New York’s Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani on Wednesday apologised to the New York Police Department (NYPD) for remarks he made in 2020 during the height of the George Floyd protests.

“I apologise for the language that I used, and I spoke to them about the fact that I want to work with them to deliver public safety because what we’re seeing in the city right now is we’re asking officers to do nearly everything we can think of,” Mamdani said in an interview on US media outlet Fox News.

“We used to ask officers to focus on serious crimes. Now we’re asking them to focus also on the mental health crisis, to focus also on homelessness. In one year alone, the NYPD receives 200,000 mental health calls,” he added.

Fox host Martha MacCallum said officers she spoke with had requested a public apology from Mamdani. He responded: “I’ll apologise to police officers right here, because this is the apology that I’ve been sharing with many rank-and-file officers. I apologise because of the fact that I’m looking to working with these officers.“

Mamdani, who continues to hold a strong lead in the polls, said his views on policing have evolved over time during his tenure in the state Legislature.

“One of my focuses was, ‘How do we deliver that justice?’ And now what I know, having represented 100,000 people in western Queens, is that to deliver that justice, you have to also deliver that safety. And that means representing the men and women in the NYPD,” Mamdani said.

“It means representing the Black and brown New Yorkers who have been victims of police brutality. It means representing the Muslim New Yorkers in my district who were surveilled on the basis of their faith,” he added.

In June 2020, Mamdani wrote on the US social media company X, then known as Twitter: “We don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety. What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD.”

Floyd, an unarmed Black man, was killed on May 25, 2020, when Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee on his neck for nearly 10 minutes. His death sparked global protests against racism and police brutality, with demonstrations spreading far beyond the US.