THIS IS NOT A DRILL. Repeat: this is NOT a drill, because the drills at the NYPD Police Academy are apparently scheduled around the mayor's jump shot.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani has been playing late-night pickup basketball with friends at the NYPD Police Academy gym in College Point, Queens, according to reports Monday from Politico and the New York Post. Sources say he's done it about half a dozen times since July. The games usually start around 10 or 11 p.m. The group, per Politico, enters through the LOADING DOCK.

The loading dock. The mayor of the largest city in America is entering a police building the way a pallet of paper towels does.

Stay with me. The gym is about 45,000 square feet, inside a roughly $1 billion academy that the city renamed in July for fallen NYPD Det. Steven McDonald. The Post reports it sits nearly 10 miles from Gracie Mansion. Ten miles. There are basketball courts in Manhattan. There are courts in Central Park. There's probably a hoop on a garage within walking distance of the mansion. The mayor drove ten miles, at night, to a police academy, to run full court.

According to Politico, the games started not long after the Knicks won the championship, which means the timeline of events is: Knicks win, city celebrates, and the mayor immediately decides he's ready for the next level, which is an empty gym owned by the cops.

This is the same Zohran Mamdani who, back in 2020, publicly backed defunding the police. Six years later he has found the one NYPD expense he fully supports, and it's the hardwood.

Now the mundane detail, and I need everyone sitting down. Sources told Politico the nighttime games "scrambled academy operations on several occasions." One person put it this way: "It's not a rec center." The Post's sources disputed that characterization.

Hold on, I'm getting more. The mayor's spokesperson, Dora Pekec, confirmed he has been "shooting hoops" there and said staff were told it wouldn't disrupt training. She added that "if his use of the facility were to cause any disruption, he would find a different place to shoot hoops."

A DIFFERENT PLACE. The mayor has a contingency plan. The subways have no contingency plan. The rent has no contingency plan. But the pickup game has a backup location ready to go.

Let me be precise about what this is and isn't. Nobody has accused anyone of breaking a law. The spokesperson says staff were told nobody's training would get bumped. What we have is a mayor, some friends, a loading dock, and a full court at 11 p.m. in a building most New Yorkers can't get into without enrolling in the academy.

Taxpayers built that gym for recruits. The recruits get the morning. The mayor gets the night. And somewhere in Queens tonight, a custodian is staring at fresh sneaker scuffs on a billion-dollar floor, wondering who's going to explain it to the brass.

We will continue to monitor the loading dock.

This article is satire. The Demorat is a parody news site; real facts are drawn from the linked sources, and jokes, invented scenes, and fictional characters are not real.

The real story that inspired this