A progressive New York City lawmaker who pushed for defunding the police moved from her former Manhattan home due to "safety issues" near "the projects," the New York Post reported.
Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou, D-Lower Manhattan, who's seeking to represent her district in Congress, moved from Harlem in upper Manhattan after witnessing a pair of disturbing crimes and fell victim to one, the Post said.
"I actually was robbed when I was living in Harlem. My boyfriend at the time, my fiancé, didn't think I was safe up there, so he told me to move in, and so that's how I moved to the Financial District with him," she said in a 2016 interview with The Lo-Down NY. "He was already living there."
The Post reported that Niou’s "Issues" section, since updated, for her most recent Assembly campaign read: "She believes that we are long overdue for police reform in this country and that we need to defund millions from the police in order to put critical funding back into our social services, education, and housing."
Assemblywoman Inez Dickens, a Democrat who has represented parts of Harlem in the city council and Albany since 2006, slammed Niou for being "hypocritical" after leaving the area due to fear of crime before advocating for stripping the NYPD of resources.
"You move out of the neighborhood because you say it's unsafe, then you say 'defund the police?' You turn around and desert the community — and then say you don’t need the police?" Dickens said. "That’s hypocritical.
"I didn’t leave my community, and there are times when I feel unsafe."
Left-wing activist Matt Thomas said he was not surprised Niou, 38, had expressed sentiments that contradict her professed ideological leanings.
"I think it is commentary on the left’s unwillingness to admit that … people’s concerns about public safety are legitimate, or at the very least they are natural responses to seeing crime on the streets, [and] things like that," Thomas told the Post.
"There seems to be a real lack of willingness to admit that people don’t always have the wokest responses [to crime], and I think that this is a rather amusing illustration of that."
While running to replace disgraced former Assemblyman Sheldon Silver in 2016, Niou told The Lo-Down that two frightening "incidents" drove her out of her East Harlem apartment.
She told The Lo-Down that she "watched a girl get raped on a pile of garbage, right across the street from the projects," where she was living.
In the other incident, Niou said she saw a man "slam a girl’s head … into an ATM machine" and rob her before fleeing.
"We have a lot of safety issues," Niou told The Lo-Down in April 2016. "Some of the things that happen on the Lower East Side are very parallel, so these are all incidents that kind of led to me moving down to the Financial District and moving in with my partner."
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.