NEW YORK (1010 WINS) — New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is going against the grain of public safety rhetoric by proposing a plan that does not expand the NYPD, but rather develops a secondary agency to address root causes of crime.
Mamdani, a democratic socialist who is quickly gaining traction in the polls, introduced his Department of Community Safety plan at City Hall Park on Tuesday.
The new agency would “invest and expand in mental health outreach teams and response across the city, further invest in gun violence protection programs,” and address the hot topic of transit safety and protection.
“As we place dedicated outreach teams in 100 stations across the system, as we transform vacant commercial units to provide medical service and connections to long-term care,” he said. “And as we invest in transit ambassadors to assist New Yorkers on their journeys.”
Mamdani expects the agency to be outcome-focused, something he said his colleagues in New York politics have lost sight of.
“Outcomes that have sadly been sidelined in the face of the same kinds of narratives that we have heard from Eric Adams that have left us in this moment once again,” he said.
At his weekly media availability on Tuesday, the mayor responded to Mamdani's plan with calls for him to explain it further explain, and said that community-based policing is not an original idea.
“I’m sorry, defund-the-police-Mamdani believes all of a sudden he wants to talk about more community-based policing, something that many of you know I cut my teeth on this,” Adams said.
The agency would cost one billion dollars, Mamdani predicts, but the Queens assemblymember is confident he could more efficiently use city funds and raise revenue by raising taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers and large corporations.
The agency budget would be comprised of $600 million for existing programs, and $450 million in new funding and be run by someone in a commissioner-level position, eliminating the deputy mayor for public safety role.
While Mamdani’s public safety agenda does not add heads to the NYPD—like that of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whose proposed plan would add 5,000 new cops—it does not cut from the police.
“This does not have a relationship with any reduction in the police department’s funding,” Mamdani said. “This is clearly a new department that will provide public safety and will ensure that police can actually focus on their jobs.”
Mamdani’s Department of Community Safety would relieve police of addressing 911 calls reporting mental health crises, “a role for which they are not equipped,” his plan states.
By focusing on policing, he predicts that officers will see higher boosts in morale and lower rates of burnout, two reasons cited by NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch as being behind the department’s “hiring crisis.”
The only active cuts to the NYPD that Mamdani outlines are its huge overtime budget—which reportedly cost the city over $1 billion in 2024—and a unit known as the Strategic Response Group, which responds to protests.
Mamdani said that his plan addresses crime in New York City in a different way than other candidates.
“We are not simply going to talk about it,” he said. “We are going to be about it.”