Last week, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced he was taking the first step toward delivering on a vital campaign promise: establishing a new way for the city to respond to mental-health distress calls. It was a big moment but not exactly what he’d hoped to deliver when running for mayor last year.

Mamdani had vowed to create a Department of Community Safety, a city agency that would operate separately from the NYPD and handle 911 calls that don’t involve crimes. The idea was straightforward and popular: stop sending armed police to handle situations that could be de-escalated with mental-health professionals. The police killing of Win Rozario, a 19-year-old Queens man, and the shooting of 22-year-old Jabez Chakraborty, who was experiencing schizophrenia and wielding a knife — his family explicitly did not want the officers to shoot — crystallized the need for the city to overhaul how these calls are answered. Mamdani aimed to fund the new department with $1.1 billion reallocated from existing NYPD money.

That’s not quite what’s happening. Instead of a new department, which would need City Council approval, Mamdani is creating something called the Mayoral Office of Community Safety via executive order. It will be overseen by Renita Francois, the inaugural deputy mayor for community safety, and its budget is a modest $260 million. Francois will supervise and potentially bolster several existing city programs, including B-Heard, which dispatches mental-health experts and emergency responders in lieu of police to respond to certain crisis calls. Established by former mayor Bill de Blasio in 2021, that program was mostly ignored and underfunded by his successor, Eric Adams.

Mamdani has vowed that the office will expand, and most leftist politicians and criminal-justice reformers praised his announcement. It’s still less than three months into the mayor’s first term, and they are understandably willing to give the 34-year-old democratic socialist time to meet a lofty campaign goal. Just as he can’t suddenly make all buses free or fund an entire universal child-care program, establishing a full-fledged community-safety operation will take more than a year.

But it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility for Mamdani to create a stand-alone department. That’s what many advocates wanted since it would be more permanent; a future mayor, by fiat, can sign a new order and wipe out the Mayoral Office of Community Safety, but it would be far harder to do that with an agency created through City Council legislation.

So why didn’t that happen? A progressive ally in the City Council, Lincoln Restler, introduced a bill to establish the new department in December. Co-sponsors signed on immediately, technically amounting to a majority. But it wasn’t a strong majority — when bills pass the City Council, lawmakers usually want much more wiggle room — and only two more members have joined up since. This is not enough to require a hearing, which would be the first step toward a vote, though City Council Speaker Julie Menin could certainly schedule one.

And there was the rub: Mamdani’s team reportedly didn’t think Menin would advance the legislation. Hence, an executive order.

Menin’s office cited the potential costs of establishing a new agency given that the city is trying to close a budget gap of at least $5 billion. Of course, if funds were merely being reallocated from existing NYPD programs, the cost should not have been a tremendous issue.

Menin’s resistance — and Mamdani’s unwillingness to engage in a lengthy political fight — underscored one of the fresh overlooked dynamics of Mamdani’s young mayoralty. Much of the socialist left has aimed its ire at Governor Kathy Hochul, drowning her out with chants of “Tax the rich” as she balks at hiking taxes on millionaires and corporations. But it’s Menin who is actually digging in against Mamdani. Menin is a relatively moderate Upper East Sider who is married to Bruce Menin, a partner and co-founder of Crescent Heights, a real-estate company with a national portfolio. Unlike Hochul, she did not endorse Mamdani in the general election. She made a friendly appearance on the radio show of Sid Rosenberg, the fiery, Islamophobic conservative who has crusaded against the mayor. (Menin eventually denounced Rosenberg after he called Mamdani a “jihadist” and a “cockroach.”) She is ambitious and may run for mayor herself one day.

Along with Jessica Tisch, Mamdani’s much more conservative NYPD commissioner (she praised the new community-safety office in a statement but notably did not attend Mamdani’s press conference), Menin has formed what appears to be a bulwark against the democratic socialism radiating from City Hall. Tisch is a billionaire, Menin is wealthy herself, and both are favored by the city’s business class, which deeply resents losing the mayoral race last year. 2025 was a startling success for Mamdani, but Menin’s ascension to Council Speaker was a political failure for him that he is now beginning to grasp more fully. When de Blasio took office in 2013, he helped organize an effort to elect a sympathetic speaker, Melissa Mark-Viverito. But Mamdani made only a belated attempt to boost a progressive alternative to Menin. His inexperienced political team simply wasn’t good enough in the back room, and Menin secured the votes for Speaker in record time. For now, she controls a sizable block of moderate Democratic and Republican lawmakers who are prepared to battle back against Mamdani.

Soon, Mamdani and Menin will have to hash out a municipal budget. The two may still work together with relatively little friction; unlike past mayors and speakers, they have declined to sharply criticize each other in public. How long that lasts, however, is an open question. Menin’s Upper East Side base didn’t vote for Mamdani, and her donors don’t care for him. She’s an Israel hawk, and he’s pro-Palestine. She is plenty incentivized to oppose him, especially as she looks toward 2029, when she’s term-limited. Mamdani has his own leverage too with his ability to pack stadiums, light up social media, and excite the youth. If his base gets restive, he may be more inclined toward a fight. We’ll see how long it takes for these two very different Democrats to collide.

Sign Up for the Intelligencer Newsletter

By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice and to receive email correspondence from us.

© Daily Intelligencer