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Late last week, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced the creation of a new Office of Community Safety.
The news was presented as the fulfillment of a key campaign promise: the creation of a full Department of Community Safety, which would, among other things, civilianize mental-health crisis response by replacing police responders with trained mental-health professionals.
On the campaign trail, Mamdani framed this move as a way to provide relief to an overburdened NYPD. But mental-health calls have not constituted a significant share of the department’s workload — fewer than 150,000 of the several million calls for service assigned to the police last year were related to mental health. All Mamdani has really done is create a new office within City Hall that will oversee, and presumably expand, already-existing programs.
This is hardly a revolutionary development, and it will do little to curb the real demands on New York City’s sworn officers.
Nevertheless, the mayor’s allies are doing their best to play up the announcement, focusing in particular on the mental-health response component.
“We believe any new approach must recognize that mental health professionals and peer advocates are best positioned to respond to mental health crises,” New York Civil Liberties Union executive director Donna Lieberman said. “We have seen the dangers of police responses to mental health crises too many times.”
Such assertions are a reminder that Mamdani’s community safety plan was always based in a critical view of the NYPD. The plan’s purpose was to sideline a department that, until recently, Mamdani wanted to defund and dismantle.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the New York Post
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Rafael Mangual is the Nick Ohnell Fellow and head of research for the Policing and Public Safety Initiative at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. He is also the author of Criminal (In)Justice: What the Push for Decarceration and Depolicing Gets Wrong and Who It Hurts Most.
