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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 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.

Advocates of crisis response argue that police often use force unnecessarily during mental-health incidents — which, in their view, reveals the inadequacies of responding officers, as opposed to the inherent dangers of such calls. Thus, the city would be better off sending trained mental-health professionals to handle mental-health crises.

The Legal Aid Society, for example, asserted in a statement that “thousands of New Yorkers experiencing the crises of homelessness, mental health challenges, and substance misuse … are met with force from New York City Police Department officers that oftentimes leads to avoidable arrests or, in dire cases, injury or death.”

Replacing cops with mental-health professionals is easier said than done, however.

Where does the mayor plan to find a workforce of trained, credentialed mental-health professionals willing to respond 24/7, including holidays, for a municipal salary? Just what does the mayor mean by “mental-health professionals,” anyway? Social workers? Psychologists? Will the city be training them? If so, what will that training look like? How much will it cost? And how will the city evaluate their performance?

Perhaps the answers lie in the programs Mamdani has held up as examples. One is a small pilot program called B-HEARD, which the new Office for Community Safety will oversee.

But without a massive expansion and meaningful changes to the policies governing that program, New Yorkers should not expect the NYPD to be out of the mental-health response game any time soon. B-HEARD operates in just a few of the city’s many neighborhoods, and even in those areas has managed to respond to only about a quarter of the mental health-related 911 calls received.

Why so few? One reason is that B-HEARD responders will not — as a matter of policy — respond to calls with a possibility of danger. They will not respond to calls involving subjects with access to weapons, who have expressed or exhibited suicidal ideation, or whom the caller has suggested may be violent. Such calls are left to the NYPD.

Unless the mayor’s new office upends this policy, the NYPD will continue to field a large number of 911 mental-health calls.

The most New Yorkers can hope for from the mayor’s initiative is a modest expansion in the capacity of B-HEARD (assuming he can secure a budget increase to fund it). That may be a positive development, but it’s worlds away from the radical change Mamdani promised.

Despite the fanfare from the mayor’s allies, last week’s announcement is another reminder that ideology always runs up against reality.

Reality eventually wins.

Reprinted with permission from City Journal. Rafael A. Mangual is the Nick Ohnell fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a contributing editor of City Journal, and author of the 2022 book Criminal (In)Justice.

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