Colin Vanderburg: To begin, how generalizable are New York’s politics of policing and criminal justice? I think there’s an idea that the NYPD, as the country’s largest police department in the country’s largest city, is somehow archetypal of American policing generally; but obviously New York is quite distinct among US cities. As we approach questions of policing under Mamdani, how much should we think of this as a specifically New York experience, and how much can be extrapolated elsewhere?

Stuart Schrader: In many ways New York is not representative compared to other cities. The centrality of mass transit, the size and density, the strict gun laws, the massive inequality, the demographic diversity, the spatial proximity of wealth and poverty—there’s a lot of factors that are not directly related to policing that make the city unique, and which nevertheless have implications for policing.

At the same time, the NYPD has long been a standard bearer for the profession.…