The mayor of the biggest city in America used his standing to try to spring a man DHS says has that record, with no footage, no investigation, and no idea what that officer was looking at. Councilmember Tiffany Cabán also called for abolishing ICE. Governor Kathy Hochul urged the White House to halt enforcement operations in New York. Not one of them had the facts. They all had the conclusion. --Scott Mechkowski.
🚨🚨 The Conclusion Always Arrives Before the Footage🚨 In Austin and in Marble Hill, the verdict came before the video. Mayors, council members, and lawyers had the conclusion ready within hours. The facts came later, if at all. I taught use of force for years. A use-of-force review is not a press conference. New piece in @realDailyWire 👇 https://t.co/GuFP13fNgt
— Scott Mechkowski (@ScottMechkowski) October 13, 2026
I taught use of force. I know the difference between a use-of-force review and a press conference. Too many people with microphones have forgotten, and some never knew, the difference.
Austin showed how this works. On September 20, an ICE officer shot a Venezuelan man, Wilber Garcés Pérez, in North Austin. Within the hour, an Austin council member was telling reporters that an ICE vehicle had rammed his car and that the agent had fired at least five times through the back windshield. Austin’s own police chief contradicted that account on the spot. By then a crowd had formed. The mayor, Kirk Watson, was at the podium within hours, saying he wasn’t surprised, because ICE was rogue and fomenting chaos. Nobody in that room had seen the footage.
The next day, Garcés Pérez’s attorney, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, held a press conference and went on national television with a specific story. A black truck had sideswiped his car; there were no lights, and he had no idea who was behind him. Members of Congress stood beside her and demanded answers. On X, she wrote that “we all know” the force wasn’t necessary, before anyone had seen a frame of footage.
Then the video surfaced. It showed a traffic stop before the shooting. Garcés Pérez was already stopped, two agents were at his driver’s window, and at least one unmarked SUV had its lights on. Asked by a local paper to walk through what happened, the attorney said she couldn’t confidently tell the chain of events. She had already told the country, with total confidence, that the sideswipe was how it began. Federal prosecutors allege he struck an officer with his side mirror and later tried to hit an officer with his car. He says he was looking for a safe place to pull over, and a court will decide that. The first version had a head start on every correction, and nobody has made her unsay it.
. . .
Mayor Zohran Mamdani didn’t wait. That night he stood in front of cameras and called ICE rotten to its core and said the agency must be abolished, before anyone had seen a second of video. He also spent two hours on the phone with the president of the United States and the secretary of Homeland Security trying to get Belgal released. The mayor of the biggest city in America used his standing to try to spring a man DHS says has that record, with no footage, no investigation, and no idea what that officer was looking at. Councilmember Tiffany Cabán also called for abolishing ICE. Governor Kathy Hochul urged the White House to halt enforcement operations in New York. Not one of them had the facts. They all had the conclusion. The only official who gave the public real facts that night was the police commissioner, who laid out what the cameras showed and what they didn’t. That is more than the mayor did.
Nobody following his career should be surprised. In 2020, Mamdani wrote that the NYPD was racist, anti-queer, and a major threat to public safety. He said it was an institution too wicked and corrupt to negotiate with, and he called for defunding it. He ran for mayor promising to abolish the department’s Strategic Response Group, and he still says he will. When the old posts resurfaced the week an NYPD officer was killed in a Midtown shooting, he said he wasn’t running to defund the police. The apology arrived when it started costing him votes. An apology on that schedule doesn’t erase what he said. It tells you what he believed the day before. Thursday told you what he believes now. When police work and his politics point in different directions, he knows which one he stands with, and it isn’t the one wearing the badge.
