Big-city mayors tend to rise and fall based not on the genius or idiocy of their particular policies, but on the quality of life they deliver. If the streets are clean and crime is low and the people feel safe, hizzoner tends to get the credit.

And so it goes in New York City, where Democrat Socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani is reaping the rewards for having retained his predecessor’s police commissioner. It was former Mayor Eric Adams who appointed Jessica Tisch to the job of top cop, and it is Commish Tisch who’s overseen a record-setting reduction in shootings and murders. As a recent NYPD press release tells it:

Year to date, there were 489 shooting incidents, beating the previous record of 553 set in 2025. There were 594 shooting victims, beating the previous record of 694 set in 2018 and 2025, and there were 203 murders, beating the previous record of 215 set in 2017. Compared to 2021, 846 fewer people have been shot so far this year.

In short: Mamdani is a smarmy Muslim socialist swine, but a savvy police commissioner is saving his bacon.

“I thank Police Commissioner Tisch, and the members of the NYPD,” said Mamdani, “who continue to devote themselves to the work of devising and implementing strategies that keep New Yorkers safe.”

Indeed, a case can be made that New York City is safer, relatively speaking, than it’s ever been — unless, of course, you’re a Jew, in which case you might want to reconsider why it is you keep aligning yourself with a political party whose Jew-hating base flies Palestinian flags on October 7 and whose leaders keep calling your defensive war against the barbarians of Hamas a “genocide.” But that’s another story.

Now, to be fair, crime is down all across the United States. As the Trump administration noted recently, homicides are down 18% compared to this time last year and are on pace to be at their lowest level in at least 126 years. But it’s not just murders. Carjackings are down 47%, motor vehicle thefts are down 20%, robberies are down 17%, and residential burglaries are down 13%.

Still, the technocratic Tisch gets credit for bringing IT to bear on Big Apple crime. As The Wall Street Journal’s Tunku Varadarajan noted last year, Tisch has tweaked CompStat, the city’s crime-counting system, by focusing on individual pockets of crime rather than whole four-square-mile precincts. She calls it “a scalpel approach to fighting crime,” and it certainly seems to be working.

Despite this remarkable success, though, the Democratic Socialists are out with their pitchforks and their torches. They’re demanding that Mamdani fire Tisch for — get this — failing to kick federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents out of the city. As The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board writes, “The DSA pressure began after ICE agents shot Oscar Belgal, a 28-year-old illegal immigrant.” Belgal was a dangerous dirtbag with gang ties, and he “weaponized his vehicle” against those ICE agents during a targeted immigration enforcement operation. But it seems the Left would rather keep dangerous illegals in the country that keep our cities safe.

Why, you might ask, does the Left have such hatred for ICE, whose job is simply to enforce our nation’s duly passed immigration laws?

Answer: Because immigrants, and especially brown-skinned immigrants, tend to vote overwhelmingly Democrat. Why? Because the Democratic Party is the Party of Open Borders and Free Stuff. That’s just a fact. And it’s that stubborn fact that’s driving the Left’s unwillingness to work with ICE to remove even deadly dangerous illegal immigrants from our streets.

The Democrats want to run out the clock between now and the next presidential election because they know if they can do that, and if they can get a Democrat elected to succeed Donald Trump in 2028, they know that it’ll be next to impossible to restart the removal of Joe Biden’s 15 million illegals the next time a Republican is in the White House, which would be 2032 at the earliest.

So the Left’s long game of resisting and vilifying ICE — even if it means that a bunch of American citizens are going to get robbed, raped, or murdered as a result — is in fact a strategy to mint new Democrat voters by granting the Autopen’s illegals a sort of de facto amnesty.

And all this because “progressives” don’t particularly like children, don’t produce them at the rate conservatives do, and must therefore artificially manufacture the next generation of Democrat voters in order to maintain their political viability.

It’s gross, yes, but it is what it is.