Original reporting · The New York Times
What happened
The New York Times reported on Monday that Mayor Zohran Mamdani is rolling out police reforms related to use of force. According to the Times, the changes follow the retirement of an officer who was facing a disciplinary trial over the 2024 death of 19-year-old Win Rozario. The details below come from NBC New York and City & State New York, which covered the same announcement.
NBC New York reported that the mayor directed the NYPD to conduct what City Hall calls “the first comprehensive review of NYPD use of force in a decade.” The review includes encounters with people in mental health crises. According to NBC and City & State, the package also includes:
- a notification system meant to finish discipline before an officer can retire;
- sharing information with the state so officers who leave with serious charges pending have a harder time getting other police jobs;
- $2.6 million more for the city’s independent police oversight office;
- a standard process for informing families after critical incidents, including giving them Force Investigation Division final reports.
City & State reported that Rozario was in a mental health crisis when he called police to his Queens home. It also reported that the Civilian Complaint Review Board had recommended misconduct charges against both officers who shot him, and that the NYPD did not notify the board before one of them retired on a disability pension. “As a result of human error, we failed to do so, and I apologize for that mistake,” Commissioner Jessica Tisch said, City & State reported. NBC New York reported that the family said the administration “betrayed” them, and that in December 2025 the state attorney general’s office declined to bring criminal charges. That office said evidence showed Rozario approached officers with scissors and refused commands to drop them.
Patrick Hendry, a spokesman for the officers’ union, told NBC the mayor should also review the board’s “blatantly biased interpretation” of force policies, and called the move an attempt to appease the mayor’s base. City & State reported that some criminal justice advocates have been frustrated with the mayor’s approach to policing. The review will run over the coming months, according to City & State. What it finds is not yet known.
Our reflection
A young man in crisis picked up the phone and asked for help, and the help that came shot him. His parents then waited on the discipline process. Then they learned that one of the officers had already retired on a pension, through what the commissioner called human error. Grief that loses its hearing to a missed notice does not rest easy.
The officers’ side carries weight too. They walk into small rooms with seconds to decide, and the state found no crime it could prove. The family’s account and that finding both stand in the record. Followers of Jesus do not get to keep only the fact that suits our side.
Matthew takes a line from Isaiah and lays it over Jesus: a bruised reed he will not break. He sets it just after the leaders begin plotting his death, while Jesus is quietly healing the crowds. Power in his hands bends toward the person closest to snapping. In Gethsemane, with a sword already swung, he said “No more of this!” and healed the ear of a man who came to arrest him. That is the standard. It judges a policy manual, and it judges me.
Few of us will ever stand at a door with a gun. We know the reflex anyway. When someone’s pain scares us, we reach for control. We raise our voice at the teenager who is coming apart, because we want the moment over more than we want him whole. And we know the side exit, the form that lets a hard reckoning quietly expire. Repentance walks back in the front door and faces the family.
What New York announced is mostly plumbing: a notice that must be sent, a report a family can hold, money for the people who check. Accountability lives or dies in plumbing. The review will be worth exactly what it changes on a real 911 call, and nobody knows that yet. Through our JCVI work we try to reach young people at first contact, so someone already knows a young man’s name before the worst night comes.
In Miami, Chicago or Houston, you can ask your own city this week who answers when a family calls 911 for a son in a mental health crisis, and whether families ever see the final report. The steps below start there.
A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out, till he has brought justice through to victory.
Matthew 12:20
Your move
Source: The New York Times, “Mamdani Rolls Out Police Reforms Related to Use of Force”