City Council Introduces Bill to Create Mamdani’s Community Safety Agency

The proposed Department of Community Safety would send mental health teams to respond to 911 calls, rather than the police, according to Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s plans.

The City Council introduced a bill on Thursday to create a new New York City agency that would deploy mental health teams to respond to 911 calls — advancing a key part of Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s agenda.

The bill’s main sponsor, Lincoln Restler, a progressive council member from Brooklyn, said he hoped that the measure would be voted on early in the new year once Mr. Mamdani takes office. Twenty-six current Council members are listed as co-sponsors of the bill in the 51-member body, indicating strong support for the legislation.

“We ask our police officers to respond to every issue under the sun, and it distracts them from preventing and solving violent crimes,” Mr. Restler said in an interview.

Mr. Mamdani, a democratic socialist who ran for mayor on an affordability message, proposed the civilian-led Department of Community Safety on the campaign trail as part of his 17-page public safety plan. It would be separate from the Police Department, dispatching mental health teams for emergency calls and expanding street-level programs intended to stop the cycle of violence. It would have an annual budget of $1 billion and allow police officers to not be the default responders to mental health calls.

For Mr. Mamdani, who takes office on Jan. 1, along with a handful of new Council members, the bill is an early indication of the Council’s intent to work with him rather than oppose him.

He said in a statement, “This legislation is an important first step towards creating the Department of Community Safety, an initiative that will use a whole-of-government approach to tackle gun violence, address the mental health crisis head-on and help deliver public safety for all New Yorkers.”

A spokesman for the Police Department declined to comment on the bill. Mr. Mamdani has said that he has spoken to Jessica Tisch, the police commissioner who will continue in her role in the Mamdani administration, about the importance of the new safety agency.

On Thursday, Commissioner Tisch said she has had several “great conversations” with Mr. Mamdani and his team.

“We’re doing briefings on different topics,” Commissioner Tisch said during a news conference with Gov. Kathy Hochul where they announced a decrease in crimes on the subway. “What I can tell you is that the mayor-elect and his team are committed to public safety.”

Ms. Hochul declined to give her assessment.

“We’re going to have conversations with the mayor-elect about public safety overall,” she said.

Mr. Restler said the bill would create a framework for the new agency and establish “community safety offices” across the city with trained personnel. The department would provide services and conduct outreach and patrols to make sure that vulnerable New Yorkers are receiving “wraparound” care like mental health treatment, social services and housing.

Julie Menin, a city councilwoman from Manhattan who is expected to become the Council speaker in January, is not listed as a sponsor, though some of her allies are. She has said that she would thoroughly examine the plan and supported not having police officers respond to some mental health incidents.

“I do believe that we are asking police officers to do too much with too little,” Ms. Menin said in a an interview last month.

Union leaders have said they are skeptical of any plan that removes officers from scenarios that can quickly escalate into dangerous confrontations with a person in the throes of a mental health crisis,.

Jillian Snider, a retired New York police officer who now teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said neither the Mamdani plan nor the City Council proposal outlines how a 911 dispatcher should handle such calls, which can come in with little information about the circumstances.

“When someone calls 911 and says, ‘Help, help, I’m having a crisis” then click, how is that person trained to say is this a safe situation,” Ms. Snider said. “Is this person a danger to themselves or others?”

She said it would be safer and more effective to invest more in programs that pair officers and mental health professionals so they can respond together, an approach that has been tried in other parts of the country, including in New Jersey.

“I don’t think the default should be not to send cops,” Ms. Snider said. “That situation can get extremely dangerous very quickly.”

Mr. Mamdani has said that about $600 million of the agency’s $1 billion budget would come from existing programs, and it would require $450 million in new funding. It would be run by a commissioner, and Mr. Mamdani would eliminate the deputy mayor for public safety, a role that Mayor Eric Adams revived in 2022.

Mr. Mamdani has pointed to the success of similar efforts in cities like Albuquerque, N.M., where the safety agency has responded to 100,000 calls for service.

Civil rights groups and progressive elected officials have long called for a more expansive view of public safety that goes beyond policing and focuses on reducing poverty and addressing mental health problems. They have criticized stop-and-frisk policing and supported the use of so-called violence interrupters, who try to defuse disputes before they escalate.

Mr. Adams has opposed many of Mr. Mamdani’s public safety proposals, including the mayor-elect’s vow to end the clearing of homeless encampments. The mayor’s senior adviser on severe mental illness, Brian Stettin, recently wrote a piece opposing the new agency, arguing that the same goals could be achieved through the existing infrastructure of city government.

Mr. Adams, who is in Mexico as part of his extended travels during his final weeks in office, also took steps to create a new city entity. He signed an executive order on Wednesday to establish the “first-ever Mayor’s Office of Rodent Mitigation.” He said it would “streamline coordination” across city government and community groups to continue his “war on rats.”

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