When Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced that he was creating an office to overhaul New York City’s policing of mentally ill people, one part of his plan quietly sparked a behind-the-scenes uproar.
For 25 years, through the terms of three mayors, the Office to Combat Domestic Violence oversaw the city’s domestic violence prevention efforts and retained a relatively direct line to the mayor.
But in creating the Office of Community Safety, Mr. Mamdani quietly pushed the domestic violence office down the City Hall hierarchy.
Under the mayor’s restructuring, the office will now be cast as one of four under the umbrella of the Division of Neighborhood Safety. The division, in turn, will exist as one of three within the Office of Community Safety — a move that some advocates view as a clear if unintentional message that the office’s mission has become a lesser imperative.
Survivors of domestic violence, as well as the professionals who work with them, plan to hold a news conference this week denouncing the mayor’s decision. They have also been collecting signatures for a letter-writing campaign protesting the move.
“Survivor groups were not invited to the table when the proposal to downgrade ENDGBV was initiated,” reads one letter, referring to the office’s full title, the Mayor’s Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence. “That exclusion is a re-enactment of the silencing survivors have already lived through.”
Jane Manning, the director of Women’s Equal Justice, a nonprofit that serves survivors of sexual assault, contended that the mayor’s decision would have a cascading effect. Any loss of prestige could jeopardize the office’s ability to garner funding or collaboration from organizations outside city government, she said.
“The gender-based violence prevention community is a very diverse community with a variety of opinions on a lot of subjects, but we are basically unanimous in the view that this downgrade to ENDGBV is a terrible idea,” Ms. Manning said. “The entire community is angry about it. Not mildly concerned, but appalled and angry.”
Sam Raskin, a spokesman for the mayor, said in a statement that while “titles and reporting lines may change,” the “office’s authority, mission and access to senior leadership remain intact.”
He argued the new structure would allow for “more alignment and better coordination across systems.” And he said the administration “recognizes advocates’ concerns and is committed to engaging closely with stakeholders during this transition.”
Jeehae Fischer, the executive director of the Korean American Family Service Center, said that the notion of housing domestic violence prevention alongside other anti-crime efforts makes sense.
“I know it’s a huge change, but I think we also have to give them a grace period,” said Ms. Fischer, whose organization works with survivors of both domestic violence and hate crime.
Ms. Fischer, who was connected to The New York Times by the mayor’s office, said she was “very excited for the change,” but acknowledged that many of her colleagues are concerned because so much of the office’s new structure remains unknown.
“The fear really comes from uncertainty,” Ms. Fischer said. “We don’t know what it looks like yet.”
The office’s existing commissioner, Saloni Sethi, will lose her title and become an executive director. As a commissioner, she oversaw 80 people across six locations, including six executive directors and four deputy commissioners. It remains unclear what will become of her staff’s existing titles and the office’s organizational structure.
“That is the uncertainty our staff are living with,” Ms. Sethi said in an interview.
Ms. Sethi declined to say when she first learned the office would be reorganized, but a person familiar with the events said the mayor’s office only briefed officials in her office in a phone call the night before Mr. Mamdani announced the Office for Community Safety.
Stephanie Woodbine, who serves on the office’s advisory council, was taken aback.
“As a survivor,” she said, “I don’t want our concerns to be waylaid. I don’t want them to be minimized.”
Advocates said that they found the news all the more disheartening because they had already had to push to get Mr. Mamdani, when he was mayor-elect, to appoint someone from the domestic violence sphere to his transition team.
The new structure suggests that City Hall does not appreciate the difference between “safety in public” and “safety behind closed doors,” Madeline Garcia Bigelow, the founder and managing director of the Domestic Violence Project at the Urban Justice Center, said.
She lamented the additional “multiple layers of bureaucracy” that she and her peers will now have to fight through.
Domestic violence remains a scourge in New York City and is considered a major contributing factor to homicides.
As overall crime numbers in the city have trended downward in recent years, the domestic violence numbers have remained stubbornly high.
Between 2015 and 2024, there were 563 domestic violence homicide incidents across the city, involving 611 victims, according to a 2025 city report. That amounted to 17 percent of all homicides.
The office’s origins trace to 1994, when Rudolph W. Giuliani created the Mayor’s Commission to Combat Family Violence through an executive order. In 2001, voters made the office permanent through a ballot measure, renaming it the Office to Combat Domestic Violence.
Ms. Sethi said she was hopeful that her staff’s inclusion in the mayor’s new Office of Community Safety could help elevate its work, given the office’s centrality to Mr. Mamdani’s campaign.
“One of the top lines of the Mamdani administration is community safety,” she said. “And so our issue, our providers, our survivors, our work, gets to be part of that conversation in a very different way.”
Hurubie Meko is a Times reporter covering criminal justice in New York, with a focus on the Manhattan district attorney’s office and state courts.
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