City Hall and NYPD officials have yet to discuss shifting police responsibilities from issues such as dealing with people having psychiatric emergencies to Mayor Mamdani’s Office of Community Safety, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch testified before the City Council on Monday.
Tisch, who is often ideologically at odds with the mayor, said that conversations about the relationship between the police department and community safety office have “not yet commenced.”
“We haven’t had strategic conversations about what’s going to shift from the NYPD to OCS because nothing is planned at this time to be shifted,” she said, adding that she expects those talks to eventually happen.
However, a spokesperson for the mayor said that OCS Commissioner Ayesha Delany-Brumsy and Deputy Mayor for Community Safety Renita Francois are scheduled to meet with Tisch later this week — noting that a meeting that was on the books before Monday’s hearing.
“The Office of Community Safety’s leadership looks forward to meeting with the Police Department to discuss ongoing efforts that advance the Mamdani administration’s whole-of-government approach to public safety and crisis response,” Sam Raskin said in response to Tisch’s comments.
Tisch said that the department’s work on issues such as gun violence prevention, domestic and gender-based violence and community mental health, issues overseen by the office of community safety, “has not stopped.” Raskin added that staffers under the OCS umbrella have been working with the NYPD on certain issues.
Mamdani pledged on the campaign trail to create a Department of Community Safety with a budget exceeding $1 billion to divert responsibility from cops in responding to mental health emergencies. In March, he announced a scaled-down version of that department.
Mamdani has earmarked $270 million proposed budget for the office, which included new funding across several of the programs under its purview. The mayor has said he still intends to move towards creating a department, a move that would require the City Council to get on board.
It’s unclear what changes the Mamdani administration intends for B-HEARD, the city’s program to dispatch social workers and EMTs to respond to emergency mental health calls. While it operates under the Fire Department and Health + Hospitals, Mamdani empowered Deputy Mayor Francois to also make policy changes to the program.
Councilmember Lincoln Restler said he was “deeply troubled” by NYPD data showing that, of nearly 18,000 calls requesting B-HEARD, just 1,411, 0.01% of calls, received a B-HEARD response.
“Does the program even exist? It was functioning at some point, It doesn’t even seem like it’s functioning today,” Restler said, adding that the program was “essentially irrelevant.”
Earlier in the heard, Tisch punted to the Fire Department, but acknowledged there is still a “huge amount of room for B-HEARD to respond to more calls.”
When the mayor announced the creation of OCS earlier this year alongside dozens of administration officials and supporters, Tisch was not in attendance.
