'Defund Police' NYC Mayoral Candidate Seen Leaving $2.75 Million Home Protected by Private Security
It’s business as usual in Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s stratosphere as a hyper-progressive, #DefundthePolice New York mayoral candidate she just endorsed was spotted leaving her multimillion-dollar home in a Brooklyn neighborhood that is protected by private security.
Ocasio-Cortez, the far-left Democrat who represents part of Queens, has been criticized for the often shameless hypocrisy of the way she lives her life while railing against things such as law enforcement, prisons and capitalism.
On Saturday, AOC put her name behind Maya Wiley, a former official in Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration who is a virtual poster child for left-wing hypocrisy.
Nobody says change like @AOC. And with AOC’s help we are going to win this race and bring the change we need to the city we love. #mayamentum pic.twitter.com/bOkheUJa1y
— Maya Wiley (@mayawiley) June 5, 2021
Wiley has pledged to cut the budget for the New York Police Department by $1 billion, yet her husband, Harland Mandel, pays into private neighborhood security in their wealthy Brooklyn neighborhood, the Daily Mail reported Tuesday.
Wiley has vowed to expand affordable housing for New Yorkers, yet she and Mandel live with their two daughters in a $2.75 million, 4,000-square-foot home in the Ditmas Park section of Brooklyn, one of the “leafiest — and safest — in the city,” according to the report.
The British tabloid published photographs of Wiley leaving the lavish home this week, just on the heels of the high-profile endorsement from Ocasio-Cortez.
Mayoral candidate Maya Wiley seen leaving $2.75M home protected by private security as she calls for defunding police https://t.co/KSCGaxu0BO
— Daily Mail US (@DailyMail) June 8, 2021
Her campaign is being backed by other progressives — including New York Reps. Jamaal Bowman and Hakeem Jeffries, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro — as her stances on policing, public schools and personal wealth make her the quintessential 2020s progressive.
Others see things differently, of course.
One critic with the NYPD said Wiley’s law enforcement platform is “asinine” and that she’s merely “pandering for votes” while she enjoys private security at home.
“Here they are wanting to defund the police — but to keep my family safe, we hire private security, which is probably staffed by retired cops or military,” the person told the New York Post. “Cops laugh about it all the time. Cops know when they retire, they will get hired by someone like Wiley.”
Democratic primary rival Eric Adams has called Wiley’s plan to defund the police “dangerous” and scathingly accused her and AOC of wanting “to slash the police department budget and shrink the police force at a time when black and brown babies are being shot in our streets” on Sunday, the Post reported.
Wiley also has faced a backlash for her vocal opposition to programs for gifted children in public schools while she sent her own daughters to private schools, including a middle school for gifted children with rigorous testing standards, according to the Daily Mail.
Curtis Sliwa, the most viable Republican mayoral candidate, told the outlet, “Hypocrisy drips from the lips of Maya Wiley. With her, it’s all do as I say, not as I do.”
Sliwa, who is best known for founding the Guardian Angels in the 1970s to fight crime in the city, touted the fact that he’s the only candidate who still takes the subway.
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He also pointed out that Wiley’s proposed $1 billion cut to the NYPD budget would be in addition to the $1 billion that’s already been slashed from the rapidly diminishing funds for the department.
Sliwa noted that “if she wins the primary, she will get armed security from the NYPD 24-hours a day at the taxpayers’ expense. I hope she refuses that, but with her record, I don’t think she will.”
“Why should you have to have an armed guard to protect you from the people who voted for you?” he said.
The taxpayer-funded security, of course, would follow the private security that protects her and her family now.
The Prospect Park South Charitable Trust, which sets her and husband Mandel back $550 a month, has guards on duty from 4 p.m. to midnight, according to a neighbor who spoke to the Post. The patrol will even pick up residents at the subway station if they feel unsafe.
Wiley, for her part, has said she doesn’t like the setup but that it’s her husband who pays for the private neighborhood security due to a “trauma response” after he was brutally assaulted during a mugging in 2001.
She told New York Daily News columnist Harry Siegel last year that Mandel “was coming home from work and he saw the car at the end of the block and it just made him feel better.”
“And so he started paying again and then I had a very hard time saying, ‘Don’t do it.’ It’s not necessarily rational but it is his trauma response, so it’s a complicated one for our family,” Wiley said.
Seriously? How many New Yorkers who have experienced trauma in the very same crime-ridden neighborhoods that would be adversely impacted by Wiley’s proposed budget cuts would love their own private security squad yet can’t afford to pay for one themselves?
It’s not really that “complicated,” after all. If you take funding away from the public security forces — you know, the people who are supposed to protect everyone regardless of personal income — then only those who cannot afford private security will suffer.
Meanwhile, it is these people for whom progressive politicians claim to be committed to fighting who will find themselves facing even more crime.
This is the face of 2021’s Democratic Party — privilege and safety for me, but not for thee. Typical.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
