Did Zohran Mamdani Really Just Say This About Why Incidents of Rape and Felony Assaults Have Increased?

violence is a social construct. Not "poverty contributes to violence" or "trauma shapes behavior," which are at least arguable points people have debated for decades. Just violence itself, the actual physical act of a man raping or beating another person, filed under the same category as gender roles or table manners. That's the framing Mamdani is reportedly working from, and it explains a lot about how he talks about crime in a city that just watched felony assault numbers climb.

If violence is a construct, then locking someone up for committing it isn't justice, it's just enforcing a bias. That's the logic that gets you to "defund the police" and "close Rikers" in the same breath, treated as forward motion rather than as two policies that remove the people whose job is to stop violent men and the building where the worst of them are held. New Yorkers don't experience assault as a social construct. They experience it as a fist, a knife, a subway platform they now think twice about standing near.

We've heard the argument before that root causes matter more than consequences, and there's a version of that worth taking seriously. But there's a difference between saying "we should address why people become violent" and suggesting the category of violence itself is invented by the people describing it. One is policy. The other is a rationale for not punishing it at all, dressed up in academic language so it sounds like insight instead of an excuse.

Rikers has real problems, and nobody serious defends its conditions. But the answer to a broken jail isn't no jail, and the answer to rising assault numbers isn't a theory that makes the assault disappear on paper while the victim is still bleeding on the platform.