New York —

Months before winning New York City’s Democratic primary for mayor , Zohran Mamdani sat inside a Pakistani restaurant in Queens with around two dozen off-duty police officers.

The officers were familiar with the 33-year-old assemblyman’s past calls to defund America’s largest police force and social media posts in which he referred to police as racist and wicked.

They’d been invited to the private meet-and-greet by a retired New York Police Department officer who’d spent years helping to boost the department’s Bangladeshi and South Asian enrollment. He told the officers to give Mamdani a chance.

“I was not a fan of Mamdani at all, but as I got to know him more, I began to respect him and like him more,” said Shamsul Haque, the meeting’s organizer and a Bangladeshi Amer

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