Mamdani’s Office of Community Safety Fails to Effectively Address Mental Health Concerns

Yesterday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani signed an Executive Order establishing a new Office of Community Safety, run by Deputy Mayor Renita Francois.

In response to his announcement, Loyda Colón (they/them), Justice Committee Executive Director, issued the following statement:

For too long, the City’s approach to New Yorkers struggling with mental health challenges has been characterized by criminalization and police intervention, an ineffective, costly and harmful response that fails to connect people to the care they need and often results in unnecessary violence by the NYPD and even death, as in the cases of Jabez Chakraborty, Win Rozario, Kawaski Trawick, Mohamed Bah, Iman Morales, and too many others. 

Mayor Mamdani’s campaign promise of a Department of Community Safety and his creation of a Mayor’s Office of Community Safety as a first step towards it comes out of an acknowledgment of the need for change. However, his focus on bringing the failed B-HEARD program under MOCS and expanding it raises serious concerns.

B-HEARD has consistently failed even by its own metrics: it does not follow proven best practices, manages only a fraction of mental health calls citywide, overrelies on traumatizing involuntary hospitalizations, and has demonstrably failed to reduce police involvement in mental health response, further endangering vulnerable New Yorkers when they need care the most. Expanding a failed program is not reform or transformative change, and it will only further entrench the NYPD’s role in mental health response. The city should phase out B-HEARD and instead work with crisis response experts who have successfully built non-police response systems in other municipalities to develop a model rooted in established best practices.

As Mayor Mamdani continues to flesh out the full Department of Community Safety, he must do so in collaboration with those directly impacted by the city’s failed police-based mental health response and the organizations led by and accountable to them.