One of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s biggest acts within his first 100 days in office was his unilateral formation of the Office, not Department, of Community Safety. It was, in his view, the start of something new: a fulfillment of one of his key campaign promises.
The Office of Community Safety (OCS) aims to better address mental health issues and other quality of life matters facing the city that are currently responded to by the overworked and stretched-to-the-limit NYPD. But nearly five months removed from its formation, where does the Office of Community Safety stand in terms of activity?
It has a commissioner, Dr. Ayesha Delany-Brumse, who reports to Mamdani’s appointed deputy mayor for community safety, Renita Francois. The agency was given a budget of roughly $260 million. Delany-Brumse and Francois lead a team largely created through the reorganization of five other offices within city government; to our knowledge, no new members of the OCS have been hired.
Thus far, according to reports, the OCS has been coordinating gun violence prevention, community mental health, crime victims, domestic and gender-based violence programs.
It has connected with violence interruption groups in an effort to stop gun violence in areas often racked by it, and has canvassed communities afflicted by shootings this summer to provide counseling and support to those directly impacted by them.
Nevertheless, many questions about what the OCS does, and what it will do in the years to come, remain. It is often heard, not seen; they are not as visible as the NYPD or the FDNY are in responding to emergencies.
The OCS was billed, in particular, as a way to lighten the NYPD’s workload – and yet not much has changed. The headcount certainly hasn’t; the NYPD will hold steady at roughly 34,000 officers through at least next June, after Mamdani and the City Council made the ill-advised agreement to scrap plans to hire roughly 530 new cops to offset recent retirements.
The NYPD continues to be the primary responder to non-violent mental health crises, which Mamdani had vowed his Community Safety agency would eventually take the lead on. As recently as June, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch testified before the City Council that conversations about coordinating cooperation between police and the OCS were still pending.
And then there’s the matter of it being the Office of Community Safety, under which the mayor has unilateral control. The City Council has legislation pending to create a Department of Community Safety, which would make the agency answerable to both the mayor and the city’s legislature. The Council would also have true oversight power and the ability to control its budget in cooperation with the mayor.
Mamdani’s community safety agency has the potential to do enormous good in addressing mental health issues, stopping violence and promoting a more peaceful city. But it needs to be done with clarity of purpose and transparency. It is up to the mayor to deliver both.