Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayoral election on Tuesday night, ushering in a rare moment of optimism for progressives seeking to push the Democratic Party left and New Yorkers hoping he’ll make the city more affordable.

But in order to implement his sweeping agenda, Mamdani will have to confront an establishment that tried to keep him out of office and tackle one of the key issues it sought to leverage against him: the New York City Police Department and its powerful union.

As Mamdani’s opponents seized throughout the race on his past criticism of police, his public safety pledges on the campaign trail reflected an attempt to thread the needle between the NYPD and its critics — strengthening the power of the department’s civilian oversight board, keeping NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch in her job, and building a Department of Community Safety to “ensure that no New Yorker falls through the cracks of our social safety net.” Together, the proposals simultaneously aim to make it harder for police to escape accountability, preserve one of the department’s institutionalist leaders, and take certain responsibilities away from police as a way to lighten their load.

The Department of Community Safety, Mamdani’s marquee public safety proposal, would do violence prevention, crisis response, and mental health work by deploying non-police personnel throughout the city. The idea, successfully modeled in other cities, is to free police officers from spending time on those issues and let them focus instead on responding to the most violent crime.

According to Alex Vitale, a sociology professor who runs the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, police have “mixed feelings” about the proposal. On one hand, rank-and-file cops largely don’t want to be in the business of responding to mental health crises. On the other, they’re part of an establishment coalition that may not want to support Mamdani for political reasons.

The city’s influential police union, which represents 50,000 retired and active police officers from the New York City Police Department, has said Mamdani’s plan won’t make a dent in their workload. “The NYPD responds to roughly 180,000 calls involving an emotionally disturbed person each year, out of roughly 9 million total 911 calls,” said NYC Police Benevolent Association spokesperson John Nuthall in a statement to The Intercept. “That means that mental health emergencies constitute less than 2% of calls the NYPD responds to.”

The Mamdani administration will also........

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