New York City mayoral contenders Zohran Mamdani and former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo are facing off over who is a better supporter of law enforcement after Monday’s mass shooting in a midtown Manhattan office building.

Mamdani is the 33-year-old democratic socialist state lawmaker from Queens who shocked the political world last month by coming from behind to top Cuomo and nine other candidates to capture the Democratic Party mayoral nomination in the overwhelmingly blue city. He has been facing criticism after the shooting over his past comments calling to defund the NYPD. 

Cuomo has called Mamdani “anti-police,” arguing he “doesn’t understand the need for public safety.”

“He has said the NYPD are racists, the police are a threat to public safety,” Cuomo charged Wednesday morning ahead of a press conference held by Mamdani, during which he addressed the criticism from Cuomo. “I think he’s dangerous because he doesn’t understand the need for public safety in this city.” 

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After the Manhattan shooting this week, Mamdani is facing renewed scrutiny over past statements made on social media in 2020 when he called for defunding the police multiple times. And Mamdani, who spent the past several days in his native Uganda celebrating his recent wedding, has also been chastised for what some argue was his tardy response to the shooting, which left four people dead, including a police officer.

In response to Cuomo’s criticism, Mamdani slammed the former governor for politicizing the mass shooting that occurred in downtown Manhattan earlier this week, while blasting the former governor for being stuck in the past.  

“I know that Gov. Cuomo is far more comfortable in the past, whether it be his own or whether it be in attacking me for tweets made before I was even an Assembly member,” Mamdani said at a news conference Wednesday afternoon after Cuomo’s morning criticism. 

They were Mamdani’s first public remarks since New York City’s worst mass shooting in a quarter century.

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“Cuomo wishes he was running against me in the past. He wants to find every tweet he can. He doesn’t want to look at the present but the past,” Mamdani added. 

Cuomo denied Mamdani’s claims he was using the mass shooting to score political points, telling Fox News Digital in response to Mamdani’s rebuttal that “it’s not politicizing the tragedy … it is a political discussion that we have to have in this campaign.”   

“The public safety discussion has been ongoing for months. It’s a very important topic,” Cuomo said. “It is an everyday issue and, yes, it is a political discussion that we have to have in this campaign.”

Cuomo, who is running in November’s general election as an independent candidate after losing his bid for the Democratic Party nomination, said that, for him, “public safety comes first.”

Pivoting to the recent mass shooting in Manhattan, Cuomo also suggested that the magnitude of the shooting, which has grabbed plenty of national attention, could shake up the mayoral race.

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“New Yorkers have PTSD from 9/11 and from other horrific situations, and I think it’s always in the back of every New Yorker’s mind that all it takes is one mentally ill person with an assault weapon and that’s TNT, that’s a public safety stick of dynamite,” Cuomo said. “And, yeah, I think it brought that back. It’s back to reality. In New York City you’re a target.”

During Wednesday’s press conference, Mamdani sought to distance himself from his 2020 comments about defunding the police, arguing they were made before he even entered public service and “amidst a frustration that many New Yorkers held at the murder of George Floyd.”  

“I’m proud of the public safety platform we’ve put together,” Mamdani said. “For the former governor to have spent an entire day speaking almost exclusively about me and barely about the New Yorkers who have been killed is indicative of the very politics New Yorkers want to leave in the past.”