Regrets, Andrew Cuomo has a number of — and he believes they’re not too few to say.
Contemporary off of saying he’s working for mayor this yr, Cuomo acknowledged Thursday that he needs he would’ve finished some issues in a different way 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 main to interchange the embattled Mayor Adams — had no qualms about different candidates within the race accusing him of making an attempt to carpetbag the election by transferring to New York Metropolis only some months in the past with a view 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, stated 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 the town, below 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 yr earlier than that metropolis funds handed, Cuomo added 500 new officers to the MTA’s police pressure in 2019 that he on the time argued have 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 practically 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 in opposition to the NYPD cuts a yr later.
Police funding is a thorny subject for Cuomo. Although he stated Thursday that calling for regulation enforcement cuts is “dumb,” Cuomo argued in 2020 that the defund-the-police motion was a “legitimate” concern, and as governor he threatened to withhold state funding from departments in New York that didn’t enact sure civil rights reforms.
Moreover the police funding concern, Cuomo stated he needs he would’ve “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 few controversial coverage he instituted on the outset of the pandemic barring nursing houses from refusing admission to visitors identified with COVID-19, a apply research say resulted in lots of deaths. He additionally didn’t categorical 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 e book have been on show on the protest. (Yuki Iwamura/AP)
On a extra philosophical degree, Cuomo lastly stated 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,” stated Cuomo, who resigned as governor in 2021 after being accused of sexual misconduct by 13 girls.
Cuomo, who has denied any sexual wrongdoing, didn’t converse Thursday about these accusations. He has beforehand stated he “deeply apologizes” to anybody he may need made really feel uncomfortable.
Initially Printed: March 6, 2025 at 5:24 PM EST
