A blizzard brought New York to a standstill on 23 February, with schools across the city closed. Restless young people without anywhere to go began to gather in Washington Square Park, summoned by Instagram chatshow Sidetalk, which wanted to stage an almighty snowball fight. A sea of young men in ski goggles gathered, armed with phones in one hand and balls of ice in the other. Cannonballs of snow flew across the sky. Others backflipped off snowmen or wrestled on the snow. The scene was of good-natured pandemonium.

“But it started getting chaotic once people were throwing gigantic blocks of ice. That’s when I left,” says Gabriella Yankovich who stopped by on her lunchbreak. “Boys being boys.”

Within an hour, there were 911 calls about teens climbing a park building and pelting those inside, and the New York police department increased its presence in the park.

But the dozen or so officers received an icy reception. They were swarmed and pummeled with snowballs. Social media was later flooded with images of snow raining down on officers.

“They try shutting us down but we’re still out here, and we’re still lit,” shouts one participant in Sidetalk’s highlights reel of the event.

Shortly after, police released a statement that multiple officers had been injured and taken to hospital “in a stable condition”.

The Police Benevolent Association (PBA), the largest New York police union, said the snowball fight was “unacceptable and outrageous” and called for arrests. “All of our city leaders must speak up to condemn this despicable attack.”

Many did – ​​ with a stonefaced seriousness that didn’t match the playful tone of mostly school-aged children whose only weapon was ice. The police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, called the incident “disgraceful” and “criminal”. The governor, Kathy Hochul, said throwing anything at a police officer is unacceptable, while the city comptroller, Mark Levine, urged that the behavior “absolutely cannot be normalized”.

But New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, sang a jollier tune. He dismissed the videos as “kids throwing snowballs” in an X post, before joking: “If anyone’s catching a snowball, it’s me.”

What began as a viral stunt has snowballed into a larger, high-stakes clash between Mamdani and the NYPD that comes at a politically delicate moment. After winning the mayoral race in November, Mamdani announced he would be keeping Tisch as commissioner, despite her track record of increasing surveillance and shielding officers from discipline, at odds with the more progressive policies Mamdani promised. Political analysts said Mamdani kept Tisch on to assuage concerns that he would be soft on crime and against the police.

As recently as 2020, Mamdani tweeted that the department is “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety” and called for its defunding. While he backtracked on that position, his campaign promised reform, pitching public safety as a health issue.

“Do the mayor-elect and I agree on everything? No, we don’t,” Tisch wrote in an email to rank-and-file officers when she accepted the offer.

The snowball spat foregrounds what may be the central tension of Mamdani’s leadership: can a progressive mayor work with the famously reactionary NYPD?

Charged over a snowball fight

The day after the snowball fight, the NYPD began posting suspect photos of four young men, wanted for inflicting multiple injuries on two officers. But Mamdani maintained a relaxed disposition.

“From the videos that I’ve seen, it looks like a snowball fight … I’m not going to be banning snowball fights,” he said at a press conference. The PBA condemned the response as a “complete failure of leadership”.

Nicholas Johnson and Salvatore Stallone, the injured officers in question, are the targets in most of the clips. One video appears to capture them being pelted from every direction, including a snowball thrown from out of shot, hitting the left side of Johnson’s face, leaving him with an apparent red eye.

Two men have since been arrested and charged by the Manhattan district attorney: Gusmane Coulibaly, 27, and Eric Wilson Jr, 18.

Coulibaly was initially charged by the NYPD with a violent felony, with prosecutors alleging that he caused Johnson’s injuries including “redness, tenderness and pain to the eye, as well as pain to the head and neck”, according to the arraignment transcript. Later, the DA determined there was insufficient evidence the injuries were caused directly by the defendant, so they reduced the charge to harassment and obstructing government administration.

Wilson allegedly struck Stallone with several snowballs – causing the victim to be “annoyed, harassed and alarmed” – Stallone told the DA. Wilson has no criminal record and turned himself in. He has also been charged with harassment and obstruction.

The complaints acknowledge a large crowd throwing numerous snowballs at the officers – but it seems the reason the defendants were singled out is simply because they were captured on video. For Coulibaly, this wasn’t coincidental: a content creator with more than 20,000 Instagram followers, he was identified by an officer due to a recent arrest for attempted robbery. His attorney has claimed it was simply a prank that went wrong: Coulibaly recorded himself telling a stranger to “run your pockets” and posted it online.

The snowball fight reflects a broader schism over how the police should behave: as defenders of community spirit, working with local people to keep them safe and ensure their freedoms, or in opposition to the people they police.

“The whole episode was ridiculous. I’ve been in snowball fights since I was 11 years old, you can’t possibly suffer an injury serious enough to require you to go to the hospital,” says Jeffrey Fagan, a Columbia law school professor. The NYPD are generally “snowflakes” about perceived disrespect, he adds, due to a perpetual belief they are under threat of assault. “They think it’s a slippery slope where a snowball today can turn into a rock tomorrow and then a gun later on.”

In 2014, five young Bronx men – the “Snowball Five”– won $60,000 each after filing a lawsuit against the city after a police officer pulled a gun on them and arrested them, claiming they bombarded him with snowballs. The officer testified that he was “outnumbered” and “wasn’t taking any chances” but footage showed that just one snowball hit him.

Regarding the recent incident, Patrick Hendry, president of the PBA, has claimed the “ice was packed with rocks”, although there is no mention of this in the two complaints that were filed.

“I’d love to know what actual injuries they supposedly suffered. I’m assuming it’s redness and cold,” says Jerome Greco, supervising attorney of the Legal Aid Society’s digital forensics unit, which specializes in challenging police surveillance evidence.

But Maria Haberfeld, professor of police science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, insists that because officers are outnumbered by the public, they cannot enforce the law if their presence isn’t automatically respected.

“This is not as benign as people want to portray. Once the public shows lack of compliance, that’s the end of law enforcement,” she says.

Mamdani’s stance on policing

By siding with content creators over officers, Mamdani risks damaging his relationship with the NYPD early in his mayoralty.

“The mayor is not going to have our backs,” Hendry told reporters outside the courthouse after Coulibaly’s arraignment. He later accused Mamdani of putting a “bullseye” on officers’ backs by failing to condemn the incident as an attack, speaking after Wilson’s arraignment, which was attended by about a dozen police officers.

The last mayor to have considerable friction with the NYPD was Bill de Blasio. Police unions accused him of undermining officers after he voiced support for the 2014 Ferguson protests, sparked by the police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, two unarmed Black men. Thousands of NYPD officers turned their backs on de Blasio during the funerals of slain officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu.

“That dynamic is probably going to be mirrored with Mamdani,” says Rafael A Mangual, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. “Given his long history of opposition to the NYPD as an institution, most rank-and-file officers are already expecting his administration to be unfriendly,” he says.

On a 2020 podcast, Mamdani argued that police officers can escalate certain situations such as domestic violence, mental health crises and homelessness, which could better be handled by specialized civilian responders as opposed to “an individual with a gun who has received quite a limited amount of training”. In a 2024 op-ed, he wrote that “more policing and incarceration” does little to prevent harm, but rather, “dignified work, economic stability, and well-resourced neighborhoods” can more effectively keep the public safe.

His financial plan for his term, published last month, will scrap the hiring of 5,000 additional NYPD officers – agreed to under the previous mayor, Eric Adams – triggering fierce backlash among Staten Island officials, a borough with strong, multigenerational ties to the force. Republican city council member Frank Morano said that decision was led by “an ideological desire to shrink the police force”.

As Mamdani governs, critics primed to see a lawless city are watching for any uptick in crime. He has kept Tisch at the helm of the police, for now, to steady the transition and mollify any officers that might feel antagonized by his previous statements.

Appointed commissioner in 2024, Tisch is a billionaire heiress who champions data-driven, predictive policing, which critics argue perpetuates historical biases, and has been an active proponent of the NYPD’s expansion of surveillance technology.

When pressed on Mamdani’s comments about the snowballs, Tisch warned: “Don’t mess with my cops.”

Neither the officers, the defendants, the mayor’s office or the NYPD responded to the Guardian’s requests for comment.

It’s unlikely that snowballs alone will break Mamdani and Tisch apart, but it is the first public fissure between the two. It might not be the last. Looking ahead, there will be some “core, dealbreaker issues” regarding reform, says Mangual.

Among them: a 2024 bill that would abolish the NYPD’s controversial “gang database” that Mamdani said he would sign if it reached his desk. Mamdani also said on the campaign trail that he wanted to give the state’s civilian complaint review board (CCRB), the independent agency charged with investigating misconduct, final say on officer discipline, shifting authority away from the commissioner.

“If he were to pull those levers, it would likely lead to the end of Tisch’s tenure under Mamdani,” with either actions creating an “untenable tension”, says Mangual.

Even without those changes, Tisch will have to reckon with Mamdani’s agenda to shift many nonviolent responsibilities away from police, the centerpiece of which is a proposed civilian department of community safety (DCS) forecast to cost $1.1bn, according to a campaign white paper. Legislation to create the department is already progressing through the city council.

While the DCS wouldn’t cut officer headcount, it proposes a form of functional downsizing: diverting large swathes of 911 calls to civilian responders, shifting operational control and data flows away from the NYPD.

Last month, Mamdani reiterated his vision for the DCS after police shot Jabez Chakraborty, a 22-year-old man in mental distress, after his family called 911 and he charged at officers with a knife.

“This situation underscores just how urgently we need a different and more effective mental health response system,” Mamdani said of the events, and urged Queens prosecutors not to pursue charges against Chakraborty.

But Haberfeld, the John Jay College professor, believes the DCS won’t work in practice due to the pre-existing shortage of social workers and mental health responders. But should it secure the funding and legislative approval, Haberfeld expects Tisch will be forced to capitulate to Mamdani’s vision or step down.

“Or he will remove her,” she predicts.

Next month, Coulibaly and Wilson will appear in court to make the case that the snowballs they allegedly threw were not the criminal kind. While unlikely, the maximum sentencing they face is 364 days in county jail.

The ice from that day has now melted, but the tensions between Mamdani’s agenda and the police will be harder to defrost.