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Mamdani’s Office of Community Safety still leaves NYPD on the hook for the city’s most dangerous mental-health calls 

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........

© New York Post