Over at the Daily Signal, author Jarrett Stepman thinks so. His article opines that Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim Socialist, has been chipping away at public order in New York City, the better to prepare it and its inhabitants for a new Socialist future (his phrase during his campaign being “The Warmth of Collectivism”). We who know something about what socialism actually brings about are less than happy with the so-called warmth.

Here are a couple of excerpts from Stepman’s article.

New York City’s socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani has carefully plucked away another small but significant element of public order.

According to the New York Post, the mayor’s office issued a directive that the New York Police Department would no longer be responding to calls relating to homeless encampments. Instead, officers will now have to first dispatch social services to deal with such matters before they are allowed to act.

The move is just the latest by the Mamdani administration to peel away public order in the Big Apple in the name of social justice.

The administration had already put up roadblocks to prevent the NYPD from removing homeless encampments, but now it will be further handcuffed.

Gee, this sounds like exactly what Seattle Socialist Mayor Katie Wilson is doing, but a bit more drastic. Cause more chaos, cause the government to come in and take over.

While Mamdani has been careful not to work too directly against the NYPD since he was elected, this is just further demonstration that he’s determined to, over time, entirely undo the kind of policing that made New York dramatically safer under former Mayor Rudy Giuliani. That crime-fighting revolution paid dramatic dividends for decades.

Even though many crimes have dropped to rates below their post-George Floyd riots peak, urban chaos remains a problem and, in some cases, is getting worse.

Like Seattle, the number of homeless people in New York has reached a five-year high.

And the growing numbers of homeless people are clustering in encampments that are transforming parts of the city, particularly the ones by the Intrepid Museum, Citi Field—where the New York Mets play—and under FDR Drive.

“Local residents and workers are decrying a homeless takeover under the FDR Drive, where mountains of trash, foul smells, and fights are regular occurrences,” amNewYork reported. “According to locals, the parking area under the highway from 17th Street to 23rd Street has become a massive homeless shelter.”

Mamdani did do something about one shantytown. The city swept away an encampment on Wednesday that had built up near the New York University dorms. Oh, it’s in an area likely filled with a high concentration of Mamdani superfans. A coincidence, I’m sure.

We all are aware that Muslim Mamdani is increasing the numbers of hijabs seen on NYPD officers, and now he will be relying on more over-stressed Social Workers to deal with the growing numbers of potentially violent street vagrants in the City. What could possibly go wrong?

Unfortunately, these sorts of anti-policing tactics by the Mamdani administration may “work” in a certain sense. The encampment problem will surely grow. But as the situation slowly gets out of hand, the administration can better defuse the blame without immediately infuriating the public.

They’ll say that the problem is “affordability,” that the budget is too small, and that systemic racism is causing an epidemic of homelessness.

All of that being nonsense, but by the time the issue is out of control the public may be more accustomed to thinking it’s endemic rather than a consequence of bad policy decisions.

It’s right up the Socialist Alley to go into a city, reduce its police force to spread chaos, ignore all the “broken windows”, and eventually crack down on ALL citizens and destroy the people’s everyday lives. Mamdani is already driving the billionaires away-we have all seen the articles about wealthy scions of Wall Street decamping for Dallas and Florida. This new drive will make them leave faster, and those New Yorkers who are less than wealthy will see their city’s order deteriorate more rapidly than it already is doing.

What worries me is that New York City has the largest concentration of Jews in the world, outside of Israel, and many of those Jews voted for Mamdani. Anti-Semitism is growing everywhere, and some NYC Jews seem to be in favor. Young people in America have had, since the 1980s, a severe deficit in their history lessons, which ignore the evils of Communism, so they seem to think that socialism and communism mean warm-fuzzy “sharing” of resources, and not severe repression of everything that makes life in America worth living.

Some people are going to have a very unpleasant existence coming to them, with the twin threats of Islam and urban breakdown.