The Big Apple can’t keep this doctor away. Mayor Zohran Mamdani appointed Dr. Ayesha Delany-Brumsey as the city’s first-ever Office of Community Safety commissioner last Tuesday, May 5. In a phone interview, she expressed excitement about employing her nearly two decades of experience in mental health care and criminal justice reform toward heading the new agency.
“My work from the beginning has really focused on [improving] health outcomes for all communities, but with a particular emphasis on communities of color,” said Delany-Brumsey. “A lot of my work in grad school was research on health equity … [and] that work took me on a trajectory in my career to think about how the different systems we interact with, particularly the criminal justice [and] criminal legal system, can have an impact on the health and well-being of the people and the communities that it’s interacting with.
“That is where I started my career and I’ve transitioned into a more significant focus on thinking about crisis systems and looking upstream and what happens at the point of a 911 call.”
Delany-Brumsey comes most recently from the Office of Behavioral Health at New York City Health + Hospitals as senior advisor and director of community-based services. There, she oversaw part of the city’s mental health response pilot, B-HEARD, which Mamdani pledged to reform through his Office of Community Safety proposal. The program diverts emergency mental health calls from police to unarmed medical professionals who are trained to de-escalate crises and provide informed health assessments.
In her new role, Delany-Brumsey will continue working with the pilot and coordinate between her current employers and the Fire Department of New York (FDNY), whose paramedics serve as B-HEARD first responders with H+H clinicians. The program started roughly a year after visiting Black Chicago resident Daniel Prude died in Rochester after a mental health response in 2020, and was largely assigned catchment areas in majority Black and Brown neighborhoods like Harlem.
A NYC Comptroller audit published last year found the NYPD still responded to many calls potentially eligible for a B-HEARD team (mental health responses involving weapons or imminent danger do not qualify and receive “traditional” police and ambulance deployment). Delany-Brumsey said working with the FDNY and H+H to build a strong foundation plays a key role in ensuring the pilot reaches “as many New Yorkers as it should.”
Long-term, Delany-Brumsey wants to expand B-HEARD, not just geographically, but in other types of calls teams can respond to. She pointed to how similar programs tackle the likes of noise complaints and quality of life requests.
To be clear, the Office of Community Safety exists beyond just B-HEARD and mental health response. It now oversees several smaller agencies, including the Office to Prevent Gun Violence, Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence, and Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes. “All of that work is essential work to ensuring safety for New Yorkers,” said Delany-Brumsey. “B-HEARD is a key component, but it’s not the only thing that we’re going to be working on.”
Mamdani released his Department of Community Safety plan on April 1 last year during his mayoral run, proposing a “smart on safety” approach by addressing crime’s root causes and focusing the NYPD on investigating serious crimes. His blueprint delineates ambitions for retooling B-HEARD and bolstering the city’s Crisis Management System to prevent gun violence, among other non-police investments in public safety and health.
The campaign promise was no April Fool’s joke — this March, Mamdani signed an executive order to establish the Office of Community Safety after complications with a City Council bill to form the full-fledged department. He also appointed Renita Francois as deputy mayor of community safety, whom Delany-Brumsey reports directly to.
“With the Office of Community Safety, we are developing a coordinated, citywide strategy that ensures every situation gets the right response — not a one-size-fits-all approach,” said Mamdani in a statement. “I’m confident Dr. Delany-Brumsey will lead the Office of Community Safety with both deep expertise in public health-based practices and deep commitment to community-led solutions.”
“Dr. Delany-Brumsey will help us strengthen how the city responds — deploying the appropriate personnel and resources in every situation and delivering a more holistic, effective approach to safety across the five boroughs,” added Francois in a statement.
Lengthy resumé
Delany-Brumsey is no stranger to inaugural roles — she was the first chief strategic growth officer at Fountain House. That experience will come in handy, especially since the mental health nonprofit, and the “peer clubhouse” model it pioneered, feature heavily in the Mamdani’s Department for Community Safety proposal as a cheaper, more humane alternative to incarceration or forced hospitalization. Fountain House CEO Ken Zimmerman pointed to her time developing a scaling strategy for the seven-decade old organization to expand in the state and across the country.
“What’s exciting to us about Ayesha’s appointment is — and I think it’s reflected in what the mayor’s ambitions are for this office — is to recognize the proactive and preventive nature of community mental health,” said Zimmerman. “There is a public health frame to this effort, and this is where clubhouses offer such a critical opportunity. We know that every individual with serious mental illness, unsheltered or not, needs access to sustained and meaningful care [and] access to appropriate long-term housing, but also needs connection to community and belonging.
“Those three ingredients feel like what that Office of Community Safety is designed to advance citywide. And because Ayesha’s experience bridges all of those things, I think it bodes exceedingly well in terms of both vision [and] the practical experience that she brings to bear.”
In addition to her Fountain House and H+H experience, Delany-Brumsey also worked previously at the NYC Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, Council of State Governments Justice Center, and Vera Institute of Justice. Her PhD in clinical psychology from UCLA focused on health equity research.
Last year, Mamdani mentioned “an allergy on behalf of politicians to acknowledge anything that has worked in previous or current administrations” when talking about his proposal. The Office of Community Safety will not make the same mistake. Delany-Brumsey plans on “taking a moment to step back” during her upcoming first days as commissioner, despite her enthusiasm.
“I’m going to look with our agency partners at this portfolio of community safety and focus on crisis response and … the places where New York City is strong, because we do have good work that’s already going on,” she said. “But there [are] also places where there are gaps, so I’m looking forward to working with our agency partners, with our community advocacy partners, [and] our service provider partners, to get a good landscape of that and use that to drive the work that we’ll be doing going forward.”
Author’s Note: A previous headline abbreviated the Office of Community Safety as “DCS,” referring to the Department of Community Safety.
