There are still many unanswered questions regarding the shooting which took place yesterday evening in East Midtown Manhattan, six blocks from where I live. But one thing is crystal-clear: the perpetrator killed four people, including one NYPD officer, and left another in critical condition.

This simple, grim fact makes the event a crucial test for the Democratic mayoral nominee, Zohran Mamdani. He can either demonstrate that he has decisively left behind his childish views on law and order from 2020, when he called for defunding the police in part to achieve “queer liberation”, or he can live down to his critics’ picture of him as an avatar of “peak woke”.

Already, the tragedy is being used to discredit his mayoral bid. “Can somebody in Uganda please wake Zohran up? A cop is dead,” tweeted the Fox News writer David Marcus, referring to Mamdani’s trip to his land of birth to celebrate his wedding.

But that’s unfair, given that voters have yet to hand Mamdani the keys to Gracie Mansion, the traditional mayoral residence. His being in Uganda during this freak event isn’t analogous to LA Mayor Karen Bass’s decision to fly to Ghana despite her office receiving serious warnings ahead of a huge fire earlier this year.

A more credible critique, however, has to do with Mamdani’s 2020-era record of anti-law enforcement rhetoric that clashes sharply with current attitudes among even Democratic voters. Indeed, even back then, talk of police-and-prison abolition appealed mainly to a narrow base of progressive activists. At the height of the George Floyd riots, a strong majority of black Americans told pollsters that they wanted the same level or more policing in their neighborhoods.

Fast-forward five years, and Mamdani has renounced #defund. “I will not defund the police,” he declared during the Democratic primary contest. “I will work with the police, because I believe the police have a critical role to play in creating public safety.” He also indicated that he might retain current NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, a technocrat who has proven popular by being simultaneously tough on both crime and police corruption.

Still, public safety was among his weakest issues during the primary. And if the anti-Mamdani camp coalesces around one nominee — whether Andrew Cuomo or incumbent Mayor Eric Adams — Mamdani’s earlier rhetoric could hurt him in the context of a general election. The overall impression, reinforced by his public safety plan, is that Mamdani fundamentally believes cops are being called to address too many social pathologies which aren’t law-and-order problems, but having to do with economic precarity, mental illness and the like.

In a sense, Mamdani’s right. None other than Bill Bratton, the former NYPD commissioner and one of the architects of Broken Windows policing, argued a few years ago that as the social-safety net has frayed under the neoliberal model, cops have been tasked with addressing more and more crises that really aren’t their business. Mamdani’s proposals to ramp up addiction support and mental health responses aren’t wrong.

But here’s the thing: there is a criminal element in Gotham (as in any other community), a relatively narrow slice that victimizes the rest through theft, assault, sex crimes or drug dealing — or, as in the rare case of the Midtown East shooter, acts of terror. What Mamdani needs to communicate is that he understands this at a gut level, and will fundamentally have the backs of America’s largest police force. Carefully worded, progressive-NGO-friendly statements that cops are “part of the solution” won’t do when you have a record of saying policing as such should be defunded.

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Sohrab Ahmari is the US editor of UnHerd and the author, most recently, of Tyranny, Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What To Do About It

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