NEW YORK — Top City Hall and NYPD officials took a field trip to Columbus, Ohio, on Wednesday to learn more about how the Midwestern city works to de-escalate protests with a special “Dialogue Unit.”

Mayor Zohran Mamdani has previously held up the city’s protest policing methods as a model for ensuring nonviolent responses, and the trip comes amid pressure from the left to fulfill his campaign pledge to dismantle the NYPD’s Strategic Response Unit, an arm of the NYPD that responds to protests.

Among those who traveled to Ohio were Mamdani’s chief of staff, Elle Bisgaard-Church, his chief counsel Ramzi Kassem and Freddi Goldstein, chief of staff to First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan.

NYPD Deputy Commissioner Alex Crohn, Assistant Gerry Dowling, Assistant Chief Victoria Perry were also on the trip. They departed Tuesday night and stayed through Wednesday, a police spokesperson said.

“Leadership from the Big Apple joined us to observe firsthand how the Columbus Division of Police approaches public safety during First Amendment activities. A major focus of the visit was our Dialogue Team- a specialized unit dedicated to maintaining open lines of communication between law enforcement and protest participants,” the Columbus PD wrote on social media on Thursday.

“Thank you to our visitors for the great conversation and for the shared commitment to keeping our cities safe.”

Mamdani on the campaign trail nodded to the midwestern city as an inspiration for nonviolent protest response.

“We should learn from the models of cities around the country, around the world,” Mamdani said during a public safety discussion hosted by the policy journal Vital City in September. “One that’s been of interest to me is in Columbus — and the way in which they’ve approached some of these questions of how to have a police presence at these larger demonstrations.”

A spokesperson for the mayor did not immediately response to questions about the cost of the trip.

Columbus’ model sends the special “Dialogue Unit” to talk to protest leaders as part of an effort to decrease arrests or violence.

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