Multiple candidates vying for New York City mayor are hoping to distance themselves from their past support of “defund the police” initiatives.
Democrats, like New York State Sen. Zellnor Myrie, former city comptroller Scott M. Stringer and current city comptroller Brad Lander, have thrown their hats into the ring to replace Mayor Eric Adams in 2025. Since announcing their runs, each candidate has been promoting a pro-police and public safety campaign to address rising crime.
Both Stringer and Myrie have released a plan to hire more than 3,000 police officers, with Stringer also calling for “a dedicated officer on every subway train.”
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Lander, meanwhile, was more repentant, saying that he wanted to “acknowledge that progressives, including myself, were slow to respond to the growing sense of disorder coming out of the pandemic.”
This marked a stark contrast to their opinions on police and police funding just a few years prior.
In June 2020, shortly after George Floyd’s death, Lander remarked, “It is time to defund the police and reimagine our public safety infrastructure.” His mindset remained unchanged into 2021, despite having an NYPD security detail for himself.
“All neighborhoods need and deserve to be safe, and we must confront rising levels of gun violence,” Lander said in 2021. “But NYC already has more police officers per capita than nearly every large American city.”
Stringer called for a $1.1 billion reduction in the police budget in 2020 during the height of the Black Lives Matter protests.
“The brutal, senseless murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery are the most recent reminders of the longstanding need for racial justice and reform in policing,” Stringer said. “We must call out racism in all its ugly forms to break this painful cycle. But it is not enough to condemn racism in words: our fight for justice must be backed up with accountability and concrete action.”
Myrie previously sued the NYPD, claiming he was assaulted and pepper sprayed while taking part in a Black Lives Matter protest.
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“Police brutality is in the DNA of this country and if we do not start the conversation from there I will not engage with you,” Myrie wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter) in 2020.
Fox News Digital reached out to the candidates for comment.
The shift resembles Mayor Adams’ own tough-on-crime campaign that led him to victory. In 2021, he criticized his primary opponent, Maya Wiley, for hiring private security while pushing to defund the police.
“To me that’s the highest level of hypocrisy,” Adams said. “Security can’t be for the affluent — it must be for every New Yorker.”
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