New York City’s Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has apologized for calling the New York City Police Department “racist” and detailed his plans to address crime in the Big Apple as he faced a grilling from Fox News.
Mamdani is leading in the polls and getting ready to face off next month against his independent opponent, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwas. Ahead of a Thursday night debate, Mandani took an interview with Fox News’ Martha MacCallum.
MacCallum asked Mamdani Wednesday afternoon about his relationship with the police, calling it a “big issue.”
Before Mamdani was in the national political spotlight, he was a New York State assemblyman for Queens. On his campaign website in 2022, when he was seeking re-election, Mamdani called the NYPD “racist” and called for reducing the police force by 1,300 officers, according to a recent New York Times story that resurfaced his past remarks.
“We can’t reform our way out of a racist police system that’s working exactly as designed — as a means of control over Black & brown New Yorkers,” he wrote.
He had been calling the NYPD racist since at least 2020, during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement.
MacCallum brought up those comments and more in her interview with Mamdani.
“You said in the past, I almost don’t need to go through it, it’s been said many times, but that you called the police force racist, said they were a major threat to public safety, called them wicked and corrupt,” she said.
MacCallum asked Mamdani if he would give a public apology to the NYPD, and he did.
“ I’ll apologize to police officers right here because this is the apology that I’ve been sharing with many rank and file officers, and I apologize because of the fact that I’m looking to work with these officers and I know that these officers, these men and women who serve in the NYPD, they put their lives on the line every single day,” Mamdani said.
The New York Times reported in December 2022 that there was about 34,000 NYPD officers on the force. The force currently stands at about 33,000 officers and is the largest and one of the oldest municipal police departments in the U.S.
The Vera Institute, a national organization advocating to end mass incarceration, reported in June 2020 the NYPD has the most expensive police department budget in the country with more than $11 billion to spend annually.
When asked why Mamdani changed his mind about the police, he said, “ In 2020, the year where all of these tweets are referring to, it was the year when George Floyd was killed. And it felt like safety and justice had never been further apart.”
Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, died in May 2020 while being arrested by a white Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, who knelt on his neck.
“Now, what I know, having represented a hundred thousand people in Western Queens. Is that to deliver that justice, you have to also deliver that safety,” Mamdani said. “And that means representing the men and women in the NYPD, it means representing the Black and brown New Yorkers who’ve been victims of police brutality.”
Patrick Hendry, the president of the NYC PBA, a police union representing NYPD members, told The Independent in response to Mamdani’s apology, “Elected leaders’ words matter, but their actions matter more.
“An apology will not improve police officers’ quality of life. It will not protect them from being assaulted by dangerous repeat offenders or having their rights trampled by the CCRB [Civilian Complaint Review Board]. Those are the issues we are focused on now, and they’re the same ones we’ll be discussing with the next mayor after Election Day.”
Unlike Cuomo, who has said he wants 5,000 more officers on the streets of New York City, Mamdani said he doesn’t want to change the current size of the police force — a shift in his previous comments calling for department cuts.
He also said he wants to make the job of current NYPD officers easier by allowing them to focus on serious crimes.
“ We used to ask officers to focus on serious crimes. Now we’re asking them to focus also on the mental health crisis, to focus also on homelessness,” Mamdani said.
Speaking on the issue of mental health and how it relates to crime, Mamdani said, “ So often the only mental health system that we have that’s functioning in this city is Rikers Island,” referring to New York City’s infamous jail complex.
Mamdani said if he were elected, his administration would create a “Department of Community Safety that would bring together all of these pre-existing silos that address mental health crisis, that address homelessness into one department, provide it with the funding necessary, and actually address this crisis.”
According to a recent Quinnipiac University poll, Mamdani is leading with 46 percent of support from likely voters, as Cuomo trails with 33 percent and Sliwa with 15 percent ahead of the November 4 election.
Mamdani performs slightly better than Cuomo on public safety, but the difference is within the poll’s margin of error.
When asked who they think would do the best job of keeping them and their family safe, 35 percent of likely voters said Mamdani, while 32 percent said Cuomo and 23 percent said Sliwa.
