New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani ordered the city’s police department to conduct its first comprehensive review of use-of-force policies in a decade and moved to prevent officers accused of serious misconduct from avoiding discipline by retiring.
The changes would require the department, the nation’s largest police force, to flag retirement applications from officers with pending disciplinary cases so proceedings against them can be completed.
Officers who retire with charges pending will also be referred to New York State for possible decertification, which could prevent them from being hired by another police agency in the state.
Mamdani also announced $2.6 million in additional money to triple staffing at the Department of Investigation’s inspector general for the police, expanding independent oversight of the roughly 34,000-officer department.
The funding will allow the agency to “fully staff and re-establish robust oversight of policing in New York City,” DOI Commissioner Nadia Shihata said in a statement. She called such scrutiny one of her top priorities.
The measures follow the retirement of an officer facing disciplinary charges in the March 2024 killing of Win Rozario, a 19-year-old Queens man who was shot by police during a mental health crisis. The officer retired before a disciplinary trial could take place, according to the mayor’s office.
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“We have an obligation to Win’s family and to every New Yorker who calls for help in a moment of crisis,” Mamdani said.
The city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, which looks into complaints against the police, found in September 2025 that the officers involved used excessive force, rejecting the conclusions of its investigators, who had determined they acted within departmental guidelines.
Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch acknowledged last week that the department had erred in not alerting the review board about the officer’s plan to retire, “so it could take whatever steps it deemed appropriate.”
“As a result of human error, we failed to do so, and I apologize for that mistake,” she said in a statement, which added that new review procedures had been incorporated and the civilian employee responsible for the mistake had been demoted.
New York State Attorney General Letitia James declined to bring criminal charges in December, saying her office couldn’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the use of force was unjustified because Rozario had approached officers with scissors.
Officers facing serious disciplinary charges have a financial incentive to retire because being fired could affect their pension benefits, though dismissal doesn’t automatically result in forfeiture of an already vested pension.
The NYPD can’t prevent an officer from applying for retirement, though the police commissioner has a limited period after an application is filed to determine whether the officer can depart the force in good standing.
An officer can retire after 20 years of service and typically receives a full pension equal to 50% of their final average salary.
The New York City Police Pension Fund manages tens of billions of dollars for current and retired members of the department and is one of the city’s five public pension systems, which collectively rank among the largest public retirement systems in the US.