OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Another Democrat who vehemently supported an effort to “defund” the New York Police Department appears to have been caught in an act of hypocrisy.
Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou (D-Lower Manhattan) told a local publication in 2016 she first moved to the district she now wants to represent in Congress because “safety issues” near “the projects” in Harlem forced her to move in with her then-fiance in the Financial District, the New York Post reported.
When Niou was campaigning for her current seat, she told The Lowdown she sought out the wealthier Manhattan neighborhood after she saw a couple of disturbing crimes and also fell victim to one herself.
“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 explained in an interview with the publication. “He was already living there.”
The Post added:
Four years later, the since-updated issues section 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.”
Niou bid to represent the newly configured Lower Manhattan-Brooklyn House seat has earned endorsements from “Sex and the City” star and former gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon, left-wing group New York Communities for Change and state Sen. Julia Salazar (D-Bushwick), among others.
In 2016, while vying to replace disgraced ex-Assemblyman Sheldon Silver, she recalled to the local outlet that two separate frightening “incidents” drove her out of her apartment on 106th Street and 1st Avenue in East Harlem.
In one of the incidents, Niou said she “watched a girl get raped on a pile of garbage, right across the street from the projects” where she lived at the time. In the other, the congressional leftist candidate said she saw a man “slam a girl’s head … into an ATM machine” and then rob her before he ran off.
“We have a lot of safety issues,” Niou reportedly said 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.”
Niou has represented the 65th District since 2017, which includes the Financial District along with Battery Park City, Chinatown, and the Lower East Side. At the time, she was engaged to David Segura, founder of Giant Media.
In a report issued in October 2012, Segura forecast that the company would earn $8 million in its third year. The ad and technology firm was summarily sold in 2014 for an “undisclosed sum.”
Segura’s Instagram bio goes on to note that he is an “Angel Investor in 60+ startups.”
“During their relationship, several pictures Segura posted of the pair on Instagram show them leading a luxurious lifestyle. They include meals at multiple Michelin star restaurants — the Trump International Hotel and Tower’s Jean-Georges, Gramercy Tavern, and Somtum Der, along with other fine dining spots,” The Post report noted.
“Public records show that Segura in 2014 bought a $2.6 million Wall Street apartment where Niou started living before her successful 2016 bid, during which claimed she loaned her campaign $50,000 of her savings while earning $75,000 per year as chief of staff to as state Assemblyman,” the report continued.
Assemblywoman Inez Dickens, who has been the representative for portions of Harlem in the City Council and the state legislature in Albany since 2006, ripped Niou as being “hypocritical” for leaving her former neighborhood out of fear and then calling for stripping the NYPD of funding and 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, a Democrat, railed. “That’s hypocritical.”
“I didn’t leave my community, and there are times when I feel unsafe,” she added.
“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,” Matt Thomas, a left-wing activist and writer who isn’t affiliated with any candidate, told The Post.
“What’s funny is how aggressively Yuh-Line and others in that space attempt to discipline people for transgressions against woke propriety, when at the same time, they have a lot of the same breaches of that propriety in their very recent pasts,” Thomas added.
