The town’s longest-serving NYPD commissioner, Ray Kelly, endorsed Andrew Cuomo for mayor Monday — however the Huge Apple’s main police unions are sitting out the race.
Kelly mentioned he respects Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, who he has recognized for 40 years via the Guardian Angels.
“Nevertheless it’s widespread sense now: It’s important to vote for Andrew Cuomo to have any shot, any likelihood to defeat [Zohran] Mamdani,” Kelly mentioned on 77 WABC “Sid & Buddies” present.
Mamdani, the lefty Democratic nominee and front-runner, will “wreak havoc on us,” Kelly instructed host Sid Rosenberg.
“It doesn’t look good, however we have now to be on the good aspect right now,” mentioned Kelly, who served two stints as police commissioner underneath Mayors Mike Bloomberg and David Dinkins.
He claimed Mamdani will redirect funding from the NYPD funds to create his proposed new Division of Group Security, which is able to concentrate on aiding mentally in poor health residents and different social companies and crime prevention applications.
“That’s defunding the police,” Kelly mentioned.
The town’s former prime cop known as Mamdani’s initiative — to have social service employees strategy people with psychological sickness with out cops — “pie within the sky.
“These occasions can activate a dime and turn out to be very harmful,” Kelly mentioned.
Mamdani has tried to make good with the division and its supporters whereas working for mayor, distancing himself from feedback he made in 2020 when he known as the NYPD “racist, anti-queer & a significant risk to public security” and backed “defund the police.”
With Metropolis Corridor inside his grasp, he now says he would retain Jessica Tisch as police commissioner.
However Kelly mentioned it might be “very troublesome” for Tisch to work underneath Mamdani, given their disagreements on key criminal-justice points.
Cuomo welcomed Kelly’s endorsement.
“Ray Kelly is among the finest police commissioners within the metropolis’s historical past, and we recognize his assist as Andrew Cuomo fights for the vote of all uniformed members,” mentioned Cuomo marketing campaign spokesman Wealthy Azzopardi.
Cuomo has vowed to rent 5,000 extra cops and hold the jail advanced on Rikers Island working as an alternative of opening new ones within the boroughs.
In the meantime, lots of the metropolis’s law-enforcement unions — rolled into the Uniformed Forces Coalition 2025 masking a lot of the metropolis police, corrections and sanitation unions that backed Mayor Eric Adams’ re-election run earlier than he dropped out of the race — haven’t endorsed Mamdani, Cuomo or Sliwa.
The town Police Benevolent Affiliation, representing beat cops however not a part of the coalition, additionally has not endorsed a candidate.
Reps from the law-enforcement higher-ups’ coalition– which incorporates the Detectives’ Endowment Affiliation, Sergeants Benevolent Affiliation, Lieutenants Benevolent Affiliation and Captains Endowment Affiliation — met with Cuomo and Sliwa on Friday and determined to not endorse both candidate, a supply aware of the deliberations mentioned.
Almost all of the unions representing regulation enforcement and uniformed officers had backed Adams’ profitable run for mayor in 2021, and a few supported Republican Nicole Malliotakis for mayor in 2017, although none voiced their official assist for Invoice de Blasio when he first received the mayoralty in 2013.
Cuomo’s actions as governor have come again to hang-out him. He accredited the state’s controversial cashless bail regulation, and police unions have blasted Cuomo’s state Parole Board appointees for releasing convicted cop-killers, a law-enforcement union supply mentioned.
Reps for the coalitions didn’t meet with Mamdani’s marketing campaign, however among the union officers will proceed to assault him as anti-cop, a labor insider mentioned.
