Mamdani Quietly Kills NYC’s “Cop City” Plan

By Michael Gonik

Nearly ten years after it was initially proposed, a plan to build an officer training center that’s come to be known as “Cop City” has been razed by the Mamdani administration.

The original 2017 plan, which was first greenlit by then mayor Bill de Blasio, called for a state-of-the-art $100 million correctional academy. But by the time he was getting ready to leave office in 2021, there wasn’t a lick of perceivable movement on the plan, though that didn’t stop him from claiming it was not only still underway but would now be located next to the police academy in College Point, Queens, as he stumbled out the door. From there, the can was kicked to Eric Adams, who announced an expansion of the plans in 2024 that more than doubled its cost to the city (up to $225 million) and widened its focus to train law enforcement teams across other city departments. At the time, Mamdani—whose mayoral aspirations were clear but far from certain, serving as the New York State representative for the 36th District in Queens—was explicitly against the proposal. “We do not need to spend more than $200 million on a ‘Cop City’ training facility in Queens,” he told City & State.

That brings us more or less up to the present, when a Mamdani rep confirmed his administration was pulling the plug on the project entirely. “We stopped plans for the previously proposed public safety academy,” the spokesperson said in a statement, also according to City & State, which spotted the mayor running pick-up basketball games, ironically, out of the very same police academy in Queens that would have been the site of the “Cop City” project. Early criticism of the plan’s dissolvement came from MAGA-adjacent City Council member Vickie Paladino, who called the move “disappointing but unsurprising” in a statement, charging the mayor with pandering to his DSA base. “The mayor is committed to de-policing and decarceration, and this cancellation is just another part of the agenda.”