In August 2025, a claim spread online that Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist running for New York mayor, wanted to "end all misdemeanor charges."
The rumor about Mamdani, who won the city's Democratic primary in June, spread on X, Facebook and Reddit.
It appeared to originate from a New York Post story (archived), which claimed: "Zohran Mamdani and his comrades at the Democratic Socialists of America want to wipe out the enforcement of all misdemeanor offenses." Other news outlets also published stories based on the Post's reporting. In response, several X posts alleged that the Post made up the claim.
As of this writing, Mamdani's platform did not include any indication that he wants to end enforcement of misdemeanor offenses. The Post appeared to base its story off of the Democratic Socialists of America's political platform, which did, in fact, include a call to "end all misdemeanor offenses." Mamdani is a DSA member.
The DSA is a progressive, political nonprofit organization — not a political party — that entered the mainstream political consciousness through the 2016 presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. The organization believes in the abolition of capitalism and collective, social ownership of the economy.
Mamdani did not immediately return an inquiry from Snopes about his stance on the DSA's call to end misdemeanor offenses; the Post's reporter on its story, Gabrielle Fahmy, also did not immediately respond with any evidence that Mamdani supports or has supported that part of the DSA's platform. As such, we could not rate this claim.
It is worth noting that the Post, a conservative tabloid, often attacks Mamdani, which Mamdani has joked about and addressed in his campaign videos.
Mamdani's public-safety platform
Mamdani's full public-safety platform is available on Google Docs, accessible from a link on his campaign platform page. A search through that document found no mention of "ending" misdemeanor offenses, nor any mentions of misdemeanor offenses at all.
Instead, the document focused almost entirely on the creation of a new "Department of Community Safety" that aims to "prevent violence before it happens by taking a public health approach to safety" (see Page 1).
The department would work to improve social services, such as for mental health and homelessness, with the idea that police could then spend more time on fighting serious crimes, instead of dealing with "the failures of our social safety net," as Mamdani put it in a campaign video.
As a New York State assemblymember, Mamdani has supported criminal-justice reform legislation easing penalties on nonviolent crimes, such as a proposal that would decriminalize possession of controlled substances. However, as of this writing, nothing in his legislative history nor in his mayoral campaign platform suggested ending enforcement of "all misdemeanor offenses."
DSA's criminal-justice platform
The DSA's platform calls for the abolition of the "carceral state," a term used in academia that has no single accepted definition, but by in large often refers to the system of mass incarceration and policing in the United States. As part of that political philosophy, the DSA has called for ending misdemeanor charges, per its website:
- End the criminalization of working-class survival
- End all misdemeanor offenses, accounting for 80% of total court dockets, reduce jail churn by reducing arrests, and cut funding to prosecutor's offices
Mamdani has appeared to indicate support for the DSA's criminal-justice platform before. In 2020, a podcast host on "The Far Left Show" asked him whether prisons were obsolete, a reference to Marxist scholar Angela Davis' book calling for the abolition of prisons.
In response, Mamdani questioned the purpose prisons serve, referencing high rates of recidivism and calling for "a system of justice that will repair the harm that has been caused and address it in a serious way, because right now we don't have it and it makes everyone more unsafe" (see 23:18 for the start of this conversation).
However, as a mayoral candidate, he has also reportedly walked back various positions he held in 2020, including a call to defund the police. As such, it was not possible to say how much of the DSA's criminal-justice platform Mamdani supports as of this writing.