Mayor Zohran Mamdani has a new sheriff for New York City, and the resume is the message. On May 29 he fired Sheriff Anthony Miranda and appointed retired NYPD lieutenant Edwin Raymond, handing one of the city’s least-watched but most powerful enforcement jobs to a man who built his name accusing the police department of misconduct from the inside.
Most New Yorkers never think about the Sheriff’s Office until it shows up at the door. It is the city’s primary civil law enforcement agency, a division of the Department of Finance that carries out court orders using evictions, property seizures, arrests and wage garnishments. Who runs it shapes how some of the city’s most contested actions get carried out, and it has operated largely out of public view.
Raymond is not a quiet pick. A Haitian American who grew up in East Flatbush as the son of Haitian immigrants, he spent 15 years in the NYPD, rose to lieutenant and commanding officer in Brooklyn North Community Affairs, and retired in 2023 as a prominent reform voice who publicly attacked quota-driven policing. In 2015 he was one of 12 Black and Hispanic officers who filed a federal lawsuit accusing the NYPD of using arrest quotas that fell hardest on Black and Latino men, and his advocacy earned him the NAACP’s Courage Under Fire Award.
The contrast with the man he replaces is hard to miss. Miranda, an Eric Adams appointee, came under investigation after owners of unlicensed smoke shops said cash went missing following sheriff’s department raids, according to reporting by Gothamist. Mamdani replaced a sheriff dogged by a misconduct inquiry with one who made his career calling out police misconduct.
That is the bet. A reform-minded cop-critic now controls the unit that evicts tenants and seizes property, and the question reform advocates will be watching is whether his record changes how those powers get used or whether the office runs the way it always has. The symbolism is loud; the day-to-day enforcement is where it gets tested.
If a sheriff’s deputy ever does come to your door, it is almost always to enforce a court order, an eviction, a seizure, a garnishment, which means the underlying case in housing or civil court is where your rights actually live. Free legal help exists for tenants facing eviction in New York City, and the housing court that issued the order is the place to challenge it before the Sheriff’s Office acts on it.
Featured image: Nick.Allen / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
