This has been the longest year in the history of this city.

Longest year, the toughest year, and a year where there was so much that we had to overcome together.

Over the past year, New York City has confronted two major forces.

New York City, the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US,

a pandemic that hit the city harder than any place in the country and exposed the depth of its inequities.

The report from the mayor's office calls COVID-19 the largest mass fatality incident in modern New York City history.

And massive protests over race and policing that prompted calls to rethink and defund the NYPD.

It's a man that has city defends NYPD by at least half.

And so as the race to replace New York City's mayor got underway, it seemed like those two

issues would become central to the campaign. And that's how it started.

We need to make New York City the COVID-19 comeback city but also the anti-poverty city.

The candidates talked about the best and fairest way to bring back an economy battered by lockdowns.

Policing is fundamentally broken in this country.

And they talked about how to change policing.

Or maybe it's not broken, it's just working exactly how it's supposed to.

And the point about what people are demanding is then break it, then make it different.

We have become a safe haven for those who want to use that power in abusive way and not in a

corrective way.

With some of them calling for huge cuts in the police budget.

It's time to move a billion dollars from one police plaza into the streets of our city.

It was exactly the kind of campaign with a progressive consensus at its core that you'd expect in a deep blue democratic city.

But then over the past few months, the campaign started to change and the consensus started to unravel.

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