NEW YORK — On a recent spring day, just steps from New York’s City Hall, Andrew Giuliani stood with his father, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and the former Republican mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa, inveighing about crime and the district attorneys elected to prosecute criminals.
He railed against the “defund the police” movement and vowed to restore funding to departments throughout New York State. He decried bail reform. And he promised that, if elected, he would move to recall prosecutors who have taken an approach that he views as far too soft on criminals.
Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, would be his first target.
“On day one of my administration, I will remove Alvin Bragg or any of the other 61 district attorneys in the state of New York,” Giuliani said. “Alvin Bragg has failed his oath of office, so we would absolutely remove him.”
Bragg, who rode into office in January after running on a platform of criminal justice reform, became a favored target for Republicans earlier this year after issuing a memo stating, among other things, that prosecutors should not bring armed robbery charges as long as the suspect “didn’t create a genuine risk of physical harm.”
Bragg later walked back parts of the memo, but for many Republicans, the bell could not be unrung.
Despite the City Hall backdrop on the day he spoke against Bragg, Andrew Giuliani is not running for mayor like his father before him. He’s running for governor.
But he is campaigning on a platform much like his father’s, and he’s hoping his run will have enough resonance among enough Democrats concerned about rising crime to get him elected.
New York state is dominated by Democrats, and Giuliani, if he’s successful in the Republican primary, will need to peel away enough of their votes to win the governorship.
To Giuliani and his Republican competitors, the issue of crime is key to doing that.
Compared to the time immediately before the pandemic, crime has been on the rise not only in the city and the state, but throughout the entire country. Mayor Eric Adams won City Hall by emphasizing the issue. But crime in the city today is much lower than it was when Rudy Giuliani took office as mayor in 1994.
So the dilemma Giuliani now faces is whether the issue of crime will work for him as it did for his father, who famously had experience as a mob-busting federal prosecutor before his mayoral runs.
Ken Frydman, who served as Mayor Giuliani’s director of media relations, is not convinced.
“Does the apple fall far from the tree? I don’t know,” Frydman said. “He doesn’t have any crime-fighting experience like his father did. I haven’t seen any evidence that would encourage people to vote for him on his crime-fighting experience.”
Andrew, who famously made a cameo during his father’s swearing-in as mayor, has tapped his father to attend several recent campaign events. At the one in City Hall Park, he appeared to rely on his dad’s imprimatur, waiting patiently for his turn while his father spoke about gun control, once again a hot-button issue after mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas.
“This city has had at the lowest 320 murders and as high as 2,400 murders with the same gun control,” Rudy Giuliani said. “You can change the gun control as much as you want, you’re not going to reduce murders. Murder isn’t affected by gun control. People will find another way to do it.”
The former mayor went on to say that the key is enforcing gun laws more strictly. Part of that, noted his son, could be more frequent use of stop-and-frisk.
“We do need to allow our police officers to be able to get to areas where crime is likely to be committed before it’s going to be committed,” he said.
For many New York City residents, especially people of color, that is a tough sell.
And Andrew Giuliani has to know that his father, not to mention former President Donald Trump, who employed both the older and younger Guilianis, comes with liabilities.
Andrew served in the Trump White House in the Office of the Public Liaison, arranging visits with sports teams, and represented Trump in meetings on the opioid crisis. He is also one of Trump’s longtime golfing companions. As Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy was the mouthpiece for some of the more outrageous conspiracy theories of the president’s reelection campaign, and the former mayor has since had his license to practice law in New York state suspended.
In heavily Republican parts of upstate New York, Andrew’s connections will likely be viewed as an asset, but in Democratic-dominated areas like the Big Apple and sections of Buffalo and Rochester, it’s likely to work against the would-be governor.
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