Adams often overlooked. 

Sisitzky was among several speakers during a rally outside City Hall last month who helped deliver a letter against an officer hiring spree, signed by roughly 70 organizations, including the Democratic Socialists of America, an organization often synonymous with the membership-card-holding Mamdani. Days later, the projected 580 officer headcount was nixed from the budget. 

“What the headcount debate proved is that the administration is willing to listen when they are pushed,” said Sisitzky. “It was really encouraging to see … we are going to continue to push for the administration to deliver on the rest of their campaign platform and their promises with respect to policing, [with] disbanding the SRG being one of those commitments that the mayor has again reiterated his commitment to, and we are going to continue to organize and put pressure on the administration to deliver on that.”to, and we are going to continue to organize and put pressure on the administration to deliver on that.”

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