{"id":173186,"date":"2026-03-24T11:31:30","date_gmt":"2026-03-24T11:31:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/173186\/"},"modified":"2026-03-24T11:31:30","modified_gmt":"2026-03-24T11:31:30","slug":"mamdani-delivers-a-department-of-public-safety-thats-barely-even-symbolic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/173186\/","title":{"rendered":"Mamdani delivers a Department of Public Safety that’s barely even symbolic"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s not a department and it\u2019s not about safety or any recognizable community \u2014 but Mayor Zohran Mamdani\u2019s launch of his Department of Community Safety <\/a>otherwise checked all the boxes.<\/p>\n

That is, the entity the mayor rolled out last week will symbolically honor his vow in last year\u2019s campaign \u2014 and symbolism is what this mayoralty is all about.<\/p>\n

Witness the great fanfare as Mamdani posed before a packed City Hall staircase to sign an executive order creating an Office of Community Safety.<\/p>\n

He\u2019d need City Council approval to create a new department, and apparently won\u2019t even try for that OK, since the council might ask too many questions about spending cash this way amid multibillion-dollar budget deficits.<\/a><\/p>\n

His promise was to move $1.1 billion a year worth of work addressing some mental-health-emergency calls<\/a> from the NYPD to social workers under an all-new department; yet the staff of this office \u2014 both of them! \u2014 will merely oversee a $260 million budget as they study that (possible) shift.<\/p>\n

Another symbol: Mamdani tapped Renita Francois, who previously headed a de Blasio-era \u201cneighborhood safety initiative\u201d as the first deputy mayor for community safety.<\/p>\n

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Maybe that will appease the coalition of black clergy and activists who\u2019ve been complaining that the socialist big tent of the city\u2019s first African-born mayor hadn\u2019t found room for a top African-American deputy.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, she\u2019s only overseeing a potpourri of safety-related agencies (the Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes, the Division of Community Mental Health, gun-violence prevention work and so on), which makes the whole thing look like a Potemkin \u201cdepartment\u201d \u2014 a false front with not much real work going on.<\/p>\n

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With two chiefs (Francois and a \u201ccommissioner\u201d to run the new mayoral office) and no soldiers, it\u2019s not even obvious what the $260 million will go for \u2014 just the stuff that its bits and pieces were doing before, or something truly new?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to see this appeasing the Defund-the-NYPD crowd, but maybe symbolism was all they ever wanted, too.<\/p>\n

What should anyone have expected of a guy who won this job via TikTok videos and vaporous talk about city-run groceries, frozen rents and so on?<\/p>\n

Problem is, it looks like cardboard cutouts are the best he can do on any front; good luck deploying them to close that budget gap.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s not a department and it\u2019s not about safety or any recognizable community \u2014 but Mayor Zohran Mamdani\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":173187,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[7739,14927,302,303,304,9,56,63,65,64,299,29001,308,82],"class_list":["post-173186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-budget","tag-city-budget","tag-city-hall","tag-crime","tag-editorial","tag-new-york","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-nyc-headlines","tag-nyc-news","tag-opinion","tag-policing","tag-public-safety","tag-zohran-mamdani"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173186","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=173186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173186\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/173187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}