Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Thursday named a new deputy mayor tasked with creating and then overseeing a new office of community safety.
He appointed Renita Francoise, a veteran of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration, as his deputy mayor for community safety with the job of crafting the new office, which will be run by a commissioner the mayor appoints who will report to her.
The announcement is a slimmed down version of one of Mamdani’s signature campaign promises: the creation of a new $1.1 billion Department of Community Safety aimed at, amongst other things, ending disastrous police responses to 911 mental health calls.
The mayor did not set a timetable for the launch of what he called a “first step” toward the eventual creation of a new Department of Community Safety. Nor did he specify how much he will put in his budget for what he called a “groundbreaking” new approach as he signed an executive order placing five existing mayoral units dealing with mental health and criminal justice issues under Francoise’s supervision to better coordinate services.
The new office is within the Office of the Mayor, which is also footing the bill for Francois’ $290,000 salary.
“At the core of both the campaign commitment and today’s announcement is a north star on delivering safety to each and every New Yorker and on finally treating the mental health crisis with the seriousness and specialization that it deserves,” Mamdani proclaimed.
Standing next to the mayor in front of dozens of advocates who’ve been pushing for reform for years, Francoise made clear that the move from an office to a department will take time, while promising a careful analysis of existing programs and gaps in coverage.
“That’s not going to happen tomorrow if you want it to be done responsibly,” she said.
Daniela Gilbert, director of the Vera Institute’s Redefining Public Safety initiative that pushes for criminal justice reforms, said it was a good idea to assign a top mayoral aide to look at what’s working and what’s not before creating a new agency.
“The idea of standing something up in a way that allows for executive leadership and authorization — it makes sense to have a deputy mayor leading the charge on that and that once the work is established, it would make it sense to codify it as a department,” she said.
‘A Small Step’
A key element of the new approach will be finding ways to reduce the number of police responses to mental health 911 calls, interactions that in the last decade have resulted in 24 people being fatally shot or tased by cops.
During his campaign, Mamdani vowed to expand a de Blasio-era program called B-HEARD that mobilizes non-police responses to 911 calls to all 78 precincts, increase its funding by 150% and remove it from the city’s Health & Hospitals Corp., placing it in his new community safety department.
The executive order he signed Thursday, however, reversed course on pulling it out of HHC. And on Thursday, while Mamdani promised more funding for B-HEARD, he did not provide a specific figure or repeat his promise to fully expand it across the city.
He also did not address a persistent problem with the B-HEARD model: from its inception in 2016, it has only responded to a relatively small number of the hundreds of thousands of 911 mental health calls NYPD dispatchers field annually. Instead, the vast majority of these calls — between 75% and 80% — are routed to police.
A spokesperson, Sam Raskin, told THE CITY after the mayor’s announcement that the new deputy mayor will be looking at how 911 dispatchers handle these types of calls.
“The Mamdani administration has started exploring ways to redesign the 911 system to increase the number of calls going to B-HEARD, and this effort is one of the many initiatives the Deputy Mayor for Community Safety and Office of Community Safety will oversee. We need to expand their capacity and that’s something we’re committed to exploring.”
In his own remarks, however, the mayor had noted that even when calls are routed to B-HEARD teams, the program doesn’t always respond because there aren’t enough teams on duty.
“What we’re seeing right now is that it’s an idea within city government that has constantly been told ‘no’ when it comes to support — whether it be fiscal support or operational support,” he said.
Thursday’s announcement was a good first step, said Ruth Lowenkron, director of the Disability Rights Program at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest and a member of the steering committee for the advocacy group Correct Crisis Intervention Today, which has long lobbied for a dramatic reduction in police responses to mental health calls.
“It’s a small step but it’s definitely a step in the right direction,” she said.
Brian Stettin, who served as a senior advisor to Mayor Eric Adams on mental health issues, said the plan Mamdani announced Thursday abandoned or deferred much of what he’d promised during the campaign about his Department of Community Safety.
“There’s nothing new in anything they announced today at all. It’s just a reshuffling,” said Stettin, who noted it did not address the fact that year after year, most mental health calls wound up with a police response because of the potential for danger.
Stettin advocates instead for a co-response, pairing police with mental health clinicians.
“That is the single greatest need — to teach police and clinicians to work together and think less about not sending calls to the NYPD. There’s nothing about this in this plan today.”
