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........

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