Progressive proponents of defunding the NYPD are out of touch with the city’s Democratic electorate — with worries about crime and safety the greatest among the party’s lower-income and minority voters, a poll commissioned by The Post has found.
Opposition to last year’s $1 billion NYPD budget cut was also strongest in the crime-ridden Bronx, where more than 60 percent of respondents said they disapproved of the move by the City Council and Mayor Bill de Blasio.
A Brooklyn cop said of the results, “It doesn’t surprise me that the politicians don’t know what the people of the city really want.”
“If people aren’t safe, nothing else matters. People want to make sure that they can safely go to work and go to sleep at night in their homes,” the cop added.
The poll of 1,000 likely Democratic city voters was conducted from June 10 to June 15 by McLaughlin & Associates ahead of the city’s first-ever ranked-choice primary election on Tuesday.
The survey showed that respondents who earn less than $20,000 a year were the most likely to rank crime and safety as the issue that would decide their votes, at a rate of 38.7 percent.
That figure was nearly as high — at 36.4 percent — for those earning between $20,000 and $40,000, and was 36.8 percent for those earning between $40,000 and $60,000.
By comparison, just 22.1 percent of respondents with annual salaries in excess of $250,000 said the issue would decide their votes.
Among racial and ethnic groups, 32.1 percent of African Americans and 30.5 percent of Hispanics said their No. 1 issue was crime and safety, compared with 26.4 percent of whites.
Black women comprised the most-concerned group, at 34.3 percent.
By borough, crime and safety was the top issue in traditionally conservative Staten Island, at 36.4 percent, followed by The Bronx, 35 percent; Queens, 32.7 percent; Brooklyn, 26.7 percent; and Manhattan, 26.3 percent.
But on the subject of defunding the police, 62.2 percent of Bronx residents said they disapproved of last year’s slashing of the NYPD’s $6 billion budget.
That rate was even higher than in Staten Island, where the move was opposed by 51.5 percent.
Official statistics show that murders in The Bronx have increased 46.2 percent this year, while shootings are up 117.5 percent and the number of people shot is up 125 percent as of Sunday, compared with the same period during 2020.
In Queens, 50.5 percent of respondents disapproved of defunding the NYPD, compared with 40.5 percent who approved.
Brooklyn was the only borough that approved cutting the NYPD budget, by a narrow margin of 47.3 percent to 46 percent.
African Americans disapproved by more than 10-percentage-point margin, 50.8 percent to 40.5 percent, with the rates among African-American women slightly more lopsided, 51 percent to 39.4 percent.
The results appear to run counter to the pledge by top-tier Democratic candidate Maya Wiley to strip the NYPD of another $1 billion and shift the money to city schools for “trauma-informed care.”
At a campaign rally in Brooklyn on Friday, Wiley rejected the poll’s findings.
“New Yorkers are very clear: They understand that unjust, unfair policing has harmed black and Latino communities wrongly, unconstitutionally,” she said.
“I’d rather stop the gun from being fired than I would make sure we have police stopping people in the streets.”
Wiley, a former de Blasio counsel, placed second in the poll, with 16.5 percent support, behind Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, a former NYPD captain, who scored 21.3 percent.
Other candidates who want to defund the police — city Comptroller Scott Stringer and former nonprofit exec Dianne Morales — lagged far behind in the eight-person Democratic field, with 7 percent and 3.3 percent, respectively.
Additional reporting by Craig McCarthy