The new sheriff in town has a long history of claiming the NYPD is systemically racist — including tying slave patrols to modern policing.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Friday announced Edwin Raymond’s appointment as NYC sheriff, saying he “represents the kind of public servant New Yorkers deserve.” principled, courageous and deeply committed to justice.”
But Raymond, a retired NYPD lieutenant and agency whistleblower, is as radical as socialist Mamdani, has made a string of divisive statements — and as a cop, once gave a domestic violence a slide because he was black, The Post can reveal.
“From slave patrols, some people feel this thing was never designed to work,” said Raymond in an interview segment posted later Friday on X by End Wokeness.
“So slave patrol were basically, militias, if you will, during the time when slavery was legal, whose job was to catch runaway slaves. And after the Civil War, many of them literally just rolled over into police departments,” added Raymond, claiming the NYPD and other police departments are byproducts of the 17th and 18th-century, state-sanctioned patrols.
In his 2023 book “An Inconvenient Cop,” Raymond doubled down, saying “today’s police force is the kin of the slave patrols of the nineteenth century and the Black Codes of the Jim Crow South.”
“Anyone who knows their history understands that it’s no exaggeration to draw a straight line from there to here,” he wrote. “The NYPD model has been packaged and sold by politicians and top cops in New York who have made millions off it.”
In 2015, Raymond and 11 other black and Hispanic cops made headlines by filing a federal lawsuit against the NYPD, accusing Transit Bureau supervisors of mandating arrest quotas of people of color.
The NYPD adamantly denied the allegations. The case was dismissed, but is currently under appeal.
In 2017, the NYPD launched an internal probe against Raymond for giving a domestic violence suspect a slide for being Black.
The investigation resulted in Raymond being found guilty of failing to make arrests, improper supervision, and failing to maintain activity logs, for which he was penalized 20 vacation days, according to disciplinary records posted by 50-a.org.
During a 2024 interview, Raymond, 40, claimed Eric Garner’s 2014 chokehold death by an NYPD cop over hawking untaxed cigarettes was all about racism and meeting quotas.
“What I saw was the embedded, lasting, you know, systemic racism in the form of pressure for arrest and summonses,” he told YouTube’s Brooklyn Savvy Talk Show. “When you’re a plainclothes officer, you not only have a quota, it has to be a felony.”
Raymond is replacing Anthony Miranda, a holdover from ex-Mayor Eric Adams’ tenure, who was axed as sheriff on Thursday.
He’ll oversee an office of 150 deputies and other staffers who serve as the city’s top civil enforcement agency under the Department of Finance and handle matters like cigarette tax enforcement, property fraud and regulating illegal pot shops.
One retired NYPD cop said Mamdani is an “idiot” for hiring him.
“He sued the [NYPD] before,” said the cop. “He touts himself as an expert on police relations, but all he does is bad mouth the Police Department. He had a bone to pick with white supervisors. How do you relate it to slavery?
The Mayor’s Office did not return messages.
Additional reporting by Sonya Gugliara.
