Mamdani Presses for Community Safety Department as Mental Health Crisis Response Faces Hard Questions

New York’s plan to strip police from mental health crisis calls promises safer interventions—but its blueprint lacks clarity, and the stakes are high.

If New Yorkers needed a reminder of the delicate intersection between policing and mental illness, they received it on January 28th, when the NYPD put four bullets into Jabez Chakraborty. Mr Chakraborty, aged 22, lay on a ventilator in Bellevue Hospital after the shooting, which occurred when his family phoned 911 seeking not the police, but an ambulance for his mental health episode. The police arrived instead. As body camera footage revealed, a kitchen knife escalated an already tense scene into tragedy.

This incident thrust into the spotlight an ambitious, if hazy, pillar of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration: the “Department of Community Safety.” Hailed on the campaign trail as an antidote to New York’s patchwork approach to gun violence, homelessness and mental health crises, the department’s raison d’être is to send social workers—not police offsiders—when New Yorkers are in distress. The mayor, moved by the Chakraborty shooting, vowed this week to hasten the new agency’s launch. Backed by a 17-page whitepaper, Mamdani claims his team, led by First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan, has already started hiring. A bill advancing through City Council gives the plan the bureaucratic imprimatur it needs.

Yet for all the urgency, much remains unformed, not least how a City Hall department could reliably protect both responders and people in crisis. Critics, such as Elizabeth Glazer—once Bill de Blasio’s criminal justice czar—point out that no one seems able to answer simple operational questions. What if someone produces a weapon after social workers arrive? What if an incident turns violent, as is depressingly common? The Mamdani administration, candid to a fault, admits it does not yet know.

This should not surprise. New York’s current approach, split among the Office of Gun Violence Prevention, the Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes, and more, already suffers from fragmentation, funding squabbles and tepid coordination. The city’s “B-HEARD” pilot program, trialled in select precincts, sends teams of social workers and EMTs to non-violent crisis calls. Participants both praise and grumble: Between July 2021 and June 2023, B-HEARD responded to roughly 6,175 calls—paltry, given the hundreds of thousands of 911 mental health calls each year. Nearly a third required police backup anyway.

The new department, so its whitepaper promises, will harmonize and expand these efforts. Its mandate is sweepingly broad: to “expand, reform and better coordinate” policies across gun violence, hate crimes, homelessness, and—crucially—to “diminish” police involvement in mental health response. If achieved, the impact could be significant. The NYPD says it fields over 150,000 calls annually relating to emotionally disturbed persons; the city spends a gargantuan $5bn on police and far less on social services. New York’s criminal justice system, bloated and overburdened, would surely welcome relief.

Whether these ambitions outstrip political and fiscal reality remains to be seen. The Mamdani administration has not divulged how many people it will hire, nor what exact skills they will bring. The multi-agency coordination that bedevils existing pilot programs will require Sisyphean determination to untangle. City Council’s pending legislation is short on teeth, heavy on rhetoric. And as events like the Chakraborty shooting demonstrate, crisis scenes can change in the blink of an eye. If unarmed responders face an armed patient, who decides when the police step in?

Other American cities provide limited, if imperfect, prototypes. In Eugene, Oregon, the CAHOOTS program has responded to crisis calls for over thirty years, resolving the vast majority without police intervention. Denver’s STAR initiative, launched in 2020, achieved similarly buoyant early results, reducing arrests in certain categories by nearly 34%. Both programs, however, operate at scales puny compared with New York’s and reckon with lower rates of violence and firearm prevalence. Their successes portend possibilities, but the comparison is inexact.

Globally, similar experiments in Stockholm and Melbourne point to the promise—and pitfall—of moving away from police-centric intervention. These cities have marshalled robust training, clear command protocols, and tight coordination between sectors. None has fully eliminated police involvement, but all suggest that with sustainable investment and evidence-based protocols, risks can be mitigated. New York faces a more fractious union environment, more complex demographics, and a media ecosystem quick to pounce if things go awry.

Unanswered questions, untested ambition

The Mamdani administration would argue that anything is preferable to the status quo, in which people in psychiatric distress risk both incarceration and injury. On this, it is hard to disagree. The city’s jails, teeming with mentally ill detainees, are an indictment of failed social policy as much as police overreach. The fiscal burden of repeated ER visits, jail stays, and legal claims runs into billions annually.

But promises, whitepapers and campaign slogans will not answer the city’s knottiest operational challenge: when urgency collides with ambiguity. Social workers are neither magicians nor martyrs; police, poorly trained in crisis intervention, generate risk. The answer must lie in clear protocols—when to dispatch whom, how information flows, and who commands at a scene. Without such specifics, New York risks a piecemeal system—bureaucratically seductive, but operationally frail.

The mayor’s instinct—to move with speed, harness national evidence, and commit funds—is sound. But haste, without clarity, courts disaster. If the Department of Community Safety delivers nothing more than a new acronym and mid-level managers, public scepticism will rightly grow. Reformers must be honest about trade-offs and pilot real-world protocols in diverse settings. New York’s global peers have found that only painstaking attention to detail—not grand designs—delivers results.

Amid dire headlines, New York could become a model for cities seeking to untangle law enforcement from the burden of mental health care. It has the resources, talent, and (judging by this week’s events) political will. But for Mayor Mamdani, rhetorical urgency must give way to administrative rigour. Promises alone, after all, do little to shield New Yorkers from the perils of crisis—not to mention their city’s own penchant for bureaucratic diffusion. ■