Two N.Y. GOP congressional candidates previously pushed to limit police funding

Two Republican candidates running for hotly contested New York congressional seats presided over pushes to reduce police pay in official posts they once held — a political stance that runs counter to broader GOP attacks against defunding of police.

One of those congressional hopefuls is Nick LaLota, who’s running to fill the Suffolk County congressional seat that will be left vacant by GOP gubernatorial nominee Rep. Lee Zeldin come next year.

A Navy veteran who’s highlighted the need to rein in crime on the campaign trail, LaLota is running against Bridget Fleming, a Suffolk County lawmaker who’s secured the endorsement of the county’s local police union.

LaLota previously worked as a budget officer in Amityville, where he pushed the local police union to cut cops’ salaries by reopening their contract.

In 2015, LaLota was a central player in the village board’s plan to cut cops’ pay by $4,000 annually on average, according to Newsday. At the time, he argued high police salaries were threatening the village’s fiscal health and framed the cost-cutting measure as generous because the local government wasn’t seeking to claw back other benefits already enshrined in the local police union’s contract.

“We wanted to be as liberal as possible,” he said of the plan at the time.

The fight between LaLota and the local cops dragged on for years and grew increasingly contentious over time.

“Once again, Nick LaLota is using the Amityville PD and PBA as a punching bag by attacking officers and manipulating statistics for his own political aspirations. For years, we have been repeatedly bullied, insulted, and scapegoated for the bad fiscal management and lack of leadership of the Amityville 1st Party,” the Amityville PBA posted on Facebook in 2017. “Despite claims that they are committed to public safety by citing their hiring of new officers to replace retirees, the APD is staffed at its lowest levels since 1975. This has forced our officers to repeatedly staff tours with minimum manpower, no supervision and triple overtimes, all of which are detrimental to public safety.”

LaLota was at the time a member of the Amityville First Party, which was accused in mailings of wanting to disband the police department.

A LaLota spokesman, James Zenn, said his boss was facing a budget deficit when he first took the Amityville post. He noted that LaLota is “extremely pro-police” and accused Fleming of suggesting that funding should be diverted from police in 2020 and redirected to other agencies to address crime.

“No officer took a pay cut,” Zenn said of the Amityville budget maneuvers.

Fleming’s campaign offered a different interpretation.

“There’s a reason the police on Long Island refused to back extremist Nick LaLota — he’s a danger to law enforcement and public safety,” said Fleming spokeswoman Nebeyatt Betre. “The police endorsed Bridget Fleming because she has always recognized the importance of law enforcement in local communities, and unlike LaLota, helped law enforcement get the funding they needed to do their jobs.”

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Another GOP congressional candidate, Michael Lawler, was also involved in a push to cut police funding but under different circumstances.

Lawler, who’s now running to unseat Dem incumbent Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney in the Hudson Valley, made the so-called defund the police movement a bogeyman before launching his current political run.

“Defund the police? Get real,” he said at a Back the Blue rally in 2020 when he was running for state Assembly. “To all the woke, weak-kneed politicians who have caved to the demands of activists and put politics before the safety of all New Yorkers, I say to you today: You are responsible for this breakdown in our country — not law enforcement.”

More recently, Lawler attacked Maloney for supporting bail reform, a position he framed as soft on crime.

But in a previous job, as senior adviser to the Westchester County Executive, Lawler was part of a budget process that cut funding for the county police force by nearly $2 million, budget documents show.

Once elected to the Assembly, he, along with a majority of Republicans, also voted against a budget bill in 2021 that included $10 million for crime reduction efforts.

“There are hundreds of items in a specific budget bill,” Lawler said in an email to The News. “I voted against that specific budget bill because it had $2.1 billion for unemployment benefits for illegal immigrants.”

But those moves haven’t gone unnoticed by his opponent.

“While Lawler literally defunded the police in Westchester and voted against funding for law enforcement in Albany, Rep. Maloney delivered $7 million for local police departments,” said Maloney’s campaign spokeswoman Mia Ehrenberg. “Voters won’t fall for MAGA Mike’s act.”

Lawler chuckled when asked about his budget stance in Westchester and referred questions to his spokesman Bill O’Reilly, who said Lawler had “nothing to do with” that budget process.

Former Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino acknowledged that Lawler was “helpful to me in the process throughout the years,” but said he did not recall him weighing in specifically on funding for the county cops. Astorino added that the overall intent during the budget process was to keep spending levels down in order to avoid a tax increase.

O’Reilly noted that Lawler stepped down from his job in August 2016 and that the budget was adopted in October. But Lawler’s LinkedIn page shows he “consult[ed] with and offer[ed] suggestions to the County Executive, Deputy County Executive and Budget Director with respect to the county budget.”

When asked about that, O’Reilly doubled down on his original response.

“C’mon man — are you kidding me?” he said.