Opinion: Mamdani’s proposed Department of Community Safety would be a win for New Yorkers

One of the signature proposals of Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign is the creation of a Department of Community Safety that would address a variety of pressing public safety issues with new, improved and expanded civilian and community-led responses. The proposal contains five programmatic areas that would address gun violence, subway safety, mental health crises, public homelessness, and hate crimes. 

Throughout the campaign, one of the recurring attacks from his opponents has been that Mamdani’s proposals are too radical, out of step with best practice and impractical to fund and implement. In this area, however, it is clear that Mamdani’s ideas are well-grounded in existing best practices across the country and here in New York City and that there is broad support for many of them among both the public and the City Council that would have to fund them. 

Gun violence

The city has an existing community-based violence reduction infrastructure called the Crisis Management System. It consists of over two dozen organizations that deploy credible messengers to respond to community violence in hopes of breaking the cycle of retributive violence that drives a large number of shootings and homicides. Credible messengers are hired from within the community based on their relationships within the community and their ability to connect with those most at risk of involvement in violence based on their personal experiences. This effort has shown significant success in evaluation studies. 

More, however, needs to be done. There are other programs around the country that take a more holistic approach by building out a variety of important support services to complement the work of the credible messengers. Newark, NJ is a good example of this. Since 2014, Newark has been creating a community-based anti-violence ecosystem that consists of numerous organizations providing services and directly intervening in conflicts anchored by the community-based Newark Community Street Team and the city’s Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery. This ecosystem provides real-time crisis response, preventative outreach, trauma recovery services at the neighborhood level, substance abuse interventions, victim services, long-term case management, mediation and youth mentoring. Together, these services have helped reduce violent crime in Newark to a 60-year low. In 2014, there were 93 homicides in Newark. Last year there were only 37, and so far this year, there have only been 25. 

More funding from a Mamdani administration could allow for both greater professionalization of existing groups and a more holistic approach. There is a need to improve salaries for front-line workers to reduce turnover and burnout. Many of these groups also need additional technical assistance to manage budgets and personnel matters. More work needs to be done to keep accurate records, identify impediments to success and evaluate the work being done. Most importantly, though, New York needs to adopt a more holistic response that integrates mental health and substance abuse services and financial stabilization into all aspects of its anti-violence work. This would give credible messengers more resources to interrupt the cycles of violence and further bring down shootings. 

Mental health crisis response

One of the largest and most complex interventions in the DCS plan is to dramatically scale up and improve the city’s response to mental health crises. This involves both creating a city-wide civilian crisis response program integrated into the 911 system and expanding community-based mental health services. 

The city currently has the B-Heard pilot program that operates in the Bronx, Upper Manhattan, and parts of Queens and Brooklyn. B-Heard teams are made up of EMS workers from the Fire Department and a civilian mental health outreach worker and are available 16 hours a day, though coverage is limited by the number of teams on duty at any given time. The program is integrated into the 911 system and responds to mental health crisis calls in which there is no indication of violence or a crime in progress as determined by 911 dispatchers. Some community-based advocates have expressed concerns that having FDNY be the lead agency has led to some mistrust by community members who associate them with a police response and forced transport to an emergency room. A recent audit by the city comptroller’s office shows that these teams have regularly called for police assistance or been unable to respond, leading to a police response. This undermines the core nature of the initiative, which is to gain public trust and achieve better outcomes than was true of a police-led response. 

There are many things that could be done to expand and improve this initiative. Denver’s STAR program, for instance, uses fully civilian teams of outreach workers and clinicians who respond to a wide variety of calls involving mental health crises, homelessness and substance abuse issues. They almost never request police assistance. According to research from Stanford University, they are saving the city of Denver millions of dollars in police, jail and hospital expenses, and they have been shown to significantly reduce overall crime rates in the areas they operate in. 

Putting this response into the Department of Community Safety and increasing funding would allow the program to separate its response from the FDNY, expand it city-wide, make it available 24 hours a day and improve the linkages to follow up care and baseline mental health services. Public Advocate Jumaanee Williams issued an excellent report in 2019 on what this could look like.

Transit safety

Significantly improving mental health and homelessness services will immediately generate improved conditions in the city’s mass transit systems. But additional steps are also needed. The DCS proposal includes the creation of a civilian ambassador program as an alternative to periodically flooding the subways with more police and National Guard troops. 

Philadelphia’s SEPTA system created the SCOPE Program (short for “Safety, Cleaning, Ownership, Partnership and Engagement”), which can act as a guide. This program has created a broad range of civilian interventions designed to engage with and help those living in or around the transit system in order to improve conditions in the system and enhance the feelings of safety among riders. This initiative includes partnering with local hospitals to utilize medical students and street medics to support those in need, the use of civilian staff to act as wayfinders and be a visible presence throughout the system, bathroom and elevator monitors to improve safety and physical conditions and expanding cleaning staff. 

Los Angeles uses a number of civilian service providers to improve safety. They have numerous homeless outreach teams that attempt to stabilize the unhoused and connect them to long-term services. They partner with the County Department of Mental Health to use crisis response teams to deal with people experiencing acute mental health crises as an alternative to sending the police. These medically-based teams provide immediate services and connect people with chronic needs to long-term services. Los Angeles has also created a large Ambassador program that uses civilians to act as a visible calming presence throughout the system. They provide directions, assist those in crisis and can call in other emergency services as needed. They receive extensive training in crisis management, customer service, conflict de-escalation and identifying mental health challenges. 

Hate crimes

This is an area where New York City has shown national excellence. Under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, the Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes undertook a broad strategy to develop community-centered interventions to address hate crimes through a preventative rather than reactive lens. 

The office undertook five major initiatives. They funded community-based organizations to engage in a variety of cultural awareness and sensitivity initiatives and skills building to help communities become more aware of different cultures, identities and lifestyles, and build the capacity to keep each other safe in difficult situations. They coordinated government agencies to better respond to hate crime incidents and improve public awareness of the need for tolerance and understanding, which included influencing educational practices and coordinating with victim services providers, the Commission on Human Rights and the broader anti-violence community. They also initiated restorative justice practices at both the level of individual incidents and at the level of inter-community conflicts in which group bias was a contributing factor. Finally, they collected data on hate crimes that allowed them to identify patterns in terms of the role of mental health issues, the geographic location of incidents and the types of interventions being utilized to guide future best practices. 

Under the Adams administration, the office was reduced from seven staff members to just three, and there has been less emphasis placed on systematic data collection. Under Mamdami, the office could be returned to its previous staffing level and more could be done to coordinate efforts with mental health providers, since this is a major factor in driving the most serious incidents. 

Homelessness 

The Department of Community Safety would just be one part of the city’s overall homelessness reduction efforts. Most likely, it would focus on outreach to people living outside of the shelter system in public spaces such as parks, sidewalks and the subway system. This would involve a combination of outreach, stabilization and connecting people with vital services such as supportive housing. Existing outreach programs attempt to do this but often work closely with police, which can cause a breakdown in trust between outreach workers and those who are most vulnerable. 

Mamdani’s plan calls for fully civilian outreach teams and the creation of stabilization centers. In the subway system, he proposes utilizing currently empty commercial spaces as places where people can receive assessments, counseling, first aid, nutrition and clothing. This can allow for the establishment of trusting relationships that are essential to connecting high-needs populations with services. 

The city of Austin, Texas, funds a variety of outreach and stabilization efforts. There are two community-based programs, The Sunrise Homeless Navigation Center and the Charlie Center. Each provide peer-to-peer outreach and access to drop-in centers that provide people with stability, safety and the opportunity to connect with essential services. Austin recently purchased a commercial hotel and turned it into supportive housing to help create more pathways to long-term housing stability for people with mental health and substance use needs. 

Support

There is broad public support among the public and the City Council for many of these initiatives. Recent reporting in Gothamist found overall support for the idea of a civilian response to mental health calls, which mirrors national polling that consistently shows large majorities of the public support sending someone other than police on these calls. Locally, polling showed strong majorities for non-police mental health response, increasing overall mental health spending and poverty reduction initiatives as an alternative to more police spending. The Safer Cities Initiative conducted a national poll that found 80% support for creating civilian Departments of Community Safety. 

The City Council has also signaled strong support for these kinds of alternatives to policing and incarceration In last year’s budget, they added in $50 million over the mayor’s request for additional supportive housing, mental health services, mobile crisis teams and a variety of alternatives to incarceration programs. I have personally spoken to numerous Council members who have expressed general support for the proposed Department of Community Safety and its priorities. While creating new essential services will be a bureaucratic challenge, this is something that the public supports, and it doesn’t necessarily require financial support from the state or federal government.

New York City is behind the curve on many of these efforts, but Mamdani’s proposal offers a significant opportunity to move forward.