Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced the creation of the city\u2019s Office of Community Safety on Thursday and appointed Renita Francois as the first-ever deputy mayor for community safety. <\/p>\n
Mamdani said the new agency will offer a variety of responses, including gun violence prevention and mental health. <\/p>\n
\u201cOur vision for safety is simple,\u201d said Francois. \u201cEvery New Yorker from Highbridge to Stapleton to Bushwick deserves to feel safe and be safe.\u201d <\/p>\n
Mamdani said this centralizes several existing agencies because there is a demand for a multi-faceted response. <\/p>\n
\u201cIf we want to keep New Yorkers safe, we have to also ensure that we are not just asking police officers to respond to every single issue that comes as a result of the fraying of the social safety net,\u201d said Mamdani. <\/p>\n
The announcement came one day after NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch testified before the City Council. She said the NYPD received more than 4.3 million 911 calls in 2024 and only 2% of \u201cnon-violent mental health calls\u201d would\u2019ve been diverted from the NYPD. <\/p>\n
Phil Grimaldi, a retired NYPD detective, told News 12 that mental health calls can be unpredictable. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe possibility of it turning violent can happen very, very rapidly \u2013 and that\u2019s why I think police officers need to be responding to all of these [emotional disturbed person] calls,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
Advocacy groups, like the Legal Aid Society, backed the new agency to provide resources that New Yorkers need. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve been trying to punish our way through safety in a way that has failed and has really not addressed the full scope of problems that result in people having interactions with the police,\u201d said Phil Desgranges, attorney-in-charge for the criminal law reform at the Legal Aid Society. <\/p>\n
City officials did not go into detail about how the new office will respond or how many staff members it will have. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced the creation of the city\u2019s Office of Community Safety on Thursday and appointed Renita…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":168680,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[128,1445,22925,9,24,63,308,1986,35907,69189,129,131,130,82],"class_list":["post-168679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-the-bronx","tag-bronx","tag-mamdani","tag-mayor-zohran-mamdani","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-public-safety","tag-safety","tag-safety-concerns","tag-safety-measures","tag-the-bronx","tag-the-bronx-headlines","tag-the-bronx-news","tag-zohran-mamdani"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168679"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168679\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/168680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}