NYC Mayor Mamdani launches community safety office, inching forward a campaign promise

NEW YORK (AP) — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Thursday unveiled a new office dedicated to community safety, a tentative first step toward fulfilling a key campaign pledge to reduce the role of police in responding to mental health emergencies.

Mamdani initially envisioned a $1 billion-per-year agency that would dispatch civilian workers, instead of police, in non-criminal emergencies. His initial proposal is far more modest, though, launching with only two staff members and few immediate plans to shift the city’s approach to 911 calls.

It will soon scale up, eventually “ushering in a new era for our city’s crisis response,” Mamdani said, as he signed the executive order at City Hall flanked by criminal justice advocates.

“Officers have to handle 200,000 mental health calls a year,” the Democratic mayor said. “That is not a system that is working. Today marks the end of it.”

For now, he said his administration will look to expand funding and support for an existing program, B-HEARD, which dispatches mental health workers in response to 911 calls for people in emotional distress.

That program, started in 2021, is one of several initiatives of its kind that have spread across the country in recent years. It has languished in New York, in part due to lack of funding and support, a recent audit found.

“We are going to find out,” Mamdani said Thursday, “what it looks like when someone is willing to invest, not just financially, but also politically in this method of response.”

Backers of Mamdani’s plan say police often escalate confrontations with people in emotional distress, who would be better served by trained mental health professionals.

The mayor has cited the recent police shooting of a Queens man, Jabez Chakraborty, whose family called 911 because he was acting erratically, as an example of an encounter that would benefit from mental health worker. The department said Chakraborty lunged at them with a knife.

Critics of Mamdani accuse him of downplaying the complexities of the city’s vast dispatch system while understating the number of calls that require a police response.

At a City Council hearing Wednesday, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch estimated that about 2% of calls for service would be removed from the department’s jurisdiction. “You need to send the police when there’s a call for a violent person,” she said.

The creation of a community safety agency was a core campaign promise for Mamdani, who broke with his opponents by refusing to call for an expansion of the police department.

The Office of Community Safety will also house existing city programs to reduce shootings through violence interrupters, to combat hate crimes and to provide services to victims of sexual assault, among others.

It will be led by Renita Francois, who previously oversaw former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to reduce violence in public housing.

Mamdani delivered the announcement surrounded by supporters and elected officials, who hailed the plan and urged patience from New Yorkers.

“There will be some mistakes,” warned Public Advocate Jumaane Williams. “That happens in the police department, too.”