How Mamdani Proposes to Make New York City Safer

In cities in Oregon, crisis workers answer emergency calls instead of the police. Since 2020, Denver has been sending behavioral health specialists where uniformed officers once would have gone. In Arizona, Tucson runs a 24-hour crisis center.

Now, Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee and front-runner in New York’s mayoral race, wants to create an agency that would bring mental health responders to all corners of the city.

He has released a 17-page public safety plan proposing a new civilian-led Department of Community Safety that would deploy mental health teams to respond to 911 calls and that would expand street-level programs intended to stop the cycle of violence.

Elle Bisgaard-Church, Mr. Mamdani’s chief adviser, said that the plan would consolidate existing programs and new initiatives under one agency, with the goals of using public health methods to prevent violence and relieving an overstretched police force.

“We can’t actually achieve that through a piecemeal approach,” Ms. Bisgaard-Church said.

Mr. Mamdani’s opponents, Mayor Eric Adams, Curtis Sliwa and former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, have said crime is best addressed primarily by having more officers on the beat, and have promised to increase recruiting for the Police Department, which is grappling with attrition. The department has about 34,000 uniformed officers, down from a peak of 40,000 in 2000.

Mr. Mamdani has said that he would keep staffing at current levels. He has said that the agency’s flagging numbers and the forced overtime that results from the drop in head count “reduces the quality of life for officers.”

Last year, the police received about 174,000 emergency calls for people in mental health crises, according to Police Department data. That number represents a burden on the overstretched force, Mr. Mamdani’s campaign has said. And it results in “encounters which in fact too frequently lead to police violence and even death.”

On Friday, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, an oversight agency, found that two officers used excessive force when they fatally shot a 19-year-old in mental distress last year. The man, Win Rozario, was standing in his kitchen, holding a pair of scissors as his mother tried to shield him.

Mr. Mamdani has said that his plan would free “police resources to increase clearance rates for major crimes.” Here is what to know about it:

What is a Department of Community Safety?

New York City supports the country’s largest police and fire departments and a vast emergency medical service system. The city has also spent hundreds of millions of dollars to create a patchwork of services to address issues like gun violence, homelessness and mental illness.

Mr. Mamdani’s Department of Community Safety would place many of those efforts in three divisions: Public Safety, Victim Assistance and Community Repair and Community Mental Health.

The city would channel money into mental health services, the plan says, “prioritizing peer-led programs that are proven to create long-term stability and promote recovery.” It would overhaul and increase funding for existing programs.

The tenets of Mr. Mamdani’s plan are “pretty mainstream,” said Elizabeth Glazer, an editor for Vital City, an urban policy think tank. Many cities, she said, have programs where mental health professionals work alongside the police.

“What is different in what Mamdani is doing in creating a civilian-led department is he’s not changing who should be at the table,” Ms. Glazer said. “He’s changing who is running that table.”

The new agency would require more money. The Police Department operates on an annual budget of about $6 billion. Mr. Mamdani’s Department of Community Safety would cost about $1.1 billion.

About $600 million of that is already being spent on existing programs. To raise the remaining funds, and to fund other programs he has outlined, he proposes raising the state’s top corporate tax rate to match New Jersey’s and increasing the city’s personal income tax rate on the top 1 percent of residents by 2 percent. Combined, those increases would raise $9 billion in revenue, he said.

Tax increases would have to be approved by the State Legislature, and Gov. Kathy Hochul, who holds veto power over the state budget, has said raising taxes is a nonstarter. This year, she proposed slashing income tax for most residents.

Could this strategy work?

Similar programs have made inroads in addressing a stubborn problem.

In 1989, Eugene, Ore., developed a system where mental health workers would respond to nonemergency calls involving people suffering from mental health crisis, homelessness and addiction. The program, called Cahoots — Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets — has since been seen as a national model.

In 2022, a Stanford University study found that a similar program in Denver reduced crime by 34 percent during a six-month trial. In San Diego, a mobile crisis team program that started in 2021 with two teams had grown to 44 by the beginning of this year.

In Tucson, the police and social service workers can drop off people in crisis to a 24/7 response center. A study found that most people who received the service did not seek more help in the following 30 days.

Cahoots last year responded to about 16,000 calls in Eugene and neighboring Springfield at a cost of about $2 million. The organization stopped services in Eugene this year after struggles to secure funding.

New York has tried this before.

In 2021, as the pandemic isolated millions, New York City started a pilot program called the Behavioral Health Emergency Assistance Response Division, or B-Heard. It sends mental health professionals to certain emergencies, rather than the police.

Shortly after Mayor Adams took office in 2022, the program lost $12 million in funding as the city cut spending to avert a deficit. This year, a city audit found the teams — which are in 31 precincts — failed to respond to more than a third of the 911 calls that they might have answered.

The audit found that fewer than a third of the people whose cases were reviewed took prescribed medications regularly and that one in four never met with a psychiatrist or nurse from a treatment team.

What does law enforcement think?

Many police officers would love to stop responding to mental health calls.

“No argument there from the cops,” said Kenneth Corey, retired chief of department. But while Mr. Mamdani’s plan is “conceptually rock solid,” the reality may play out differently, Mr. Corey said.

In 2022, a plan to have social workers take homeless people off the subways collapsed, he said. The city created teams of officers and mental health workers who would work underground together on evening and overnight shifts.

“Monday night, who’s there? 12 cops,” Mr. Corey said. “Nobody else showed up.”

Louis Turco, president of the lieutenants’ union, said that the civic burden of dealing with mental illness “seems to always come back to us.”

“Right now, we’re just Uber drivers for mentally ill people,” he said. “We’re very good at getting people to the hospital who don’t want to go there.”

Rodney Harrison, a former chief of department who reviewed the plan at Mr. Mamdani’s request, said he supports sending medical professionals instead of the police. But to succeed, the plan will require training dispatchers to deploy the right personnel.

“If someone is inside a house and there are knives or weapons around, even though he may be nonviolent, the police may need to respond,” Mr. Harrison said.

When asked about Mr. Mamdani’s plan, Patrick Hendry, head of the Police Benevolent Association — the nation’s largest police union — pointed to the staffing crisis in the Police Department.

“The reality is that we can’t keep the city safe unless we hire more cops and keep the ones we already have,” Mr. Hendry said. “To do that, we need meaningful improvements to police officers’ quality of life and compensation.”

What are the other candidates’ plans?

Mr. Mamdani’s opponents, who strongly back increasing the size of the Police Department, also have ideas on how to address mental illness and homelessness.

And as part of Mr. Adams’s case for re-election, he announced a $650 million plan to address street homelessness that includes building housing for people with serious mental illness and adding 900 “safe haven” beds — temporary housing paired with mental health services.

Mr. Cuomo has called the mental health crisis “a humanitarian emergency hiding in plain sight.” In May, he released a plan to get severely mentally ill people off the streets and into treatment. It includes a $2.6 billion five-year capital investment to triple the annual creation of supportive housing units.

Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate, has said he would restart the Police Department’s homeless outreach program, where officers work with mental health professionals. The Police Department currently participates in an effort — called the Partnership Assistance for Transit Homelessness — that does similar work.