Mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani has doubled down on his pro-prostitution policies.
After being hounded by rival campaigns about his stance on decriminalizing sex work as a Queens assemblymember, Mamdani said Wednesday that he wants to mirror the policies of his favorite ex-mayor: Bill de Blasio.
“What I want to do is look at the ways in which the previous administration addressed this issue,” Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, said when pressed on the issue during an unrelated public event on the Upper East Side.
“I found that it created far more safety than what the current administration has done,” he told reporters, in a ding at Mayor Eric Adams, who is running for re-election as an independent in November.
De Blasio, at the tail end of his administration in 2020, proposed a series of reforms to decriminalize prostitution in an attempt to shift focus on the arrests of traffickers, rather than sex workers.
Opponents of decriminalizing sex work, such as the National Organization of Women, however, argue it could actually lead to spikes in sex trafficking, as well as a decrease in quality of life for New Yorkers due to open-air brothels.
De Blasio’s admin pushed the use of “community-centered services” for sex workers, rather than arrests, and services supporting victims of trafficking.
But it’s not clear how much of these policies ended up being implemented.
Current City Hall representatives didn’t respond to a request for comment about the Adams admin’s implementation or rollback of the de-Blasio era proposals.
But Mamdani, a proud Democratic Socialists of America member, took the opportunity to swipe at Adams’ record on the issue.
“So I have said time and again, my focus is on the outcomes of public safety,” he claimed.
“And what we have seen from this current administration is a theater, one that repeats itself every so often and leaves New Yorkers facing the same problems that they did a year prior.”
A representative for Adams’ campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
The Manhattan District attorney’s Office announced that it would no longer prosecute prostitution cases in April 2021.
