Can a new dog learn old tricks? Surging mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani hoped so when he announced his ambitious public safety plan last Tuesday, April 1. His vision centers around establishing a new branch of New York City government called the Department of Community Safety, which would enlist civilian social services to handle certain responsibilities — like responding to mental health calls — currently tasked to the NYPD.
On the surface, Mamdani’s game plan seems rooted in the idealism, novelty and the democratic socialist principles fueling his campaign. Yet the Queens assemblyman says “the core parts of this as an idea is to ensure that it is actually implementable.”
The department would not so much invent new policies as it would bolster existing community-based initiatives like the NYPD’s B-HEARD program for mental health calls and the Crisis Management System for gun violence prevention.
“There has been an allergy on behalf of politicians to acknowledge anything that has worked in previous or current administrations,” said Mamdani in a phone interview. “Our approach is to take that which has worked and scale it up to a level commensurate with the crisis and to bring evidence proven approaches that have [been] proven successful elsewhere across the country.
“Some of the failures that we’re seeing in city government today is also a failure to expand [what] is already successful [and] a failure to understand that a crisis is occurring across the five boroughs. Therefore a response to it needs to also occur across the five boroughs.”
He points to how the city’s Crisis Management System reduced shootings across program areas by roughly 40% on average. So why does the network, which deploys violence interrupters to de-escalate conflicts before they become shootings, only operate in 28 of the city’s 78 precincts, he wonders.
Mamdani’s Department of Community Safety would increase Crisis Management System funding by 275%, including by 50% in neighborhoods most impacted by gun violence.
Clubhouses like the seven decade-plus old Fountain House similarly provide Mamdani existing solutions for mental healthcare in his Department of Community Safety plan. Yet Rikers Island is currently the biggest psychiatric facility in the city despite costing almost $500,000 to detain a one person each year, mused Mamdani during his announcement last Tuesday. On the other hand, $4,000 can place an individual with serious mental illness in Fountain House where he or she can receive healthcare and employment.
The Department of Community Safety would also place mental health specialist teams across 100 different subway stations and convert abandoned MTA retail units into clinics. The plan draws from national models across the country like the CAHOOTS program, which operated for roughly 35 years in Oregon without a serious injury or death. Mamdani says the goal will be to make New Yorkers feel safer on the subway platform, where he believes the anxiety is the highest, rather than at the turnstile, where national guardsmen were deployed last year.
But the City of Eugene discontinued CAHOOTS services this week due to funding constraints (programming will continue in Springfield, Ore.).
And Mamdani’s Department of Community Safety comes with a $1 billion price-tag, $600 million of which will come from existing city money. Mamdani says the other $400 million will need to come from more efficient spending in city government and taxing the wealthiest New Yorkers.
Notably, the money will not come from reducing the NYPD budget despite recent comments by Mayor Eric Adams calling the assemblymember “Defund the Police Mamdani” when asked about the public safety plan.
“All of a sudden he wants to talk about more community-based policing, something that many of you know, I cut my teeth on this — they’re reinventing the wheel,” Adams said during a press briefing. “Let’s look at the facts. Numbers are down. We’re getting ready to do a report tomorrow on our outcomes. So I don’t know his definition of failing the police. The job of the police is to keep us safe. That’s the job of the police. And so when you do an analysis, all of these candidates that are talking about ‘our city is in chaos, our city is not safe,’ where are they getting the stats from?”
Mamdani argues the Department of Community Safety would allow law enforcement to focus on solving major index crimes rather than busy themselves with responsibilities they are not suited for. He points to the NYPD solving just 39% of crimes and taking 20% longer to respond, blaming the reliance on officers to deal with the city’s “frayed social safety net.”
Additionally, the assemblymember believes pulling police from patrolling the subways and tackling mental health crises will reduce overtime-related burnout and the on-going attrition rate among line-level cops. Mamdani says his findings stem from speaking to law enforcement about “a frustration with just how much is asked of police officers.”
Most polls show Mamdani solidly in second place after former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the democratic primary. He will not face Mayor Adams, who will seek reelection as an independent. Still , Mamdani pointed back to the mayor, ensuring New Yorkers they would not need to choose “between safety and justice” during a previous campaign, particularly in regards to developing trust among undocumented New Yorkers to come forward as witnesses and victims during current federal crackdowns.
“In order to deliver safety, you must also deliver justice,” said Mamdani. “And in order to win the trust of the public, you must show that these two things are interlinked…our current approach has been fraying each and every day, and it is something we can see borne out in the statistics [and] in our desire for police to fulfill each and every responsibility that has been created by failures of the social safety net and also by our inability to actually respond to these specific incidents of violence in a manner that has proven to be successful.”
Tandy Lau is a Report for America corps member who writes about public safety for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep him writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.