Brian Laird on WNYC, WNYC political reporter Liz Kim is with us on some of her latest reporting on Mayor

Mamdani and other city politics.

One of Liz's stories prompted one of my questions

to the mayor when he was on with us yesterday. We will revisit that with Liz and revisit a few of the

topics we touched on with the mayor. But here's the one her reporting prompted. If you thought

Mayor Mamdani was going to defund the police, whether you were for that or whether

that scared you out of your wits, you were wrong. He announced this week that he's adding

more than 500 officers to the department. I asked him if that isn't the opposite of what he campaigned

on, which was holding the head count steady, not defunding it, but also not increasing

it as Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sleeva were campaigning on. Over the course of the campaign, I spoke about

the importance of keeping our budgeted headcount steady. When I came into office, I was informed of two

things. One was that although the Bronx was of a comparative

size and need to other boroughs, it had only one police zone, which is why we made the

decision to split it into two patrol boroughs like there are in Manhattan, in Queens, in Brooklyn.

The second is that we found that while our NYPD officers were receiving extensive training in the academy,

they were not receiving enough ongoing training once they were on the job.

We decided to strengthen that regular training so that officers can better do their jobs.

Together because of these two issues, we saw there's a slight increase in the budgeted headcount, and that is as a result of both of these.

The mayor here yesterday, and with that, we welcome WNYC and Gothamist Political Reporter Elizabeth Kim.

Happy Wednesday, Liz.

Happy Wednesday, Brian.

Can you give us more context for that clip, or did the mayor just say it, plain and simple?

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