Democratic mayoral candidate Maya Wiley wants to cut $1 billion from the NYPD’s budget — at the same time her home is being protected by a private security patrol in her Brooklyn neighborhood.
Wiley — who on Sunday clashed with rival Eric Adams over her plan to defund the police if elected — claimed in December that she thought the private security was “ridiculous and we shouldn’t have it.”
But she said her life partner, Harlan Mandel, began paying the annual fees without her knowledge to the Prospect Park South Charitable Trust to fund a guard who drives around the area.
An outraged NYPD source called Wiley’s stance regarding the police budget “asinine” and accused her of “pandering for votes.”
“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 source said.
“Cops laugh about it all the time. Cops know when they retire, they will get hired by someone like Wiley.”
Official NYPD statistics show that the 70th Precinct — where Wiley and Mandel live with their two daughters in a sprawling, historic home valued at $2.7 million — has seen major crimes decrease in six of seven categories this year through May 30, compared to the same period last year.
But in the adjacent 67th Precinct, serious crimes have increased in four of the seven categories, with auto thefts up 45.9 percent, rapes up 18.2 percent and felony assaults up 9 percent over the same period.
One of Wiley’s neighbors on Monday described refusing to pay for the security patrol, saying, “It reeks of entitlement.”
But another, Ulda Kaplan, called the patrols “very helpful” and said the guard has dispersed people for smoking weed “on the corner” — even though NYPD cops are under orders to let people puff away in public since the state legalized recreational marijuana in March.
Neighbor Barbara Hoffman — whose partner, David Langdon, is on the charitable trust’s board — said the guard is on duty from 4 p.m. to midnight, seven days a week, and can be summoned to pick up residents from the Church Avenue subway station if they feel unsafe.
Langdon, who’s been a board member since the 1980s, called the patrol a “great thing” that provides “the comfort level and the perception of safety that particularly many of the older members of the community feel.”
About half of the neighborhood’s 200 households contribute to pay for the patrols, he said.
“In the height of the Black Lives Matter thing in the summer, there was a whole movement afoot to try and defund, that people who weren’t even contributing were saying that, ‘We don’t do this,'” he said.
“But it was really kind of crazy. They were taking what they perceived to be somebody’s idea. On that basis, they want to deprive people of this service.”
Another resident described calling the guard to roust “a drunk gentleman in the bushes across the street” because “the police aren’t the right people to call for something like that because black lives matter.”
“He kind of just said, ‘C’mon, buddy. Let’s go,'” the neighbor said of the guard.
Meanwhile, during a campaign event in the Bronx, Wiley denounced the NYPD for busting at least 22 people on Saturday at Manhattan’s Washington Square Park while enforcing a new 10 p.m. curfew imposed after a Post expose about rampant drug use and loud, booze-fueled gatherings there.
“As we talk about what public safety means and what public safety looks like, I’ll tell you what it looks like: It looks like smart policing,” she said.
“It’s not riot-gear police officers showing up in Washington Square Park, using bicycles and batons to clear a public space.”
Last year, Wiley, a former counsel to outgoing Mayor Bill de Blasio, told Daily News columnist Harry Siegel that she and Mandel had paid for the private security patrol in the past before stopping at some unspecified time.
But Mandel, CEO of the nonprofit Media Development Investment Fund, later decided to pay for the security patrol on his own due to his experience of having been badly beaten during a 2001 mugging, Wiley said.
That experience still has him too scared to walk on the area’s sidewalks after dark, and he instead walks in the middle of the street, Wiley said.
“And he said, one night he was coming home from work and he saw the car at the end of the block and it just made him feel better,” she said.
“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 also noted that in the 20 years they’ve lived in Prospect Park South, she’s only aware of one other mugging on the block.
The NYPD said no arrests were ever made in the assault on Mandel, who a witness said was attacked from behind by four males on Oct. 5, 2001, while he was walking north on Buckingham Road hear Church Avenue.
Mandel suffered a cut to the nose and broken tooth but had no memory of the incident and didn’t know if he was robbed.
Wiley’s campaign on Monday said she stood by her remarks last year but declined to comment further.
On Sunday, Adams — a former NYPD captain-turned-Brooklyn borough president — said that “young people are being shot in our streets” amid the city’s crime wave and predicted that Wiley’s plan to shift $1 billion from the NYPD to city schools could “be dangerous to our children and our families.”
A day earlier, Adams responded to Wiley’s endorsement by US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) by saying they both “want 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.”
At a competing campaign event, Wiley likened Adams’ remarks to those of Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
“It sounded like the kind of talking points that is actually going to send us backward into the discrimination, humiliation and trauma that was not smart policing — it was unconstitutional policing,” she said.
Additional reporting by Len La Rocca
