A sociology professor at Brooklyn College appointed to New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani's transition team wrote a book about ending policing.
"I'm excited to announce that I have been asked to join the Mamdani Transition Team to work on community safety issues. A New Era for NYC," Alex Vitale said gang units, Vitale argues that they are racist.
"In most cities, gang units function as a mechanism for racialized social control," the book says in chapter five. "Black and Latino youth are labeled as gang members for hanging out together, while white youth groups are dismissed as harmless."
Policing borders is also racist, according to the author.
"The expansion of Border Patrol powers has been justified through fear and racism. It legitimizes xenophobic narratives that define immigrants as threats rather than as fellow workers or neighbors," the book says in chapter six.
Vitale also describes border policing as "inhumane."
Chapter nine of the book argues against training police officers on implicit bias, claiming that police officers' views on race do not matter because the whole system of policing is racist.
"Racism in policing is structural, not simply a product of bad attitudes," the book says. "Training officers to recognize implicit bias without changing what they are tasked with enforcing is like teaching a soldier to be sensitive while sending him to occupy a foreign country."
The professor's faculty profile on Brooklyn College's website says Vitale has spent 30 years writing about policing, and that he consults with law enforcement entities and international human rights organizations.
He teaches courses about African Americans in the criminal justice system, according to his university profile.
Vitale has often called to abolish police on his Mamdani officials did not return a request for comment.
Fox News' Alec Schemmel contributed to this report.