NYC Defund-the-Police candidate fled Harlem due to 'safety issues'

A Democratic New York state politician who pushed to defund the police first moved to the district she is running to represent in Congress because of “safety issues” while living “right across the street from the projects,” according to an unearthed 2016 interview.

Assemblywoman Yu-Line Niou (D-Lower Manhattan) gave an interview to The Lo-Down in Apr. 2016 while campaigning for the seat she currently holds, explaining she moved to the posh Financial District at the invitation of her then-fiancé after a robbery while 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 said in Apr. 2016, reports the New York Post.

“He was already living there.”

Niou said she witnessed numerous “safety issues” for women while living in Harlem, including a girl getting “raped on a pile of garbage” and an assault and robbery at an ATM. She called the police both times and was frustrated with how “they just took their time.”

But the issues section of her most recent Assembly campaign in 2020 stated that Niou “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,” reports The Post.

The section was titled, “Yuh-Line’s Progressive Platform.”

Niou also tangled with police in February when she called officers in the subway who had just attended a funeral for fallen NYPD Officer Jason Rivera a “frightening show of intimidation,” then liked a reply that called the funeral a “fascism rally” and compared it to a post of Nazis marching.

Born in Taiwan, Niou has represented the 65th District, which includes the Financial District, Battery Park City, Chinatown and the Lower East Side, since 2017.

She is currently in the crowded race for the newly configured 10th Congressional District, which contains Lower Manhattan, against 16 other candidates, including Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-NY) and former mayor Bill de Blasio.

Assemblywoman Inez Dickens, a fellow Democrat who represents parts of Harlem, blasted Niou as a hypocrite.

“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 told The Post.

“That’s hypocritical.”

“I didn’t leave my community, and there are times when I feel unsafe,” she added.

Niou appears to have since split with her fiance, David Segura, who sold his company, Giant Media, in 2014 for an “undisclosed sum.”