Sparring over crime, but not over Jessica Tisch

This piece first ran as part of The Countdown, our daily newsletter rounding up all the developments in the New York City mayor’s race. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. There are 78 days to the election.

🚨 Another mass shooting renews sparring over crime

• Three people were killed and nine others wounded in a shooting at a bar in Crown Heights early Sunday morning. The violence appears to be gang-related, but “there had to have been innocent victims” who were not part of the shootout, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch told The New York Times on Sunday.

• This comes less than a month after a gunman killed four people in Midtown Manhattan, including two Jewish women who were beloved in their Upper East Side synagogues.

• Though crime has dropped in New York since the pandemic, it’s a major issue in the mayor’s race. All the candidates argue they will make the city safer, but Mamdani has come under attack for embracing calls to “defund the police” in 2020, which he says he no longer supports.

• Andrew Cuomo took the chance to jab at him on Sunday, writing on X, “This isn’t the time to defund or dismantle the police. We need more officers, not less, to keep our communities safe.” Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee who founded a notorious anti-crime group called the Guardian Angels, attacked them both: “Cuomo’s pro-criminal laws created this mess, and Mamdani’s radical agenda would only make it worse,” he said on X.

• Meanwhile, Mayor Eric Adams, a former police captain, said he was joining a coalition of police, faith leaders and violence interrupters to prevent retaliation. Mamdani said the shooting was “yet another example of the scourge of gun violence that has taken hold across so much of our city.”

• Mamdani has said he would consider keeping Tisch, who hails from a prominent Jewish family, as police commissioner if he is elected mayor. The potential partnership has been encouraged by some businesspeople and Democratic leaders, according to The New York Times,  though Tisch has reserved her praise for Adams and criticized calls to reduce the police budget.

📍 Where are the candidates?

• Cuomo headed to the Hamptons this weekend for a fundraiser hosted by Jewish siblings Andrew Stein, former president of the New York City Council, and Jimmy Finkelstein, a media executive. It was at least his fourth weekend in the Hamptons since losing the primary, according to Politico.

• Mamdani went back to his grassroots with a kickoff for volunteers in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn over the weekend. It’s the first time he has sent his supporters back to door-knocking since the primary.

• Adams defended his poor polling numbers on FOX5 NY’s “Politics Unusual.” Despite making “a lot of mistakes” as mayor, he said he believed he had the trust of New Yorkers for presiding over a decline in violence. He also acknowledged the scandal surrounding his former staffer Mohamed Bahi, who pleaded guilty last week for a role in funneling illegal donations to Adams’ 2021 campaign. Turkish-American businessman Erden Arkan similarly pleaded guilty after making illegal donations and was sentenced on Friday.

💬 Jews weigh in

• Billionaire Bill Ackman urged either Cuomo or Adams to drop out of the race on Sunday. If one did not, he said they would “both be responsible for a socialist takeover” under Mamdani that represented New York’s “death knell.” During the primary, Ackman reportedly donated $500,000 to Fix the City, a super PAC dedicated to boosting Cuomo and burying Mamdani. Ackman, who has also been an activist around antisemitism on college campuses, has said that he would spend “hundreds of millions” to defeat Mamdani in the general and more recently has supported Adams.

• Anthony Wiener, the former New York congressman who pleaded guilty to transferring obscene material to a minor in 2017, also chimed in on Sunday. He predicted that Mamdani’s election as mayor was inevitable in an interview on WABC 770 AM, adding that party leaders Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries would “have to endorse the nominee of their party.” The duo has so far withheld support for Mamdani.