Nassau County is planning to install surveillance cameras, license-plate readers and facial-recognition technology along its border with New York City, County Executive Bruce Blakeman said.
Blakeman, speaking to Fox News Digital, reiterated plans to boost the county police force headcount and said he would intensify patrols on the border to protect Nassau. He didn’t give specifics or a timeline for the technology and patrol deployment.
Blakeman’s remarks, published by Fox News earlier this week, come in the aftermath of the election of Zohran Mamdani as New York City mayor. Blakeman has called Mamdani a “dangerous person.”
“We are doing everything necessary to make sure that Nassau County is safe,” Blakeman told Fox News.
A spokesman for Blakeman, Chris Boyle, on Tuesday declined to share specifics with Newsday about the security technology. A Nassau police spokeswoman declined to comment.
Mamdani, who called for defunding the police in 2020 but repudiated those views during the campaign, will become New York City’s 111th mayor on Jan. 1. He will control the NYPD, the nation’s largest police force, and has promised to keep its headcount at the current 35,000 officers.
Last week, the incumbent police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, agreed to stay on into Mamdani’s tenure.
Mamdani’s plans include dispatching clinicians on certain mental health emergency calls where a police response is deemed unnecessary and abolishing a controversial police unit that has faced allegations of brutality.
New York City and Nassau share a border spanning roughly 15.5 miles, from Little Neck Bay on the North Shore to the Rockaways on the South Shore.
Dora Pekec, a spokeswoman for Mamdani, a Democrat who was elected Nov. 4, didn’t respond to a text message Tuesday evening seeking comment. In the past, Mamdani has said he’ll work with the NYPD to keep the city safe.
Just days after Mamdani was elected, Blakeman announced a marketing campaign to attract new residents, businesses and tourists.
Last month, Blakeman, a Republican, said he and the county police commissioner Patrick Ryder had been planning for a Mamdani mayoralty. The county executive said he was unsure of the extent to which the county police force and the NYPD would collaborate under Mamdani.
“We share very sensitive intelligence back and forth. I’m not sure that they will give us the intelligence, the truthful intelligence, that we have been receiving from NYPD, if he becomes mayor, because he’s very suspicious of police officers, blames them for virtually everything,” Blakeman said at an unrelated news conference on Oct. 29, “and we have information that’s very sensitive. I’m not sure that we want to share it with them, or they’ll share it with us.”
“We are in joint investigations, and the integrity of those investigations may be compromised with a Mamdani administration, so I think it’s a danger to the whole region if he’s elected,” he said.
Nonetheless, President Donald Trump, whom Blakeman supports, said on Friday that he’d “feel very comfortable” in a New York City run by Mamdani, after the two met at the White House.
“Yeah, I would, I really would, especially after the meeting,” Trump said.
Newsday’s Bahar Ostadan and Michael O’Keeffe contributed to this story.
Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.
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