Socialist New York City mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani suggested at a debate Thursday that he would not defund the New York Police Department (NYPD) if elected in November’s election.
This, after Mamdani was pressed about his 2020 social media post calling the department “racist” and “anti-queer.”
Mamdani appeared to say he would support the Big Apple’s law enforcement officers, and he downplayed his past anti-police rhetoric. He also took a jab at his opponent, former Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whose administration saw an increase in nursing home deaths after the implementation of COVID-19 pandemic policies.
“As much as Andrew Cuomo wants to bring up tweets from 2020, which is around the same time that he was sending seniors to their death in nursing homes,” Mamdani said during the debate. “I am looking to work with police officers. Not to defund the NYPD. Looking to ensure that officers can actually do one job when they’re signing up to join that department.”
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“He [Cuomo] was specifically referring to comments you made,” said the debate’s moderator. “We will come back to that, but we’re out of time.”
Cuomo — who has been running for mayor as an independent since losing the June 24 Democratic primary to Mamdani — then interjected that Mamdani had called the NYPD “racist.”
“That’s what you said. Your words. Your words,” the former governor said.
“We don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety,” Mamdani, then a candidate for New York State Assembly, wrote in a June 2020 post to X (then known as Twitter), that was still online five years later. “What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD … NO to fake cuts – defund the police.”
Mamdani’s social media post came while there were widespread anti-police riots in cities across the country, including in New York City. The riots, which caused over $1 billion in damage and were linked to two dozen deaths — had erupted following the death of George Floyd one month prior.
In March 2020, while Cuomo was serving his third term as New York governor, his Department of Health issued an orderthat explicitly prevented the state’s nursing homes from refusing patients “solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19.” Thousands of deaths occurred in New York nursing homes after Cuomo’s administration implemented the order.
The New York State Assembly found the following year that Cuomo himself edited a July 2020 government report that undercounted the number of deaths in nursing homes by COVID by at least several thousand.
Cuomo resigned the governorship in disgrace in 2021, following accusations that he sexually harassed over a dozen women. Cuomo has denied the allegations.
