Public safety was the defining issue of the 2021 mayor’s race. The city was experiencing an uptick in crime brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, and current Mayor Eric Adams rode to victory on his pledge to tackle crime and disorder.
In the years since, murders and shootings have dropped, according to NYPD statistics — yet New Yorkers have been slow to feel as safe as they believed they were in 2019.
The 2025 mayor’s race has been dominated by a different issue: affordability. Frontrunner Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary largely because of his relentless focus on lowering costs across the five boroughs. Although Adams, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa all made their own pitches for addressing affordability to keep pace with Mamdani, they have often sought to bring the focus back to public safety.
Here is how each of the leading candidates plans to keep the Big Apple safe.
Eric Adams
Mayor Adams, a former NYPD captain, has made reducing violent crime one of his signature accomplishments in office.
Hizzoner, a Democrat running as an independent, often touts double-digit decreases in murders and shootings and greatly lowered subway crime during his tenure. He constantly notes that New York is the “safest city” in America.
Murders and shootings had dropped by 36% and 54% respectively over the first six months of this year compared to the same period in 2021, half a year before Adams took office, according to NYPD data released in July. Adams has also highlighted his NYPD taking over 23,000 guns off city streets since he became mayor.
While major felony crimes have fallen significantly over the past year, according to a New York Post report citing city data, they remain well above pre-pandemic levels, according to the news site Vital City. Besides murders, the city saw drops in robberies (-17%), felony assaults (-9%), and car thefts (-10%), compared to the same period last year.
The mayor has often complained that he does not get the credit he deserves for lowering crime because many New Yorkers continue to not feel safe due to high-profile violent incidents reported in the media. He has also spent much of his time in office railing against 2019 criminal justice reforms passed by the state legislature.
Adams’ campaign website provides sparse details on his public safety agenda for a prospective second term. Instead, it says: “Preventing violence by reinventing the anti-crime unit as an anti-gun unit with better trained officers, expanding community-based interventions, and using precision policing to target violent crime.”
Adams’ campaign spokesperson, Todd Shapiro, did not provide more details by publication time.
Nonetheless, Adams’ stewardship of the NYPD has been roundly criticized.
Although the current NYPD commissioner, Jessica Tisch, is widely seen as an effective leader, she is the fourth person to hold the position during Adams’ tenure. His previous three — Keechant Sewell, Edward Caban, and Tom Donlon — either resigned or were forced out of the job.
Caban left his post shortly after federal investigators seized his electronic devices and searched his home last fall — reportedly part of a now-stalled federal investigation into him and his twin brother allegedly running a nightclub protection racket.
Numerous other scandals have rocked Adams’ NYPD in just the past year. Those include four former chiefs alleging they were pushed out for exposing misconduct; former Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey getting accused of sexually assaulting a female staffer and lavishing her with overtime to cover it up; and Donlon accusing top officials of running a racketeering enterprise out of the department.
Adams has also come under fire for embracing heavy-handed policing tactics, reviving a controversial anti-crime unit that has come under fresh scrutiny, and taking little interest in punishing cops accused of misconduct.
Andrew Cuomo
Cuomo, who is running as an independent after losing the Democratic primary to Mamdani, entered this year’s mayoral race in March with a focus on crime. At the time, he framed himself as the best candidate to “save” the city, which he said feels “threatening, out of control, and in crisis.”
However, after decisively losing the Democratic primary to Mamdani, Cuomo has mostly abandoned his “city in crisis” rhetoric surrounding public safety. Instead, he has spent much of his energy attacking Mamdani as being unfit to lead the NYPD, given the Assembly member’s past statements heavily criticizing the department.
To that end, the former governor has proposed boosting the NYPD’s ranks by roughly 5,000 officers to 39,000 — far higher than the current budgeted headcount of 35,000. He argues the staffing increase would pay for itself by reducing the need for exorbitant amounts of mandatory overtime.
“We are at one of the lowest levels of police officer staffing since the 90s,” Cuomo said during a Sept. 2 news conference. “We know that more police are part of the solution.”
Cuomo has proposed raising cops’ starting salaries by offering a $15,000 signing bonus for new officers. He said the move would strengthen recruitment by making the NYPD more competitive with police departments in nearby jurisdictions.
To keep cops on the force, Cuomo floated offering what he dubbed “retention incentives” to certain officers. The incentives range from a $5,000 annual stipend for officers in their second through fifth year who meet certain criteria to a $3,000 stipend for those in their sixth through ninth years.
Cuomo also wants to expand the controversial Strategic Response Group (SRG), which responds to terror incidents and handles protests, by 400 officers.
Furthermore, Cuomo has pledged to double the number of cops patrolling the subways by 4,000.
Adams and Sliwa have attacked the former governor for signing the 2019 criminal justice reforms into law. Many Republicans and some moderate Democrats blame the legislation, which included changes to the state’s cash bail and discovery laws, for the increase in crime that the city experienced during the pandemic.
In response, Cuomo has insisted that the reforms were necessary to correct inequitable criminal justice policies. He has also pointed to targeted rollbacks Gov. Kathy Hochul made to the laws in the years since to give judges more discretion.
Zohran Mamdani
Mamdani’s signature public safety proposal is to remove a bevy of responsibilities from the NYPD and assign them to a new non-law enforcement agency. Under his proposal, the “Department of Community Safety” would be charged with responding to mental health crises either on the streets or on the subways, stemming gun violence, and providing services to victims.
The Department of Community Safety would include dedicated mental health and homelessness outreach teams in 100 subway stations as well as the conversion of vacant commercial units in the subways for workers to use for providing medical treatment. Those teams would include a mental health professional, an EMT, and a peer, according to the plan.
The agency would have a roughly $1 billion budget. Mamdani says those dollars would come from $605 million in already allocated money for existing programs that would be folded into the department and another $400 million in new funding, which could be gleaned from raising income taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers.
Mamdani’s opponents have criticized the proposal as unworkable, arguing that social workers are ill-equipped to deal with situations that could turn violent. However, the Democratic nominee contends that the agency would relieve cops of tasks they never wanted in the first place.
Mamdani says moving those duties elsewhere would reduce the amount of forced overtime officers must work.
“When I started running this race for mayor, on average about 200 officers were leaving the department each month; that number has now climbed above 300,” Mamdani said at a Vital City forum last week. “In writing around that development, there has been a real focus on this question of forced overtime…This really reduces a sense of quality of life for many of these same officers.”
While Mamdani has emphasized his desire to improve NYPD officers’ quality of life, his past comments bashing the department and calls for radical reforms have been one of his greatest vulnerabilities on the campaign trail.
In 2020, Mamdani — like many other progressive elected officials at the time — called for defunding the NYPD. He also slammed the department as “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety” in a series of social media posts that year.
Since launching his mayoral campaign, however, Mamdani has changed his tune.
He says he is not running to defund the police, instead proposing to keep its budgeted headcount of 35,000 officers flat.
“To be very clear, as I have been over the course of this campaign, I’m not defunding the police, I’m not running to defund the police,” Mamdani said in July.
Additionally, Mamdani told the New York Times last week that he will apologize to officers for his 2020 social media posts, which he has described as a product of frustration with cops in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a Minneapolis officer that year.
Nonetheless, Mamdani’s opponents have charged that voters should not buy his pivot on policing and should hold him to his past statements. They contend he would endanger New Yorkers’ public safety by working to dismantle the department he is entrusted to lead.
Cuomo said Mamdani has been “wholly derogatory” of and “disrespectful” to the police.
“He’s called the New York Police Department wicked, he’s called them corrupt, he’s called for the defunding of the police department,” Cuomo said in a video posted on Tuesday.
Mamdani has also taken flak for pledging to dismantle the SRG, which he says has been too heavy-handed in its handling of the policing of protests. He has also faced pressure to retain Tisch as police commissioner, though he has not committed to doing so.
Curtis Sliwa
Public safety has been Sliwa’s signature focus ever since he founded the Guardian Angels volunteer patrol group close to 50 years ago.
The red beret-clad firebrand began patrolling the streets and subways across the five boroughs when crime ran rampant during the 1980s and 90s and has continued doing so to this day. He has argued that the city is still dangerous, despite NYPD data showing otherwise, and that the police department must be better staffed and less inhibited to make it safer.
According to his campaign website, Sliwa wants to hire the most cops of any candidate — 7,000 new officers. He contends that adding more cops is the only way to stem violent incidents.
“I’m the candidate who says we don’t have enough police,” Sliwa said during a Sept. 3 NY1 interview. “I’ll make sure that the streets are safe as I’ve done for 46 years.”
To entice those new hires, Sliwa has proposed creating dedicated tracts to the detective squad and leadership positions, rooting out politics from the promotion process to make it truly merit-based, and offering benefits upfront.
To keep those officers on board, Sliwa wants to raise their starting pay, eliminate “last-minute” mandatory overtime by instituting a scheduling system, and offer child care vouchers to those with young families.
Sliwa also says he would advocate for further rolling back or completely repealing the 2019 criminal justice reforms, which he claims have made it harder to keep dangerous criminals off the streets. He also wants to push the state to repeal the 2021 Less is More Act, which limits punishments for technical parole violations, for the same reason.
