Mayor’s Police Reforms Will Not Address NYPD’s Culture of Violence and Impunity

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Monday, October 12, 2026

Justice Committee: Mayor’s Police Reforms Will Not Address NYPD’s Culture of Violence and Impunity 

New York, NY — Earlier today, Mayor Zohran Mamdani released a slate of police reforms in response to last week’s revelation that the NYPD allowed Officer Salvatore Alongi, who killed 19-year-old Win Rozario in March 2024, to retire with a disability pension while awaiting a departmental trial, without proper notification to the CCRB and without reporting for state decertification. Mamdani’s Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who chairs the police pension board that approved Alongi’s disability retirement, dismissed the scandal as the “human error” of a single civilian employee.

In response to Mayor Mamdani’s proposed reforms, Loyda Colón (they/them), Executive Director of Justice Committee, issued the following statement:

“While we appreciate Mayor Mamdani’s intent behind these reforms, they fall far short of what New Yorkers, including Win Rozario’s family, need and deserve. The problem is not that the NYPD needs more training or to revise its policies, but that the Department consistently evades oversight, transparency and meaningful change, violates the law and its own rules to do so, and shields officers who harm and kill New Yorkers from facing discipline. Alongi’s retirement with an enhanced pension and the NYPD’s failure to notify the CCRB and report him for decertification is a glaring example of this. Previously administrations tried to require the NYPD to review and adjust its own policies and it has never worked.

Some immediate steps the administration should take include: 1. Appointing an Inspector General who is not afraid of holding the NYPD accountable and who has a track record of collaborating with organizations working to end police violence (in addition to increasing funding for the Office of the Inspector General); 2. Compelling the NYPD to comply with the Police STAT Act’s requirement to report all police killings and deaths in custody, which it has refused to do since the law was passed in 2020; 3. Ensuring that, within 24 hours after someone is killed or seriously injured, the officer(s)’s name, rank, post at the time of the incident, and whether or not they have been transferred, put on modified duty or suspended without pay is made public; 4. Making public if officers who have harmed New Yorkers are given NYPD retired ID cards, a “good guy” letter to maintain their service firearm, or other benefits, upon leaving the Department; and 5. Ensuring Commissioner Tisch and the NYPD do not create a loophole for officers to file for disability retirement while the CCRB is kept in the dark for months, as the NYPD’s comments last week appear to indicate. The CCRB must be notified as soon as an officer with pending misconduct cases applies for retirement —not months later, when it may be too late to move a CCRB prosecution forward.

Requiring the NYPD to "formalize" its process of reporting officers who leave with pending discipline charges for decertification is redundant when state law already requires this. And it is insufficient to make Force Investigation Division reports available to families after someone is killed, given that, since its inception FID has largely served as a tool to shield officers and the Department from accountability. FID would need a full overhaul in order to be useful, and, more importantly, the entire NYPD discipline process needs to be transformed to ensure that officers who kill and harm New Yorkers are fired.

From Alongi’s retirement to the violent repression of protests against ICE raids, New Yorkers are outraged by the NYPD’s ongoing brutality and impunity. It has been days since Win’s family exposed the scandal of Alongi’s retirement and the administration still has not responded to their demands for transparency about what happened and for Officer Cianfrocco, Win’s other killer, to be fired. Instead of releasing a slate of reforms that largely treat the problem as administrative issues for the Department to tweak, the Mamdani administration must work with directly impacted New Yorkers and the organizations accountable to them to dismantle the NYPD’s culture of violence and impunity."