Curtis Sliwa plans to crack down on crime as NYC mayor

New York City Republican mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa discussed his platform and values on "Fox News Live" Sunday. Sliwa said he's determined to crack down on rising crime in the city and is hearing "crickets" from Democratic opponent Eric Adams.

CURTIS SLIWA:  We are the largest city in America with the slowest recovery rate, and all of these politicians, professionals, the wonks, they have no idea. They haven't made the connection yet. 

The reason people aren't flocking back to work in the empty, high rise buildings that are a ghost town, the reason people who are not visiting, the reason the tourists are shying away from New York City is because of the crime; crime in the streets, crime in the subways, crime in the park, crime everywhere. And that needs to be addressed. 

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And I have been consistent in fighting crime since I started the Guardian Angels in 1979, I obviously helped Rudy Giuliani get elected. His mandate was law and order in 1993. I learned a lot from what he did to take the city from being the crime capital, the murder capital of America, to becoming the largest safe city in America. And it starts by putting back qualified immunity. 

Now, this is a difficult argument because most of the taxpayers don't understand what's happened here and it's happening across the country. Our police officers, who risk their life each and every day, are having stripped from them the protections that we, the taxpayers, afford for all civil servants, elected officials, judges, district attorneys. 

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Now, police officers have to go out and prospect for their own police malpractice insurance policy, the way doctors and lawyers do in private practice. Now, how can a police officer, who will graduate the academy earning about $42,000 a year for the first five years in the NYPD, even find affordable housing? How is he or she going to be able to afford an actual personal policy for malpractice as a police officer? 

So what you've done is you've made it even twice as hard for the police to go out there and do their job. I want to refund the police. I want to hire 3,000 more police, and I want to take the handcuffs off the police, the heroes...

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