As he was gaining popularity on the mayoral campaign trail last year, Zohran Mamdani turned to one of New York’s most intractable crises: how to respond to 911 calls concerning people who are mentally unstable.
Mr. Mamdani believed that the mayor at the time, Eric Adams, was relying too heavily on police officers using draconian tactics to address these calls, which involve New Yorkers experiencing mental health emergencies both in their own homes and on city streets. In some extreme instances, responding officers have shot people, including when a 19-year-old man, Win Rozario, was killed in his Queens home two years ago after calling 911 because he was in distress.
So Mr. Mamdani offered a counterproposal — the creation of a Department of Community Safety, fueled by a $1.1 billion budget, to overhaul the city’s response to such instances and limit the role of police officers in answering 911 calls that are not about crimes.
Now, in his third month in office, Mr. Mamdani has settled on a pared-down version of his ambitious campaign pledge. On Thursday, he plans to sign an executive order that creates a Mayoral Office of Community Safety, rather than a full-fledged city agency. And he will announce that Renita Francois, a former city official, will lead the office as deputy mayor for community safety.
Ms. Francois, who worked at the Mayor’s Office for Criminal Justice under former Mayor Bill de Blasio and is now at a nonprofit, will be Mr. Mamdani’s first Black deputy mayor, following some criticism about the lack of diversity in the upper ranks of his administration. She will report directly to Mr. Mamdani.
A mayoral office is an easier entity to create than an agency, but one that a future mayor could unilaterally undo unless its existence is codified into law. In addition to Ms. Francois, the office will start with just one other staff member, a commissioner who has yet to be named.
Mr. Mamdani’s plans were shared by two people familiar with them, who were granted anonymity to freely discuss them.
The office will begin with roughly $260 million in funding moved from existing programs, one of the people said, meaning that Mr. Mamdani has not yet committed to spending any new money on the effort.
The person said the mayor would consider increasing funding in the coming months, but as he contends with closing a multi-billion-dollar budget deficit, the endeavor is unlikely to receive the full amount he pledged during his campaign.
Taken together, the moves suggest that Mr. Mamdani is embracing a cautious approach to police reform. Several City Council members and criminal justice reform advocates expressed concern about the limits of his plan.
As the political movement he belongs to grapples with how to campaign on policing issues, Mr. Mamdani has nodded to the status quo around criminal justice in other ways. He retained his predecessor’s police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, and has so far failed to fulfill a vow to eliminate the Police Department’s Strategic Response Group, a unit deployed to protests that has been sued for its aggressive tactics.
The executive order creating the Office of Community Safety, which was obtained by The New York Times, authorizes it to oversee five existing city programs that focus on mental health; domestic and gun violence; and hate crimes.
Mr. Mamdani’s chief of staff, Elle Bisgaard-Church, described the somewhat limited rollout as the first step in what will eventually be a robust retooling of how police officers respond to 911 calls.
In an interview, Ms. Bisgaard-Church said the Department of Community Safety was one of Mr. Mamdani’s most popular campaign proposals. The appointment of a deputy mayor to lead the office “reflects the seriousness” of his desire to fulfill his promise, she said.
“It felt extremely important to us, running a bold, left campaign, to have an affirmative vision around safety,” she said. “Too often the left has been unable to articulate a concrete vision.”
In his initial proposal, Mr. Mamdani called for a system to divert certain 911 calls from police officers to response teams with mental health expertise. He also said the police and outreach teams should no longer coordinate when responding to some of those calls, something he began reconsidering in recent public statements.
“We know that police responding to people in psychiatric distress alone cannot be the answer,” Ms. Bisgaard-Church said. “The goal is not to eliminate collaboration, but to ensure that response includes properly trained and equipped specialists.”
An examination of 911 data by the Vera Institute, which opposes mass incarceration, found that more than one million calls assigned to the Police Department last year “involved a range of social and health-related issues that may be appropriate for alternative response.”
One recent case underscored the problem Mr. Mamdani is trying to address. In January, the police responded to a 911 call to the home of Jabez Chakraborty, a 22-year-old with schizophrenia who was wielding a knife. The officers shot Mr. Chakraborty several times before taking him to a hospital. He was charged with assault and handcuffed to a bed as he recovered.
Mr. Mamdani visited Mr. Chakraborty in the hospital and subsequently said the episode highlighted the need for a different approach to public safety.
Dana Rachlin, co-founder of We Build the Block, a public safety group based in Brooklyn, said the office must create a 24-hour civilian response system that is integrated into the existing 911 and 311 infrastructure.
“We wait for crises to become a crime,” Ms. Rachlin said, “then punish people for collapsing” under the system.
Leading City Hall officials have spent the past several months working behind the scenes to figure out how to build the new entity. They discussed trying to create an agency through an amendment to the City Charter, but decided that would be too difficult to pull off, according to one person familiar with the talks.
The mayor’s aides also decided against pursuing a new agency through legislation, the person said, because they thought Julie Menin, the City Council speaker and a more moderate Democrat than Mr. Mamdani, would not have advanced it.
A bill to establish such a department, pending in the City Council, has 28 sponsors — not enough to automatically qualify for a hearing, should Ms. Menin opt not to schedule one.
Rendy Desamours, a spokesman for Ms. Menin, said in a statement that the speaker “supports lessening the reliance on officers to respond to mental health calls” but has concerns about the mayor’s approach, “given the city’s current financial challenges.”
Others also raised questions about how the office is set to be structured.
Lincoln Restler, a councilman from Brooklyn who is the lead sponsor of the legislation, said the only way to ensure that the entity is a “permanent component of city government” is to enshrine it into law as a full city agency.
Alex S. Vitale, coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, has advocated for years for the creation of a Department of Community Safety. He supports the decision to hire a deputy mayor, but expressed concern that the office may have less standing than an agency would.
“My concern is if we create a mayor’s office, that might strengthen the hand of the City Council to say, well you don’t really need a department, you’ve got a mayor’s office and that’s good enough,” Mr. Vitale said.
But Tiffany Cabán, a councilwoman from Queens and former public defender, said the Mamdani administration had been “thoughtful” about creating the office and said she appreciated the slower approach.
“You have to make sure that they are fully staffed, that their policies are strong, that they’re collecting good data and delivering the outcomes that New Yorkers desperately need,” Ms. Cabán said.
The new office will, in some ways, replace an underutilized city program known as the Behavioral Health Emergency Assistance Response Division, or B-Heard. The program dispatches emergency responders and mental health experts instead of police officers to respond to people in crisis.
Created in 2021 under Mr. de Blasio, B-Heard is broadly seen as ineffective and underfunded — criticisms laid out in an audit last year by Brad Lander, the former city comptroller.
One former city official, Brian Stettin, who worked on issues surrounding mental health for Mr. Adams, acknowledged problems with B-Heard but questioned the new mayor’s approach.
In an academic article and an interview, he argued that Mr. Mamdani should try to improve existing city programs rather than start new ones, and that he should value the role the police play in responding to crises.
“They buy into this absurd idea that you can respond to a majority of these calls with no police at all,” Mr. Stettin said, adding: “I have not heard enough from them suggesting they understand the need to teach police and clinical professionals to work together.”
A Police Department spokeswoman declined to comment on the mayor’s plans for the new office.
Responding to criticism of the mayor’s approach, Ms. Bisgaard-Church said the new office aimed to “end the revolving door that so many New Yorkers experience or observe, from hospital rooms back to the streets or our subway platforms.”
She added: “It’s not just inhumane, it’s ineffective and it’s worse for everyone.”
Dana Rubinstein contributed reporting.
Sally Goldenberg is a Times reporter covering New York City politics and government.
The post After Vowing to Overhaul 911 Response, Mamdani Takes Cautious First Step appeared first on New York Times.
