A resurfaced tirade from a radical activist on Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s transition team shows her blasting fellow Bangladeshis for celebrating relatives who join the NYPD — because they could become “killers.”
Kazi Fouzia, a self-described “revolutionary organizer,” made the comments in 2020 during a discussion called “What’s App: Our Role in Black Liberation Movements.” The comments — aimed at Bangladeshis and other South Asian families — came around the time of the Black Lives Matter protests.
“What are you proud for? That your relative would become a killer one day, or brutally beat our people?” said Fouzia, director of organizing at the South Asian immigrant-rights nonprofit group Desis Rising Up and Moving, or DRUM.
Fouzia, who’s on Mamdani’s transition team for “worker justice,” said at the time it was a “fascinating moment” to see South Asian-Americans swelling with pride on Facebook, boasting that a child or other family member joined the NYPD.
“That’s your proud, because your relative will be a killer someday?” she said.
A video of the comments was recirculated by Stu Smith, an investigative analyst with the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute.
“She now sits on Zohran Mamdani’s transition committee for Worker Justice, which is odd given some of her stated views,” Smith said of Fouzia.
“[Fouzia] belittles South Asian families who feel proud when their children become NYPD officers, treating that path as inherently shameful. If this is what ‘Worker Justice’ sounds like, it is less about helping working people and more about policing what they are allowed to aspire to. That kind of determinism is deeply un-American.”
The resurfaced video of the anti-cop rant comes as New York’s Bangladeshi community and the NYPD are still reeling from the July murder of one of their own, Officer Didarul Islam. The Bangladeshi native was shot and killed by a deranged man who entered a Midtown skyscraper.
Mamdani had visited the slain man’s family.
A leader in the Bangladeshi-American community in New York declined to specifically comment on Fouzia’s bashing of the NYPD — but stood behind the police.
“We are proud. We always support the police,” said Mohammad Ali, general secretary of the Bangladeshi American Society. “I love the NYPD.”
Ali said there are a “few bad apples” in New York’s Finest, but the overwhelming majority of officers just want to protect residents of the Big Apple.
There are 3,000 Bangladeshi-Americans employed in law enforcement, including as officers or traffic agents in the NYPD, the corrections department and other uniformed services, Ali estimated.
The Mamdani transition team and Fouzia had no immediate comment.
Mamdani has done his own fence mending with police officers, after referring to the NYPD on June 28, 2020, as “racist, anti-queer and a major threat to public safety.”
“What we need is to #DefundthePolice,” the Queens assemblyman said following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
He publicly apologized during the mayoral campaign.
Fouzia is just the latest in Mamdani’s orbit to come under fire for outrageous remarks.
Catherine Almonte Da Costa resigned just hoursafter being named Mamdani’s appointments director when decade-old posts on X resurfaced of her rants about “money hungry Jews” and defunding NYPD “piggies.”
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