Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Friday reiterated his plan to deploy mental health workers to certain crises after two men were fatally shot by the police in separate incidents in Brooklyn and Manhattan.
The new mayor took office on Jan. 1 and campaigned on a promise to change how the city handles 911 calls for mental health crises. The shootings, which occurred on Thursday within six hours of each other, were the first incidents that Mr. Mamdani has had to respond to where the police used lethal force.
During a news conference, Mr. Mamdani treaded carefully around questions about the shootings, at once recommitting to creating a Department of Community Safety to respond to mental health calls, his signature public safety proposal, without providing additional details on whether — or how — it would have played a role.
“We continue to need an answer to more the than 200,000 mental health calls that the N.Y.P.D. responds to and receives on an annual basis, and I do continue to believe in the importance of having a mental health unit dedicated specially to the mental health crisis,” he said.
In the first shooting, inside NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital, a man who had cut himself with a makeshift knife, then barricaded himself in a blood-spattered room with a patient and a security guard, was killed after the police said he had rushed them with the weapon. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch described the man, who the police said was in his early 60s, as “emotionally disturbed.”
In the second incident, on Sixth Avenue and Bradford Street in the West Village, officers on a foot patrol fatally shot a man after he pointed what they believed was a handgun at them and refused their orders to drop the weapon. The police said they later learned the man, 37, was holding an air pistol.
On Friday, Mr. Mamdani largely parried questions about how he would implement his new city agency, including whether, under his plan, mental health workers would have been deployed to the hospital on Thursday.
“Those are hypotheticals that we will not engage in at this time,” Mr. Mamdani said. “What I will tell you is that I’m appreciative of the work that the N.Y.P.D. continues to do in responding to public safety needs.”
The back-to-back shootings brought a wave of questions for Mr. Mamdani, who was fiercely critical of the police when he was running for assemblyman in Queens, but as a mayoral candidate apologized for his past comments. He retained Commissioner Tisch, who was appointed by his predecessor, Mayor Eric Adams, and praised the department on Monday, after the release of statistics that showed falling crime in the city.
Mr. Mamdani released a statement about the shootings at 9:44 a.m. on Friday, calling them “painful tragedies” and promised to work with Commissioner Tisch to ensure the internal investigation into the shootings would be “as thorough and swift as possible.” Asked why he waited until late morning to say something about the shootings, Mr. Mamdani, who said he was briefed on them Thursday night, said he wanted to be “very intentional” with what he shared with the public.
“I take it very seriously, the language that I use,” he said. “I wanted to make sure that everything that we shared with New Yorkers was the language that we wanted them to know about this.”
He said the officers “were placed in incredibly difficult and dangerous circumstances,” but stopped short of saying the shootings were justified. “The actions they took, they responded swiftly, and I will always emphasize when someone has been killed, the need for a thorough investigation, as is our current process,” Mr. Mamdani said.
Commissioner Tisch, by contrast, said it appeared clear the officers responded appropriately, though she also said the shootings would be investigated.
“There is every indication that their actions were nothing short of heroic,” she said in a post on social media. It is policy for the police department’s force investigation division to investigate fatal encounters between the police and members of the public.
The first shooting occurred at about 5:30 p.m. when officers responded to the hospital in Brooklyn after 911 calls were made that a man inside was cutting himself and was threatening to cut others.
Officers found the man in a room on the eighth floor, where they saw blood on the walls and the door, the police said.
When the man came into the doorway, he showed them the bloody weapon and, over a period of several minutes, refused the officers’ repeated commands that he drop it, the police said. Inside the room was a patient in his 70s and a security guard in his 50s. The man moved toward the police officers who simultaneously fired a Taser and a gun at him.
At 10:53 p.m., more than five hours later, the police officers patrolling in the West Village were approached by the driver of a Dodge who told them that a BMW had just rammed into the car then driven off.
The officers, still on foot, found the BMW stuck in traffic on Sixth Avenue and Bedford Street, the police said. The man, 37, stepped out of the car holding a Sig Sauer air pistol that the officers mistook for a real handgun, the police said. The officers repeatedly told him to drop the pistol, telling him that they wanted to help him, according to footage from a body camera, the police said.
He refused and pointed the weapon at the officers who fired shots at him. He was taken to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 11:17 p.m.
Mr. Mamdani has not said when the civilian-led Department of Community Safety will be formed.
Plans for it have been underway since last year, even before Mr. Mamdani was sworn into office. The New York City Council introduced a bill in December to create the agency, with hopes to vote it in early this year. The measure was largely sponsored by Lincoln Restler, a progressive council member from Brooklyn, and received support from a total of 28 of the council’s 51 members.
In an interview on Friday, Mr. Restler emphasized that while the proposed agency would aim to assist those undergoing mental health crises, it would focus on connecting them with social services and responding to nonviolent situations. The police department would remain the primary agency to respond to more dangerous incidents like the one in Brooklyn on Thursday.
“When a person has a weapon or a potential weapon, and peoples’ lives are at risk, we need the N.Y.P.D. on the scene immediately to keep us all safe,” he said.
Maia Coleman is a reporter for The Times covering the New York Police Department and criminal justice in the New York area.
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