Mamdani Sent Scurrying Off Stage as NYPD Night Out Crowd Boos, Forces Him to Flee
Tuesday night, August 4, more than 3,500 residents and families packed Turtle Circle on the Midland Beach Boardwalk for the 43rd annual NYPD Patrol Borough Staten Island National Night Out Against Crime. Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) arrived late, walked to the podium beside Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, and got roughly thirty seconds into a sentence before the crowd made clear he was not welcome.
Boos, jeers, and shouted profanity rolled over the boardwalk the moment he reached the microphone. He got out “Happy Night Out Against Crime. It’s amazing to be here for the Staten Island community” — kept the smile on his face — and was moved off the stage before he could say much else.
It was the third and final stop on a citywide National Night Out tour Mamdani ran that evening with Tisch, built to showcase falling shooting and murder totals in partnership with the NYPD. Brooklyn and Manhattan cheered. Staten Island — the one borough that did not vote for him — did not.
- ~30 seconds how long Mamdani stayed at the microphone before being moved off the Midland Beach stage — RedState / Mediaite
- 3,500+ attendees families gathered for the 43rd annual NYPD Patrol Borough Staten Island National Night Out Against Crime — amNewYork
- 23.1% of the vote Mamdani's 2025 mayoral showing on Staten Island, the only borough he lost — Andrew Cuomo took 55.2%, Curtis Sliwa 21.2% — Certified NYC Board of Elections returns, via RedState / Twitchy
- 3 boroughs, 1 boo Brooklyn and East Harlem stops on the same tour drew warm receptions; only the Staten Island stop turned hostile — amNewYork
National Night Out is built to be uneventful — hot dogs, patrol-car photo ops, a mayor and a police commissioner thanking a precinct for a good year. Staten Island’s version, the 43rd annual Patrol Borough event, drew over 3,500 people to Turtle Circle on the Midland Beach Boardwalk on the evening of August 4. That is the kind of crowd size that makes a hostile reception hard to spin as a handful of hecklers.
The boos started as Mamdani approached the stage and did not let up once he reached it. Sections of the crowd shouted for him to leave; others simply booed loud enough to bury the microphone. LifeZette’s account described attendees turning away and flashing a thumbs-down as he was escorted from the podium. Mediaite’s writeup described him being “pummeled with boos” before he “turned tail and ran.” RedState’s account, the first to break the story, put his total stage time at under a minute. He never stopped smiling, and he never got past the opening line.
Mamdani relentlessly booed at NYPD Staten Island event, as he flees stage after less than 1 minute
The reception did not come from nowhere. In June 2020, then-Assemblyman Mamdani posted on X: “No, we want to defund the police.” The same account added that “the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety” and, that December, that there was “no negotiating with an institution this wicked & corrupt” — “defund it, dismantle it.” Those posts stayed live and searchable through his 2025 mayoral campaign.
He spent much of the general election walking that record back, telling voters and, later, CNN that he would not defund the department and would instead work with it. City Hall has since kept Commissioner Tisch in place and built the entire August 4 tour around her department’s numbers: 381 shooting incidents through July, down from 412 the year before; 149 murders, below the city’s previous seven-month low; and overall major crime down 12.7% for the month of July. “It is a direct result of your NYPD cops, the very best in the business, getting out there and doing the work,” Tisch told the crowd in Brooklyn. Staten Island’s reaction suggests the rebrand has not reached everyone the tour was designed to reach.
Mamdani and Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch opened the citywide National Night Out tour to a warm reception, touting falling shooting and murder totals alongside House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez.
A second stop, a second friendly crowd. The mayor's remarks on police-community “bridges” landed without incident.
The 43rd annual NYPD Patrol Borough Staten Island National Night Out Against Crime, and the only stop where the crowd turned on him the moment he reached the microphone.
Staten Island was the only one of the city’s five boroughs Mamdani lost outright in the 2025 mayoral election. Certified results put him at 23.1% there, well behind independent Andrew Cuomo’s 55.2% and Republican Curtis Sliwa’s 21.2%. It is the most conservative, most law-enforcement-heavy borough in the city — home to a disproportionate share of the NYPD’s own rank and file, uniformed and retired alike — and it delivered Donald Trump (R) a roughly thirty-point margin in 2024. A mayor with a five-year public record of calling to defund the department he now tours with was never going to get an easy room there, and the crowd at Turtle Circle made sure he knew it before he finished his first sentence.
“Mayor Mamdani got booed on Staten Island at the NYPD National Night Out event at Midland Beach, per this Facebook video. He smiled through it and kept remarks *very* short.”
Jeff Coltin · POLITICO New York, August 5, 2026
Mayor Mamdani Booed at Staten Island NYPD Event. The incident happened Tuesday evening during National Night Out Against Crime in Midland Beach, part of Mamdani's citywide tour with Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch to spotlight falling shootings and murders.
The contrast within Mamdani’s own tour is the part that undercuts any “a few hecklers” framing. Earlier the same evening, at Restoration Plaza in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, he appeared alongside House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez to a friendly crowd. At the 23rd Precinct event in East Harlem, Manhattan, the reception was the same. Two stops, two receptive audiences, both amplifying the same falling-crime message. Then Staten Island, on the same tour, with the same message, delivered from the same podium script — and the room turned on him before he finished a sentence.
That is not a message-delivery problem. It is a trust problem specific to one community that has spent years watching a mayor who once wanted to dismantle their police department show up asking to be photographed with it. “We know that the stronger that bridge is, the safer that community is,” Mamdani told the Brooklyn crowd, describing police-community relations. On Staten Island, the bridge did not hold long enough for him to finish the thought.
Neither Mamdani’s office nor the NYPD issued a statement specifically addressing the Staten Island reception in the immediate aftermath. Per reporters on the boardwalk, Mamdani posed for photos with some attendees before departing — the final stop on the tour.
The Midland Beach boos landed in the middle of a separate, ongoing fight over Mamdani’s standing with New York’s first-responder community. A Change.org petition organized by 9/11 widower Giovanni Galante, seeking to bar the mayor from the 25th-anniversary Ground Zero ceremony next month over his past statements and political associations, had drawn tens of thousands of signatures by early August. Mamdani has said he intends to attend regardless, telling reporters he will “proudly honor the families, the survivors, the first responders forever impacted by that horrific terror attack by standing alongside them.”
Two different rooms, two different grievances, one common thread: a mayor whose past rhetoric toward police and public-safety institutions keeps resurfacing every time he tries to stand beside them in public. The Staten Island boardwalk did not settle that argument. It just put a timestamp and thirty seconds of video on it.
Mayor Mamdani built an entire evening around standing next to his police commissioner and a falling-crime scoreboard. It worked in Brooklyn and Manhattan. On Staten Island — the one borough he lost, the one with the deepest NYPD roots, and the one that has not forgotten a 2020 record of calling to defund the department — more than 3,500 people gave him thirty seconds and a wave of boos instead.
