The city’s longest-serving NYPD commissioner, Ray Kelly, endorsed Andrew Cuomo for mayor Monday — but the Big Apple’s major police unions are sitting out the race.
Kelly said he respects Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, who he has known for 40 years through the Guardian Angels.
“But it’s common sense now: You have to vote for Andrew Cuomo to have any shot, any chance to defeat [Zohran] Mamdani,” Kelly said on 77 WABC “Sid & Friends” show.
Mamdani, the lefty Democratic nominee and front-runner, will “wreak havoc on us,” Kelly told host Sid Rosenberg.
“It doesn’t look good, but we have to be on the smart side at this time,” said Kelly, who served two stints as police commissioner under Mayors Mike Bloomberg and David Dinkins.
He claimed Mamdani will redirect funding from the NYPD budget to create his proposed new Department of Community Safety, which will focus on aiding mentally ill residents and other social services and crime prevention programs.
“That’s defunding the police,” Kelly said.
The city’s former top cop called Mamdani’s initiative — to have social service workers approach individuals with mental illness without cops — “pie in the sky.
“These events can turn on a dime and become very dangerous,” Kelly said.
Mamdani has tried to make nice with the department and its supporters while running for mayor, distancing himself from comments he made in 2020 when he called the NYPD “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety” and backed “defund the police.”
With City Hall within his grasp, he now says he would retain Jessica Tisch as police commissioner.
But Kelly said it would be “very difficult” for Tisch to work under Mamdani, given their disagreements on key criminal-justice issues.
Cuomo welcomed Kelly’s endorsement.
“Ray Kelly is one of the best police commissioners in the city’s history, and we appreciate his support as Andrew Cuomo fights for the vote of all uniformed members,” said Cuomo campaign spokesman Rich Azzopardi.
Cuomo has vowed to hire 5,000 more cops and keep the jail complex on Rikers Island running instead of opening new ones in the boroughs.
Meanwhile, many of the city’s law-enforcement unions — rolled into the Uniformed Forces Coalition 2025 covering most of the city police, corrections and sanitation unions that backed Mayor Eric Adams’ re-election run before he dropped out of the race — have not endorsed Mamdani, Cuomo or Sliwa.
The city Police Benevolent Association, representing beat cops but not part of the coalition, also has not endorsed a candidate.
Reps from the law-enforcement higher-ups’ coalition– which includes the Detectives’ Endowment Association, Sergeants Benevolent Association, Lieutenants Benevolent Association and Captains Endowment Association — met with Cuomo and Sliwa on Friday and decided not to endorse either candidate, a source familiar with the deliberations said.
Nearly all the unions representing law enforcement and uniformed officers had backed Adams’ successful run for mayor in 2021, and some supported Republican Nicole Malliotakis for mayor in 2017, though none voiced their official support for Bill de Blasio when he first won the mayoralty in 2013.
Cuomo’s actions as governor have come back to haunt him. He approved the state’s controversial cashless bail law, and police unions have blasted Cuomo’s state Parole Board appointees for releasing convicted cop-killers, a law-enforcement union source said.
Reps for the coalitions did not meet with Mamdani’s campaign, but some of the union officials will continue to attack him as anti-cop, a labor insider said.
