‘He Was Sending Seniors To Their Death’: Socialist Zohran Mamdani Downplays Anti-Police Tweets
Socialist candidate for New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani suggested during a debate Thursday that he would not defund the New York Police Department (NYPD) if elected in the November 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 law enforcement in the Big Apple, and he downplayed his past anti-police rhetoric. He also went after his opponent, former New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whose administration saw an increase in nursing home deaths after implementing policies related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“As much as Andrew Cuomo wants to bring up tweets from 2020, which was around the same time he was sending elderly people to their deaths in nursing homes,” Mamdani said during the debate. “I’m looking to work with police officers. Not to defund the NYPD. I’m looking to ensure that police officers can actually do a job when they sign up to join this department.” (RELATED: Anti-Cop Socialist Ready to Take Control of a Legendary Police Force He Once Sought to Take Down)
WATCH:
“He [Cuomo] “I was specifically referring to your comments,” the debate moderator said. “We’ll 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 — later said Mamdani 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, and a major threat to public safety,” Mamdani, then a candidate for New York State Assembly, wrote in a June 2020 post on X (then known as Twitter), still online five years later. “What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD…NO to fake cuts – defund the police.” »
Mamdani’s social media post came as widespread anti-police riots were taking place in cities across the country, including New York. The riots, which caused more than $1 billion in damage and have been linked to two dozen deaths, erupted after the death of George Floyd a month earlier.
In March 2020, as Cuomo served his third term as governor of New York, his Department of Health issued an order that explicitly blocked the state’s nursing homes from turning away 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 underestimated the number of nursing home deaths from COVID by at least several thousand.
Cuomo resigned as governor in disgrace in 2021, following accusations that he sexually harassed more than a dozen women. Cuomo has denied the allegations.
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