Executive Summary
Six hundred New York City police officers signed a letter asking Governor Kathy Hochul and Zohran Mamdani to stay away from the 9/11 memorial on the 25th anniversary. That letter is where this conversation starts, and it tells you almost everything about where New York is right now.
My guest this week was Zeek Arkham — twenty years in the NYPD, retired lieutenant, and a man who genuinely did it all. Plainclothes investigations, tactical, parade and event command, Washington Square Park, forensics, and the Special Victims Unit, which he calls the crown jewel of his career. He said working SVU felt like doing the Lord's work. He also said he got tired of seeing women with barcodes tattooed on their throats, because that is how traffickers were tracking and transferring them.
That is not analysis from a distance. That is a supervisor describing his shift.
What Zeek laid out is a policy trail, not a crime wave. Bill de Blasio publicly admitted his no-bail plan would put people who commit crimes back on the street, and implemented it anyway. Sixteen-year-olds come back with rap sheets two and three pages long and tell the arresting officer they will be out by tomorrow — and they are. Sanctuary rules mean an officer needs permission before he can go look at something obviously wrong. Kathy Hochul spent roughly $7 million on legal fees for people here illegally and answered the criticism with "you're damn right I did."
Underneath the policy is a longer story. The Weather Underground and Students for a Democratic Society were never held accountable — the FBI botched the cases, and the members went into academia and the Ivy League. Bernardine Dohrn ended up at Northwestern Law School. That generation used bombs. This one uses the ballot, and it has taken city councils across New York City.
This is not a hopeless story, and I would not run it if it were. We the People still hold every local room that was taken, and every one of them is winnable on any night we decide to walk in.
Scroll to the bottom for Key Takeaways.
Why 600 NYPD Officers Wrote a Letter About the 9/11 Memorial
Six hundred cops do not sign anything together unless something has genuinely gone wrong.
The officers named Hochul and Mamdani specifically. For the governor, they pointed to her lighting the replacement World Trade Center in the colors of a Muslim holiday, and to her wearing a hijab days before the anniversary. For Mamdani, the objection is his record.
Zeek's answer, when I asked him how it feels as a New Yorker on the 25th anniversary, was three words long: New York forgot.
He has standing to say it. He did details at the 9/11 Memorial. He stood at attention every September 11th for twenty years. One of his old sergeants — Paul Farrar, a man he called one of the best he ever served under — died from a 9/11-related illness, in the long quiet years after the cameras left, which is how most of them died.
So when Zeek says the ground is sacred and that people who will not treat it as sacred should not be standing on it, he is not scoring a point. He is asking for the smallest thing a country can ask.
How the Story of 9/11 Gets Rewritten in Plain Sight
Zeek described arguing over a magazine or newspaper piece that managed to cover September 11th without saying that radical Islamists flew the planes into the buildings.
Read that headline, he said, and you would think the planes flew themselves. The attribution finally showed up a paragraph or two down — hedged.
He posted a simple note that 3,000 people died that day, and the replies asked how they died. Did they all have heart attacks at the same time and keel over?
Erasure does not require censorship. It only requires a passive verb and a patient generation.
And Zeek was careful in exactly the way our national conversation refuses to be. He knows Muslims who want to practice their faith in peace, go home to their families, and bother nobody — fine, well and good, he said. He also insists that there is a violent sect that must be named, and that naming it is not a slur. He pointed out that George W. Bush drew that same line in 2001, one of the few things Zeek credits him for.
We cannot recover from anything we refuse to name. That is true in every recovery room in America, and it is true here.
Bail Reform, Sanctuary Rules and the Revolving Door
Here is where the conversation stopped being philosophical.
De Blasio, announcing the end of cash bail, patted himself on the back — and admitted out loud that there would now be people who commit crimes and get released immediately. He knew. He did it anyway. Zeek's read is that a great many of these policies were never about improving quality of life. They were about the photo op.
The street version is worse than the policy version. Officers arrest a sixteen-year-old, run the history, and get back two and three pages. The kid says he will be out by tomorrow, and he is right.
For arrestees here illegally, the loop tightens further. Zeek describes officers still doing the arrest paperwork when the person they arrested walks back into the precinct to collect his property — transport to Central Booking, processing, release, and the walk back, all inside two or three hours.
Then there is what an officer is even allowed to look at. During the COVID lockdowns, a friend of mine kept walking past a building where young girls who did not seem to speak English were going inside with much older men. He went to the precinct three separate times. Three times he was told there was nothing they could do, because officers now need permission before they can go take a look.
A trained cop on the beat, forbidden from checking out the obvious. That is not a courage problem. That is a rule.
Kathy Hochul, $7 Million, and the Gap Between Chiefs and Cops
Hochul was caught spending roughly $7 million on legal fees for people here illegally. Her response: "Yeah, you're damn right I did."
Zeek's questions are the only ones worth asking. What did that help? Did the streets get safer? Did it do one thing to end trafficking?
Now notice who stood next to her when she said it — police chiefs. That image is the whole disconnect in a single frame, because the boots on the ground support ICE and the podium does not.
In a sanctuary city an officer cannot say that on the radio. So it happens off the record. When a cop passes an ICE agent, he gives a nod. "My neck hurt," Zeek said. "I'm just trying to stretch it a little bit." And if the nod happens to point toward the hotel where the operation is running — coincidence.
That is what integrity looks like when the rules have been written against it.
Broken Windows, Stop and Frisk, and a Softer NYPD
Zeek is specific about when the job changed. De Blasio wanted de-escalation over engagement — a kinder, softer, gentler NYPD, closer to a social worker than a police officer.
The academy dropped the pressure that used to break recruits down and rebuild them. Friends who came out with him say the drills they went through are no longer permitted. Consequences at the wall were replaced by consideration of feelings.
Two decades later, he sees officers afraid to write summonses, afraid to put hands on anyone, and leaning far too hard on the taser — a tool that, when he was a rookie, existed in ones and twos across an entire precinct.
His fix is not nostalgia. Bring back broken windows policing, because it drove crime down and caught people on their way to do worse. Bring back stop, question and frisk — amended, so that lazy precinct commanders cannot use it as a get-out-of-jail-free card at CompStat. That is a working supervisor naming both the tool and its known abuse in the same breath.
Want the before-and-after photograph? Washington Square Park. Zeek was responsible for safety there, and he went to NYU in the 1990s, when he studied in that park and bought his coffee there every morning. He went back recently. Unrecognizable — a place that belongs to dealers, the addicted and activists in training, and the worst place in the city to be if you are just a normal person.
A public square stops being public the moment ordinary people can no longer use it.
The Long Game: From the Weather Underground to City Hall
This is the part our audience will recognize instantly.
Zeek traces the mentality back to the late 1960s and 1970s — the Weather Underground and Students for a Democratic Society. The FBI botched the cases. Almost none of them were held accountable. So they did not disappear; they went into academia, particularly the Ivy League, and became professors. Bernardine Dohrn landed at Northwestern Law School.
Last time the method was bombs. This time the method is the electoral system, and it is working.
The Democratic Socialists of America now hold effective control of city councils across multiple parts of New York City, with a serious presence in Albany, and they are motivated. Their program is published, not hidden: eliminate the Senate, eliminate the Electoral College.
Zeek's thought experiment is the one to bring to your next dinner table. Go back to 1986 and tell an American there will be a funded, winning push in this country toward outright socialism — eliminating the Constitution, the Supreme Court and the presidency, replacing them with rule by committee, eliminating police and prisons, and redistributing private money as a committee sees fit.
They would have called you crazy. They would have said there is absolutely no way.
Seattle was not conquered overnight. New York was not conquered overnight. They played the long game and won both. Zeek's warning is that the same game is being run right now in Texas.
Who Is Actually Struggling? Follow the Houses
The redistribution never seems to begin at home.
Bernie Sanders has three houses and is not giving up one of them. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez became a millionaire while serving in Congress. Ilhan Omar became a millionaire, then it was a paper error, and now the number is modest again. Mamdani is a rich kid. A DSA figure in Brooklyn turned out to be a rich kid whose parents bought him a condominium worth about $1.5 million.
Zeek does not know a single DSA member who is actually struggling.
There is a ceiling on who they will go after, because the target can never include themselves. They aim one tier up, tell you that your hardship belongs to those people, and collect. Zeek's closing image says it better than any chart: let me get back into my Mercedes-Benz that you can't afford as I drive off.
Concede the sincerity where it exists — some people marching genuinely believe they are defending the poor. But belief is not evidence. Three houses is evidence.
Stop Co-Parenting With Disney: Where Recovery Actually Starts
I frame our national dysfunction as an addiction to conflict and chaos, with suppliers, dealers and consumers. This episode showed me the consumer end with unusual clarity.
Zeek called Trump Derangement Syndrome the greatest psychological operation of all time, and I do not think that is an exaggeration. People are making choices against their own family, their own future and their own country over one man. That is not a political position — that is a dependency.
The hardest stretch of the hour was about women and children. Women cheering abortion at nine months. Women raising money for a woman charged with killing her three children in a basement while the others watched. A current running through TikTok and music videos telling young women that marriage is a trap, children are a burden, and an abortion makes you a hero. Zeek and I landed on the same word: anti-human.
So what is the counter-program? He gave it in one line. Stop co-parenting with Disney. Stop co-parenting with Instagram. You are supposed to be the number one influence on your child.
He is not guessing. His daughter dances, does gymnastics, cannot touch her phone during the school day, earns screen time after homework, and reads her Bible. She watched a music video and told him she liked the song but did not like how they dressed in it. That is not luck — that is a father who did the work for years.
And notice where the competing influence chooses to go. Drag queen story hour does not book prisons. It does not book nursing homes. It books elementary school classrooms. Whatever else is disputed, the choice of audience is not.
We the People Are the Answer — and the Only Ones Who Can Show Up
Zeek did twenty years, retired in good standing with a full pension, and now lives in Florida saying it is nice to be back in America. He could have gone quiet and fished. Instead he is on camera every week, naming what he saw with his name attached. That is what honorable men stepping up actually looks like — unglamorous, personal, and public.
Here is the encouraging part, and I mean it. The DSA took city councils because they attended the meetings everyone else skipped. That is the entire secret. Nothing about it is out of reach for ordinary citizens who decide to be equally patient and considerably more numerous.
Zeek reached for scripture to close, and it is the right note: when David fought Goliath, he didn't pray for him. He got up and fought. Read the record and you find people rolling their sleeves up and saying enough.
Stop being soft. Not angry — awake. Rage is the drug, and the dealers are selling it by the hour. Courage is something else entirely, and it is quieter than you think.
Key Takeaways
- Six hundred NYPD officers signed a letter asking Kathy Hochul and Zohran Mamdani not to attend the 9/11 memorial on the 25th anniversary.
- Zeek Arkham did 20 years in the NYPD, retired as a lieutenant, and calls the Special Victims Unit the crown jewel of his career.
- He got tired of seeing women with barcodes tattooed on their throats — the traffickers' method of tracking and transferring them.
- De Blasio admitted publicly that his no-bail plan would release people who commit crimes, and implemented it anyway.
- Under sanctuary rules, officers need permission before investigating; a suspected trafficking site was reported to a precinct three times during lockdown with no action.
- Kathy Hochul spent roughly $7 million on legal fees for people here illegally and said "you're damn right I did."
- The Weather Underground was never held accountable — its members went into academia and the Ivy League, and Bernardine Dohrn landed at Northwestern Law School.
- Bernie Sanders has three houses, AOC became a millionaire in Congress, and a Brooklyn DSA figure's parents bought him a $1.5 million condo.
- Stop co-parenting with Disney and social media — you are supposed to be the number one influence on your child.
Frequently Asked Questions
If police know where trafficking is happening, why can't they just go in?
Because in a sanctuary jurisdiction an officer generally needs authorization before acting on what he sees. Zeek describes a case where a suspected trafficking location was reported to a precinct three separate times during the lockdowns and officers were told there was nothing they could do without permission. That is a written policy, not a personal failure — and a written policy can be rewritten by the same city council that wrote it.
Isn't blaming bail reform for street crime unfair?
Take it from the man who sold it. De Blasio said out loud that his plan would result in people committing crimes and being released immediately, then proceeded. Zeek describes sixteen-year-olds with multi-page rap sheets telling arresting officers they will be out by tomorrow, and being right. When the architect concedes the outcome in advance, we are not speculating.
Why do 600 police officers care who attends a memorial service?
Because many of them buried their own. Sergeant Paul Farrar died of a 9/11-related illness, and thousands like him died in the years after the coverage ended. Zeek stood post at that memorial and stood at attention every September 11th for two decades. Reverence one day a year is close to the smallest thing a nation can ask of its officials.
Is naming radical Islamists the same as attacking Muslims?
No, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. Zeek was explicit that he knows Muslims who simply want to practice their faith in peace and be left alone, and that they should be. He also insists a violent sect exists and must be named — the same distinction George W. Bush drew in 2001. Refusing to name a problem has never once solved it.
What can one person actually do against a machine this organized?
Exactly what built the machine: show up in a small room, consistently, for a long time. City councils were taken because almost nobody else attended. Start with one meeting this month, one screen-time rule enforced at home for a week, and one honest conversation with somebody under 25 about what actually happened on September 11th. We the People are the answer, and We the People are the only ones who can walk through the door.
Watch the full episode on Rumble: https://rumble.com/v7f36py-mel-k-and-zeek-arkham-honorable-men-stepping-up-for-the-republic-9-4-26.html
For my readers – Yes, we used AI to turn this episode into something readable for you. My team reviews everything first and does their best to sound like me. If it doesn't, that's fair, the robots aren't perfect…yet. If you want the real thing – unscripted, unfiltered, and exactly how I said it – that's what the full episode is for. You can always find it here [https://rumble.com/v7f36py-mel-k-and-zeek-arkham-honorable-men-stepping-up-for-the-republic-9-4-26.html]