Regrets, Andrew Cuomo has just a few — and he believes they’re not too few to say.
Contemporary off of saying he’s working for mayor this 12 months, Cuomo acknowledged Thursday that he needs he would’ve finished some issues otherwise whereas serving as governor, together with because it pertains to police funding.
However Cuomo — who has emerged because the front-runner in June’s Democratic major to interchange the embattled Mayor Adams — had no qualms about different candidates within the race accusing him of attempting to carpetbag the election by shifting to New York Metropolis just a few months in the past as a way to mount a marketing campaign.
“So I’m a New Yorker 100% through and through.”
When it got here to his precise regrets, Cuomo, talking throughout his first question-and-answer session with reporters since launching his mayoral marketing campaign final weekend, mentioned he ought to have as governor “added more police to the MTA if I knew New York City was going to be cutting police, which obviously I didn’t know.”
Cuomo was referencing how town, beneath Mayor Invoice de Blasio, shifted about $850 million in funding away from the NYPD in 2020 amid requires defunding the division within the wake of George Floyd’s homicide.
A 12 months earlier than that metropolis finances handed, Cuomo added 500 new officers to the MTA’s police pressure in 2019 that he on the time argued had been wanted to handle fare-beating and homelessness within the subways.
NYPD officers patrol a subway station on March 6, 2024 in New York Metropolis. (Photograph by Spencer Platt/Getty Photographs)
The transfer almost doubled the MTA police pressure and drew controversy on the time from some Democrats who argued the coverage was counterintuitive. After Cuomo’s press convention, although, his spokesman Wealthy Azzopardi clarified Cuomo really needs he would’ve employed much more MTA cops in 2019 to hedge towards the NYPD cuts a 12 months later.
Police funding is a thorny matter for Cuomo. Although he mentioned Thursday that calling for regulation enforcement cuts is “dumb,” Cuomo argued in 2020 that the defund-the-police motion was a “legitimate” difficulty, and as governor he threatened to withhold state funding from departments in New York that didn’t enact sure civil rights reforms.
Apart from the police funding difficulty, Cuomo mentioned he needs he would’ve as governor “done much more preparatory work in the years” previous the COVID-19 pandemic, which killed tens of hundreds of New Yorkers in 2020 and 2021.
He lower himself some slack on the pandemic entrance, too, although, saying “no governor in the country” may’ve predicted COVID.
Cuomo didn’t point out regrets a couple of controversial coverage he instituted on the outset of the pandemic barring nursing houses from refusing admission to visitors identified with COVID-19, a follow research say resulted in lots of deaths. He additionally didn’t specific remorse about findings that he downplayed the variety of such COVID-19 deaths in official tallies.
Yuki Iwamura/AP
On this Oct. 18, 2020 file photograph, households of COVID-19 victims who handed away in New York nursing houses collect in entrance of the Cobble Hill Heath Middle in Brooklyn to demand New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo apologize for his response to clusters in nursing houses throughout the pandemic. Photographs of Cuomo’s guide had been on show on the protest. (Yuki Iwamura/AP)
On a extra philosophical stage, Cuomo lastly mentioned he regrets as governor taking issues “too seriously.”
“I wanted to do so much and was at times impatient with the process and the bureaucracy and everything is so slow,” mentioned Cuomo, who resigned as governor in 2021 after being accused of sexual misconduct by 11 girls.
Cuomo, who has denied any sexual wrongdoing, didn’t converse Thursday about these accusations. When he stepped down, he mentioned he needed to “deeply apologize” to anybody he may need made really feel uncomfortable.
Lindsey Boylan, an ex-Cuomo staffer who in February 2021 turned the primary girl to accuse him of sexually harassing her, blasted her former boss for not citing his alleged improprieties when requested about regrets.
Initially Revealed: March 6, 2025 at 5:24 PM EST
