Renita Francois calls her recent appointment as deputy mayor of community safety a “homecoming,” but her return to city politics remains far from the same old song and dance. The former de Blasio administration staffer will now shape and deliver Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s ambitious campaign pledge to shift the city away from defaulting to police on issues like mental health calls and gun violence prevention through the city’s Office of Community Safety, which the mayor hopes to make a full department.
“I was working on neighborhood safety in NYCHA communities in the de Blasio administration for seven years,” said Francois over the phone. “I’ve been a frontline social service worker working on Section 8 programs [and] I’ve been in Brooklyn family court working with the youth. I’m really excited to bring all that experience full circle here to help build a long-lasting and sustainable vision for community safety for the city.”
What exactly would Zohran Mamdani’s Department of Community Safety do?
Surging mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani hoped so when he announced his ambitious public safety plan last Tuesday, April 1.
On March 19, Mamdani handpicked Francois, the former executive director of the Mayor’s Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety under de Blasio, while establishing the Office of Community Safety. She becomes the administration’s first Black deputy mayor after most recently serving as chief strategy officer and chief program officer at the nonprofit Beyond Impact. A commissioner who directly answers to Francois will lead the Office of Community Safety, which stems from Mamdani’s comprehensive Department of Community Safety plan that was unveiled last spring.
Disability rights advocates have long criticized the city’s B-HEARD pilot for deploying police to nonviolent mental health calls, given that the program exists to divert those calls to civilian responders. Mamdani’s Department of Community Safety plan promises to retool the initiative and fashion it after Oregon’s CAHOOTS, a national model that has a three-decade track record without a single recorded death or serious injury.
The plan also lauds the city’s Crisis Management System (CMS) and looks to financially bolster the network of civilian-led gun violence prevention organizations, which deploy rehabilitated ex-gang members and other trusted community leaders to intervene in potentially deadly feuds and provide mentorship to at-risk youth. Research shows that this work significantly decreases shootings in key hotspots.
Earlier this year, several CMS organizations expressed excitement over Mamdani’s vision and recalled productive conversations. Francois said there’s definitely a seat at the table for these groups, which almost exclusively operate in Black and Brown communities.
“CMS organizations — those are my folks,” she said. “[Through] my time spent in the Office of Neighborhood Safety, I’ve gotten to know many of them very well and I would say that I count them amongst the people who have supported me in this position and the development of the office.”
The Mamdani administration faces a reality check, however. While a bill introduced by allied Councilmember Lincoln Restler currently exists to create a Department of Community Safety, the City Council remains reluctant to pass the legislation. Mamdani took matters into his own hands with an executive order to establish the $260 million Mayor’s Office of Community Safety, which could be undone by his successor, rather than his original $1.1 billion standalone department.
“Our administration will not wait for change, we will build it,” said Mamdani in a statement. “With the creation of the Office of Community Safety and the appointment of Renita Francois as Deputy Mayor, we are taking a decisive step toward a city where everyone, in every neighborhood, can live free from violence.”
As the Office of Community Safety attempts to rectify former Mayor Eric Adams’s more heavy-handed public safety approach and a broad historical reliance on police and prisons, similar issues continue to plague New York City four months into Mamdani’s tenure. Two people — Barry Cozart and John Price — recently died on Rikers Island and NYPD officers shot Queens man Jabez Chakraborty in January after a mental health call. Mamdani sees his Department of Community Safety as a solution by diverting people from city jails and mental health calls away from armed police.
With civilians handling matters like mental health and gun violence prevention, the mayor maintains that the NYPD can focus on investigating and solving serious felonies and upping clearance rates. He recalled speaking with police last year about their frustrations with the “ever-intensifying reliance on them to deal with our frayed social safety net and how it prevents them from doing their actual jobs.”
For the Mamdani administration, bringing the Department of Community Safety plan to life is a massive undertaking even with full cooperation from the City Council, but it is not an unprecedented one, said Francois. For example, Rudy Giuliani’s executive order initially established NYC Emergency Management as a Mayor’s Office before later developing it into a full-fledged independent agency.
Under Mamdani’s executive order, several existing offices and programs will move under the Department of Community Safety and split between three divisions. B-HEARD now calls the Division of Community Mental Health home. The Office to Prevent Gun Violence, Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence, and Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes will all fall under the Division of Neighborhood Safety. All with have their own contracts and previous dealings.
“We want to build this with intention, and for the long haul, and that means not hastily springing up a department without taking the proper steps to build the infrastructure necessary,” said Francois. “That infrastructure includes things like procurement … there’s all these other technical bureaucratic things that happen under departments. We want to make sure that we are building that capacity for the folks who are doing the actual frontline work to be [successful and sustainable].”
Community safety offices are not a new concept. Francois and Mayor’s Office staffers previously examined existing agencies in other cities. For example, Richmond, Calif., established an Office of Neighborhood Safety in 2007 and just boasted an all-time low murder rate. Durham, N.C., created a Community Safety Department in 2021 and now offers a robust alternative mental health response program.
Community justice spans beyond pedagogy for Francois, who hails from South Central Los Angeles and points to her time living in Brooklyn neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant and Canarsie. She credits her mother, a postal worker, for navigating her children “through the epidemics of gun, drug and gang violence, poverty, civil unrest, and disparate health outcomes,” and her grandmother, “a natural-born odds-beater from the deep south of Louisiana.”
“I feel so connected to the people of New York, especially those who come from communities that experience distress in all forms,” said Francois. “Whether that be economic, threats to safety, [or] health vulnerabilities, I come from that, so when I approach this work, it’s deeply personal for me. This is not something I read and studied about … it’s something that I lived and experienced.”
She jokes about the hackneyed concept of giving “voice to the voiceless.” Folks are far from voiceless, in Francois’s experience, when providing input on their communities needs and wants. Instead, she plans on amplifying them.
“I hope people see the Department of Community Safety as the ‘people’s department,’” she said. “This is a place for people to come to us to help us understand how government can best support them, and for us to figure out the best, most innovative ways for us to respond. We don’t have to do a thing just because we’ve done a thing — we can pivot, grow, learn, [and] evolve.
“For this administration, we talk a lot about it being a new era and a new day. It’s a new era on safety as well. We will not be limited by the fears of the past. We’re going boldly into the future.”