Governor Cuomo is planning to hire 5,000 more police officers if elected mayor of New York City — as he makes public safety his number one campaign issue and tries to woo Black voters.

Mr. Cuomo unveiled this “first plank” of his public safety plan at the Mount Neboh Baptist Church at Harlem on Sunday. The hiring of additional police officers would increase the size of the force by 15 percent, bringing the total number of officers to 39,000 and reversing years of declines.

“The city is in crisis, the public has no confidence in its government and in order to regain it, public safety must be job one,” Mr. Cuomo said. “Extremist DSA politicians not only cut funding — they pounded their chest while they were doing it. This madness must end, and this plan will reverse this dangerous trend and give the NYPD the resources it needs to do their job.”

Mr. Cuomo says the cost of these additional officers would be offset by reducing police overtime pay that cost the city nearly $1 billion in 2024. His plan also includes measures to improve officer retention and morale. The rest of his public safety plan is expected to be unveiled in the coming days. There was no mention of the bail and discovery reforms the governor signed into law in 2021, which Mayor Adams has blamed for the rise in city crime last year.

Mr. Cuomo’s proposal comes one day after the entrance of Black City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams to the race. Backed by one of Mr. Cuomo’s political foes, Attorney General Letitia James of New York, Ms. Adams threatens to siphon support from Black voters away from the former Empire State governor, primarily in her home borough of Queens and parts of Brooklyn.

“I think Adrienne Adams is a consummate professional,” a former New York governor, David Paterson, tells the Sun, though he says he’s not endorsing anyone. “We’ve never had a woman mayor or a Black woman mayor. That would be pretty cool.”

Black voters make up about a third of the Democratic primary electorate in the city. There are now four Black candidates running for mayor as Democrats. Mr. Cuomo has been pitching himself to Black voters for months, attending services at Black churches, and collecting a slew of endorsements from Black politicians in the city, including a former New York Comptroller, Carl McCall, and an assemblyman from Harlem, Jordan Wright, on Sunday.

“I don’t think any voter with melanin in their skin can trust this man,” the chairman of the Harlem Republican Club, Oz Sultan, tells The New York Sun of Mr. Cuomo. “His track record is sexual assaults, letting New York down, screwing up the MTA, screwing up with DeBlasio, and now we’re supposed to trust that he’s going to do something like this.”

Mr. Cuomo praised a former mayor, David Dinkins, at his Sunday sermon for increasing the size of the police force in the late 1990s. Mr. Sultan, too, says he credits Mr. Dinkins for prioritizing community policing and engagement with his community in Harlem. “This is a Republican guy saying that,” Mr. Sultan says.

Mr. Sultan says Harlem needs more community policing, police athletic leagues and after school programs, and gang intervention. He says the migrant crisis has brought Tren de Aragua gang members to northern Harlem and the Bronx. “You’re getting f-ing gang wars going on like the 70s,” he says. “This vote is going to be a little visceral for New Yorkers because they’re looking at the crime issues, they may know someone who was murdered on the subway. They’re looking at cost of living issues.”

“If they’re going to fix things, it has to be more than lipstick on the pig, which is what we’ve gotten from the Cuomos,” Mr. Sultan says.

Mr. Cuomo may be pitching himself as tough on crime, but his record is mixed. He put 500 additional officers in the subway in 2019, against the objection of progressives like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He now calls “defund the police” the “dumbest words ever uttered,” but he said in a 2021 press conference that adding more police and defunding police were “both legitimate schools of thought.” His campaign says these remarks were “taken out of context.”

On Sunday, Mr. Cuomo defended the bail reform law he signed in 2021. “Bail reform righted a terrible social wrong. We were putting people in Rikers, in jail, who hadn’t been found guilty of anything just because they couldn’t pay bail,” Mr. Cuomo told reporters. 

Mr. Cuomo’s Democratic challengers are attacking him for trying to solve the crime problem they say he helped create. Mr. Adams says recidivism is the leading driver of crime in the city and the bail reform law is partially to blame. 

“More police do not equate to better policing,” a Democratic mayoral candidate, Michael Blake, tells the Sun by text message. “While we need to hire and rehire officers to return to the force, we don’t need a return to stop-and-frisk practices or those that harm communities. Our safety doesn’t require over-policing and control.”

Another Black mayoral candidate, Zellnor Myrie, criticized Mr. Cuomo at a speech at Al Sharpton’s National Action Network last week. “We are more than props. Our community, the Black community, we are people,” Mr. Myrie said. “We cannot look to the past for solutions to our future.”

“Please. You can’t solve this problem — your cuts to mental health and the MTA are exactly what caused it,” City Comptroller Brad Lander posted to X.

Several of the progressive mayoral candidates are calling on voters not to check Mr. Cuomo or Mr. Adams on their ranked choice ballots. “Andrew Cuomo wants to fix all the problems he created,” Democratic mayoral candidate, Jessica Ramos, posted in a video message on X. “I’m inviting you to D. R. E. A. M. — Don’t Rank Eric or Andrew for Mayor of NYC.”

“I would urge you to consider Sliwa,” Mr. Sultan says of Republican mayoral candidate, Curtis Sliwa. Yet he says he hears the most enthusiasm now about insurgent Democratic Socialists of America candidate, State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani. “I know a lot of people who are considering Mamdani — it just can’t be Cuomo,” he says. 

Mr. Cuomo is leading by significant margins in all recent polls, but Mr. Mamdani is gaining support. Mr. Mamdani is proposing raising corporate taxes to pay for free buses, free childcare, and city-owned grocery stores.

“Judging by any poll that happens in March for a June election is like wearing a winter coat in July in New York City,” a Democratic strategist, Hank Sheinkopf, tells the Sun. He says Mr. Cuomo’s police proposal sounds good to moderates, “but is it enough for the left? The left doesn’t believe anything is wrong. That’s why Mamdani is such a threat. He’s the guy to watch”

“He’s smart, he’s handsome, he’s articulate, he’s a Jew hater. He’s perfect for the present moment,” Mr. Sheinkopf says of Mr. Mamdani.

Mr. Sultan says New Yorkers need to be reminded of Mr. Cuomo’s Covid policies as governor and what he says were the devastating impacts they had on Black communities. He says he knows of neighbors who lost loved ones only to find out their bodies were buried on Hart Island in mass graves.

“I beg all New Yorkers to ask a very simple question: do you know or remember someone who lost someone under Covid because of Cuomo’s policies? And do you think this same guy would be able to do anything better for New York?”