New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has announced a review of the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) disciplinary rules and use of force practices. They come after an NYPD officer involved in the 2024 shooting of 19-year-old Win Rozario retired, allowing him to skirt a disciplinary trial for misconduct over the killing. The mayor wants to close that “loophole”. But using Rozario’s case as an example of police brutality sets a dangerous precedent that could stymie efforts to tackle crime in New York.

According to body-camera footage, Rozario grabbed a pair of scissors and lunged at officers in a cramped Queens apartment, using his mother as a shield. He ignored repeated commands to drop the scissors and charged the officers. The officers deployed TASERs before opening fire. Rozario kept advancing, and they fired again. Even Attorney General Letitia James’s Office of Special Investigation declined to bring criminal charges, concluding that it could not be “disproved” that the officers had reasonably fired after Rozario advanced toward them with a potentially deadly weapon. The family nevertheless pressed for internal discipline.

There is a distinction between criminal liability and departmental discipline. But the footage raises an obvious question: what, exactly, should these officers have done differently?

The New York mayor’s office should be focused on stopping crime, not creating new disincentives for officers to do their jobs properly. The NYPD has roughly 34,000 uniformed officers serving a city of more than eight million people. Recruiting and retaining enough officers is already a challenge. Making the job less attractive by subjecting officers to prolonged disciplinary proceedings after dangerous encounters will hardly help.

This is the concern behind the Ferguson Effect, the theory used to describe the pullback in proactive policing following a fatal 2014 shooting in Ferguson, Missouri. When officers believe that doing their jobs correctly will nevertheless expose them to public vilification and disciplinary proceedings, they may decide that the safer course is to do less, or nothing at all.

In policing, hesitation has consequences. Swift action under duress can save countless lives, including an officer’s own. But when first responders become reluctant to act, it is ordinary New Yorkers, particularly those living in high-crime neighbourhoods, who pay the price.

Recently, New York has made real progress against crime. Murders and shootings have fallen to historic lows, and major crime has declined from last year. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch’s emphasis on targeted enforcement has helped produce real wins. But low crime is not a guarantee absent good policy. Despite a low murder rate, assaults and hate crimes are still up. The city should be doing everything it can to sustain and improve the status quo, not undermine the policing that has helped make it possible in the first place.

Of course, officers who abuse their authority should face consequences. But the absence of criminal charges is at least a reason to look carefully at what happened before pursuing further discipline.

Mamdani’s announcement sends the wrong message at the wrong time. New York needs to recruit more officers, retain the ones it has, and sustain the enforcement that has helped bring violent crime down. Instead, the mayor is making it easier for political pressure to follow officers long after a dangerous encounter has ended. A city serious about public safety should be asking how to prevent the next shooting, robbery, or assault — not looking for new ways to punish the people tasked with preventing them.