Socialist New York City mayoral candidate and current front-runner Zohran Mamdani turned away from his past comments criticizing the New York Police Department and his calls to defund the agency when confronted with his remarks during the first mayoral debate on Thursday.
“He doesn’t believe in law and order,” former New York governor and independent mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo said of Mamdani. “He believes in defunding the police, disarming the police, disbanding the police. That’s who he is.”
Mamdani accused Cuomo of lying “again and again and again.”
“I am not running to defund the police,” he said. “I am running to actually work with the police to deliver public safety.”
However, in 2020, Mamdani said he believed the city needed a “socialist city council to defund the police” and called the department “wicked & corrupt.”
“We don't need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti‑queer & a major threat to public safety,” Mamdani wrote in another post that year, in response to then-Mayor Bill de Blasio’s efforts to investigate the department. “What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD.”
During an interview with Fox News on Wednesday, the mayoral hopeful apologized for his past comments.
"Absolutely, I'll apologize to police officers right here, because this is the apology that I've been sharing with many rank-and-file officers," he said. “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.”
During the debate on Thursday, Mamdani pitched his approach to addressing crime in the city as an effort that would include working alongside police officers with the launch of a Department of Community Safety.
“We will ensure that no longer are police officers asked to do the job of both policing and responding to the mental health crisis,” he said. “We will have dedicated teams of mental health outreach workers in the top 100 subway stations with the highest levels of the mental health crisis and homelessness.”
He suggested his proposal would help ensure that police response times would return to 2020 levels (eleven minutes), rather than the 16-minute response time the department is seeing today, “because they won't be asked to respond to the 200,000 mental health calls that are coming in through 9-1-1 every year.”
During Thursday night’s debate, Mamdani was also asked about comments he made during his Wednesday Fox News interview about Hamas. In that interview, he refused to call on Hamas to lay down its weapons following the peace deal brokered by President Trump, saying he doesn't "really have opinions about the future of Hamas."
Fox News host Martha MacCallum asked Mamdani twice if he believes Hamas should disarm.
"I don't really have opinions about the future of Hamas and Israel beyond the questions of justice and safety and the fact that anything has to abide by international law — and that applies to Hamas, it applies to the Israeli military," he said.
But on Thursday, when pressed on the topic, he said, “Of course I believe they should lay down their arms.”
The controversial progressive candidate maintains an 18-point lead in the race after having defeated Cuomo in the Democratic primary earlier this year. Mamdani enjoys 45.7 percent of the vote, according to a RealClearPolitics polling average, while Cuomo sits in second place with 27.7 percent. Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa trails with 13.3 percent.
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