Mayor Mamdani is planning to appoint a deputy mayor for community safety as he readies to issue an executive order to launch the new department that the role would oversee, City Hall confirmed Thursday.
Creating a Department of Community Safety was one of Mamdani’s signature campaign promises. The mayor has said the prospective city agency should emphasize sending social workers instead of cops to the scene of a mental health crisis, and would strengthen other crisis and preventative services.
If established through an executive order, the department would be a division of the mayor’s office and not a permanent fixture of city government.
It’s not clear which, if any, other agencies would report to the new deputy mayor.
“The Mayor is deeply committed to establishing the Department of Community Safety, and this new Deputy Mayor will play a key role in setting the foundation for it with the help of First Deputy Mayor Fuleihan,” Sam Raskin, a spokesperson for the mayor, said in a statement.
Funding for the Mamdani administration’s proposed Department of Community Safety was not included in the mayor’s preliminary budget plan, nor was additional funding for B-HEARD, the city’s mental health emergency response program.
Mamdani said he planned to include funding for community safety in his upcoming executive budget proposal, which is due to be unveiled in April. Asked about the lack of additional funding for B-HEARD, the mayor pointed to “other things in the budget for mental health.”
The mayor previously said he’d work to hasten the program’s rollout in the wake of the the police shooting of Jabez Chakraborty in January.
Cops shot and critically wounded Chakraborty after responding to a 911 call from his family, who said they called requesting an ambulance because the 22-year-old with schizophrenia was in emotional distress.
“This situation underscores just how urgently we need a different and more effective mental health response system,” Mamdani said at an unrelated press conference in early February.
Rodney Harrison, former NYPD chief of department under ex-Mayor de Blasio, has been involved in conversations with the Mamdani administration on launching the effort, a source familiar with the situation told the Daily News.
Brooklyn Councilmember Lincoln Restler reintroduced a bill late last month that would create a Department of Community Safety. It’s unclear, though, whether Council Speaker Menin supports it.
On the campaign trail, Mamdani said that he’d set the new department up with a $1.1 billion budget, split between around $605 million from existing city programs and funding and another $455 million in new expenses.
