A year ago this Wednesday, New York City voters elected Zohran Mamdani as their new mayor. He won over a majority of New Yorkers on the promise of bringing substantial change to City Hall in how it addresses issues from affordability to public transit to safety.
One of Mamdani’s biggest campaign promises was to establish a Department of Community Safety to better respond to mental health crises that arise and other quality-of-life issues that the NYPD is otherwise responsible for addressing. The intentions were good: Have a dedicated team of mental health experts and social workers addressing New Yorkers in crisis 24/7, and moving those responsibilities away from the NYPD so the department can focus on what it does best: fight crime.
But a year later, the Department of Community Safety still doesn’t exist as an official city agency answerable to the City Council and the taxpayers.
Instead, Mamdani created the Office of Community Safety (OCS) via executive order in March of this year. It is not an official city agency for which the City Council provides direct oversight or controls the purse strings; as an executive-level office, the mayor sets the budget and directs its operations.
More importantly, getting answers as to what difference the OCS has made on New Yorkers six months into its existence is difficult to come by. Friday’s City Council hearing on the office’s operations demonstrated that lack of real action.
During her testimony, Community Safety Commissioner Ayesha Delany-Brumsey said that her office had expanded services and worked to ensure closer coordination among existing city offices. But when pressed by Public Safety Committee Chair Oswald Feliz as to any new efforts or initiatives the office has undertaken, Delany-Brumsey provided little detail.
The Mamdani administration said the OCS had worked particularly to expand mental health services for domestic violence survivors through a build-out of its Crisis Management System. More than $270 million has been directed by City Hall toward OCS operations, according to Delany-Brumsey.
But no New Yorker asked Mamdani to create an executive-level office to merely shift around responsibilities, cut through red tape, or better coordinate responses. They asked for a full-fledged department to do more to address mental health and quality of life issues — to bring help to those most in need of it, and to make New York’s safe streets even safer.
That can only happen with the passage of legislation to create an independent Department of Community Safety answerable to both the mayor and City Council. City Council Member Lincoln Restler of Brooklyn previously introduced legislation to do just that, but progress on it has been slow.
Delany-Brumsey noted in her Oct. 30 testimony that City Hall is working with lawmakers to amend the legislation, but did not provide specifics or even a timetable on when a bill could be ready.
New Yorkers need a real Department of Community Safety, not this half-baked OCS that seems more focused on management than real action. It’s time Mamdani ends the foot-dragging, let the Council create the department via legislation, and get down to the business of revolutionizing how New York government takes care of those most in trouble.