Zohran Mamdan and Curtis Sliwa (Getty Images)
"I could have had a police detail. I said, ‘No, we need them to protect people in the streets,’" Sliwa told Fox News Digital. "I was offered it again as a major party candidate, the Republican candidate, and unlike Zohran Mamdani, who couldn't wait to take armed security police officers from the NYPD, again I said I'm in the subways, I'm on the streets. Let the police go out there and protect the people.
"And isn't it ironic, while arriving from Uganda, while he was there, he was protected by armed commandos bearing AK-47-loaded weapons with masks on. So, again, the sanctimonious hypocrite, ‘Do as I say, but not as I do.’ If social workers would have responded to that madman entering the facilities of that Park Avenue building, they would have been cut down in a hail of bullets. And he probably would have said, ‘Well, maybe we need a few alterations. We need to sort of reconvert.’ This is absolute insanity."
Sliwa also criticized Mamdani for his previous pledge to disband the New York Police Department’s Strategic Response Group (SRG), which was a unit that responded to the midtown shooting earlier this week that resulted in four deaths before the shooter turned a gun on himself.
MAMDANI CONFRONTED ON STREETS OF NYC ABOUT 'COMMUNIST' LABEL, REFUSES TO ANSWER
Zohran Mamdani, a candidate for New York City mayor, speaks during a news conference while campaigning outside a subway station in New York City April 1, 2025. (Reuters/Brendan McDermid)
Fox News Digital reached out to the Mamdani campaign for comment.
Mamdani answered questions about his past comments in opposition to the police during a news conference Wednesday, where he attempted to distance himself from his calls to defund the police.
"Looking at the crisis of retention that we have in the city today, to try and pin it upon tweets from five years ago, as opposed to the conditions of this moment, is to ignore what officers themselves are saying," Mamdani said as he praised the NYPD officer who was killed in the recent midtown shooting.
The 33-year-old socialist said multiple times that his past tweets were "clearly out of step" with the current landscape and claimed they were made out of "frustration" over the death of George Floyd.
Mamdani also defended his NYPD security detail, saying, "My life is sadly not the one that it was. There are far more threats, and with that comes precautions that I wish I didn't have to take. Though they are also precautions that I am immensely grateful for, especially in the example of the NYPD detail that I have here in New York City."
Fox News Digital's Peter Pinedo contributed to this report
Andrew Mark Miller is a reporter at Fox News. Find him on Twitter @andymarkmiller and email tips to AndrewMark.Miller@Fox.com.
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