Zohran Mamdani ran for mayor promising to fundamentally reshape the NYPD. One hundred days in, the department looks a lot like the one he inherited.

The democratic socialist who flipped City Hall last year made police accountability a centerpiece of his campaign. He pledged to eliminate the NYPD’s gang database, shut down a SWAT-style unit widely criticized for excessive force, disband so-called “quality of life” enforcement teams that critics say disproportionately target Black and Hispanic New Yorkers, and shift disciplinary authority over bad cops from the police commissioner to a civilian oversight body. Bold promises. Big ones.

He hasn’t delivered on most of them.

Criminal justice reformers and rank-and-file cops share, for once, a common feeling: uncertainty about what this mayor actually intends to do with the police department he now controls.

The New York Civil Liberties Union, which backed many of Mamdani’s reform proposals, is trying to stay patient. Michael Sisitzky, the group’s assistant policy director, acknowledged the scope of what the mayor is up against. Sisitzky stressed the “preexisting problems with the NYPD that the mayor has inherited,” calling it “a pretty herculean task to right these issues.” That’s a diplomatic way of saying City Hall hasn’t moved fast enough. But the NYCLU isn’t walking away yet.

The Police Benevolent Association is less charitable. PBA President Patrick Hendry said his members remain deeply skeptical, even though the mayor has so far left the most aggressive campaign pledges on the shelf. “It’s good that the mayor has not acted on some of his most drastic campaign pledges, but there is still a perception among police officers that the city under his leadership won’t have our backs,” Hendry told The City. He added that Mamdani still has a window. “It is still early, and the mayor has a chance to change that perception, but he needs to make a real effort to hear our concerns and work with us to address them,” Hendry said.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement. But not a declaration of war either.

Mamdani, for his part, isn’t pretending the tensions don’t exist. He told the New York Times in an interview published Thursday that he will overrule Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch if he believes it’s necessary to push reforms forward, saying “as the mayor, ultimately I am responsible for what happens in our city within each and every city agency and department.” That’s a direct assertion of authority over the department and a signal that Tisch doesn’t have an unconditional mandate.

So what has actually changed?

Mamdani spokesperson Sam Raskin pointed to a handful of concrete steps. The mayor appointed a deputy mayor for community safety, which City Hall describes as the first structural move toward a new department designed to reduce how often police respond to 911 mental health calls. That kind of co-responder model has shown results in other cities, though building it from scratch in New York is a different project entirely.

City Hall also codified an NYPD policy requiring the department to release body camera footage within 30 days of what Raskin called “critical incidents.” That’s not nothing. Body camera transparency has been a persistent fight between reform advocates and police departments across the country, and locking it into policy rather than leaving it to departmental discretion matters. Still, it’s a procedural win, not a structural one.

The gang database. The SWAT-style unit. The discipline overhaul. Those remain unaddressed, or at least undetailed. No timeline, no plan, no public accounting for why candidate Mamdani’s specific promises haven’t moved.

Reporting from The City this week captures the frustration on all sides: reformers who expected faster action and officers who don’t trust the mayor’s long-term intentions.

A hundred days is a short clock. Anyone who’s covered City Hall knows the difference between a mayor who’s building toward something and one who’s quietly abandoning promises he no longer finds convenient. Right now, with Mamdani, it’s genuinely hard to tell which one this is.

What happens next depends partly on the city budget negotiations ahead and partly on whether Mamdani decides to spend political capital on a department that’s never going to love him anyway. The question isn’t whether he can tame the NYPD. It’s whether he’ll try.