Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis Criticizes Zohran Mamdani at Gainesville DOGE Press Conference
During a press conference in Gainesville on audits into local governments by the Florida Department of Government Efficiency, Gov. Ron DeSantis criticized the New York Democratic mayoral nominee, Zohran Mamdani.
DeSantis didn’t mention Mamdani by name, but it was clear who he was referring to.
DeSantis said, “New York City’s budget is more than the State of Florida. They have 8 million people, and if this guy gets elected mayor up there and he starts running the grocery stores, they’re gonna end up in a bigger hole than they are now.”
One of the staples of Mamdani’s campaign is a promise of city-run grocery stores.
DeSantis went on to say, “How he could get elected—actually he probably could get elected in Gainesville. Not many other parts of Florida could he possibly get elected. If he does get elected there, you are gonna see people starting to flee… Everyone’s got their threshold, and I think with this guy—people will reach their threshold… In Florida, we've done law enforcement recruitment bonuses. When we bring in people or new recruits from within the state, they get a $5,000 signing bonus. Part of it is that we want to promote law enforcement as a noble profession, but we also understood that a lot of these cops are treated poorly in some of these jurisdictions. You’ve got a guy that could get elected mayor who thinks the NYPD should be abolished. I don’t know—I would not want to put on the uniform and risk my life in that circumstance, with a mayor that clearly doesn’t have your back. I think you're going to see a lot of law enforcement want to relocate out of there. I guarantee you—they’ll go different places—but I guarantee you the number one landing spot will be the State of Florida, because we're a law-and-order state.”
Mamdani said at a debate in the New York Democratic primary, “I will not defund the police. I will work with the police because I believe the police have a critical role to play in creating public service—public safety.”
Mamdani said in an appearance on The Breakfast Club podcast, “I wanna be very clear, we are not defunding the police. What we are talking about is sustaining the number of police we have in the police department. When I talk to those police officers themselves, they tell me they signed up to join the police force to tackle serious crimes. Yet, what they’re being asked to do today is serve as mental health professionals and social workers. The same officers who thought they would be responding to shootings are picking up the 200,000 phone calls per year about mental health. What we’ve seen elsewhere in the country is you can actually move mental health calls out of the police department. That can reduce the calls police have to deal with by 20%. In doing so, you can increase police response time in those major categories of crime… Police have a critical role to play in public safety, and we also need to ask them to just focus on their job and not ask them to do every job. What we’re seeing right now is the same politicians who have given us this lack of public safety over so many years telling us their only answer, no matter the question, is to ask the police to do more. I want them to do the thing they signed up for and to have a Department of Community Safety with teams of dedicated mental health outreach workers.”
Zohran Mamdani speaks about his position on police funding on The Breakfast Club podcast
