Late last week, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced the creation of a new Office of Community Safety.
The news comes as the fulfillment of a key campaign promise: the creation of a comprehensive Department of Community Safety, which would, among other things, free up mental health crisis response by replacing police response with trained mental health professionals.
On the campaign trail, Mamdani framed this movement as a way to provide relief to the overburdened NYPD. But mental-health calls don’t make up a large part of the department’s workload — fewer than 150,000 of the several million calls for service assigned to police last year were related to mental health. All Mamdani has done is create a new office in City Hall that will oversee, and perhaps expand, existing programs.
This is hardly a revolutionary development, and it will do little to curb the real demands on New York City’s sworn officers.
Still, the mayor’s allies did their best to play down the announcement, particularly focusing on the mental health response component.
“We believe that any new approach must recognize that mental health professionals and peer advocates are best positioned to respond to mental health crises,” said New York Civil Liberties Union executive director Donna Lieberman. “We’ve seen the dangers of police response to mental health crises time and time again.”
Such a statement is a reminder that Mamdani’s community safety plan has always been based on a critical view of the NYPD. The purpose of this plan is to sideline a department that, until now, Mamdani wants to defund and dismantle.
Crisis response advocates argue that police often use unnecessary force during mental-health incidents — which, in their view, reveals a lack of responding officers, as opposed to the dangers inherent in such calls. Therefore, the city would be better off sending mental health professionals trained to handle mental health crises.
The Legal Aid Society, for example, asserted in a statement that “thousands of New Yorkers are experiencing homelessness crises, mental health challenges, and substance abuse…
Replacing police with mental health professionals is easier said than done.
Where does the mayor plan to find a workforce of trained, credentialed mental health professionals willing to respond 24/7, including holidays, on the municipal payroll? What does the mayor mean by “mental health professionals,” though? Social worker? Psychologist? Will the city train them? If so, what would that exercise look like? How much is that? And how will the city evaluate their performance?
Perhaps the answer lies in the programs implemented by Mamdani as an example. One is a small pilot program called B-HEARD, which will be overseen by the new Office of Community Safety.
But without a major expansion and significant changes to the policies governing the program, New Yorkers shouldn’t expect the NYPD to get out of the mental health response game anytime soon. B-HEARD operates in only a few of the city’s many neighborhoods, and even in that area it has managed to respond to only about a quarter of the mental health-related 911 calls received.
Why so few? One reason is that B-HEARD respondents will not – as a matter of policy – respond to calls with possible danger. They will not respond to calls involving subjects who have access to weapons, who have expressed or indicated suicidal ideation, or who the caller suggests may be violent. Such calls are left to the NYPD.
Unless the mayor’s new office steps up this policy, the NYPD will continue to field a large number of 911 mental health calls.
The most New Yorkers can expect from the mayor’s initiative is a modest expansion in the capacity of B-HEARD (assuming he can secure an increase in the budget for funding). That may be a positive development, but it is far from the radical change that Mamdani promised.
Despite the uproar from the mayor’s allies, last week’s announcement was another reminder that ideology is always at odds with reality.
Reality finally won.
Reprinted with permission from City Journal. Rafael A. Mangual is a Nick Ohnell fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, contributing editor of City Journal, and author of the 2022 book Criminal (In)Justice.
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