Zohran Mamdani on his $1 billion public safety plan to hire social workers for New York City
Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic socialist and the presumed frontrunner in New York City's mayoral race, has big plans to overhaul America's largest city and revamp the NYPD's responsibilities if he wins in November.
Mamdani, who appeared with Sen. Bernie Sanders at a town hall in Brooklyn over the weekend and recently challenged President Trump to a debate, has made major promises to make city buses free, expand universal child care and freeze rent on certain apartments by raising taxes on the top 1% and corporations.
The 33-year-old state assemblyman from Queens is also vowing to spend $1 billion to create the city Department of Community Safety, which he says would have social workers respond first, instead of NYPD officers, in certain cases.
Taking pressure off NYPD officers
Mamdani laid out his, perhaps controversial, public safety plan to rely on mental health workers first instead of the NYPD in situations involving emotionally disturbed individuals -- like homeless people on the subways -- during an interview Sunday on CBS News New York's "The Point with Marcia Kramer."
"These are not incidents that might necessarily be categorized in COMPStat or as a crime, but they are moments that showcase a mental health crisis, a homelessness crisis, and we have asked police officers to be the ones responsible and to respond to that," Mamdani said.
He said decoupling the mental health response from a police response would ease pressure on NYPD officers, letting them focus more on what they signed up for and are trained to do, like respond to shootings, murders and other serious crimes.
"Our vision for a Department of Community Safety, the DCS, is that we would have teams of dedicated mental health outreach workers that we deploy to the hundred [subway] stations with the highest levels of mental health crises, to respond to those incidents and get those New Yorkers out of the subway system and to the services that they actually need," he said.
The NYPD currently responds to approximately 180,000 calls involving emotionally disturbed individuals, according to testimony in a New York City Council hearing. Mamdani believes he can replicate a similar program launched in Oregon, where he says 90% of those types of calls were handled without police involvement.
"You always could call upon them, but knowing that the first instinct would be able to respond to them without asking the police to do so. It changed their [police department's] nature," he said.
Following through on public safety promises
New York City currently has a pilot program, called the Behavioral Health Emergency Assistance Response Division, or B-HEARD, that is similar to Mamdani's proposed Department of Community Safety. However, reports show approximately 60% of calls are ineligible for a social worker response because they involve suicidal people or other dangers where police are needed.
"Even if it is 60%, that would still mean 40% that you're reducing from police responsibility that would allow them to [improve] their response times to serious crimes across the city," Mamdani said.
Mayor Eric Adams, who is seeking reelection as an independent, has claimed credit for reducing crime since the days of the COVID pandemic, but the assemblyman accused him of getting in the way of B-HEARD's ability to succeed through a lack of funding and support.
"Part of the reason I'm running for mayor is that it's time to have someone who leads this city who is sincerely interested in fulfilling the promise of these pilot programs, delivering that safety, because we're not seeing it right now," he said.
Mamdani said the cost of hiring enough social workers to take over the cases where cops are not needed at first is part of his $1 billion estimate to get DCS up and running. He does not expect challenges finding enough people to fully staff the department.
"We have to pay people what they're worth," he said.
Mamdani does not foresee hiring more NYPD officers, but would take "an outcome-oriented approach" to his policies, he said.
Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa and independent candidate Andrew Cuomo have both proposed hiring more police officers and have called the assemblyman's plan misguided.