Fulfilling a campaign pledge, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Thursday created the city's first Office of Community Safety, which will create a cohesive strategy to handle mental health emergencies.
Renita Francois, a former civil servant who has worked at Brooklyn Family Court, was named as deputy mayor of the new department. She will be in charge of streamlining various city programs under one roof, create new policies and expand the B-HEARD (Behavioral Health Emergency Assistance Response Division) program, which dispatches a team of health professionals, including EMTs/paramedics from NYC Fire Department and mental health professionals from NYC Health + Hospitals, to 911 mental health calls.
"Today is a day of ambition, a day where we commit to approaching public safety with the complexity and the innovation that it deserves," the mayor said before he signed an executive order to create the new office.
Police officers respond to about 200,000 mental health calls per year, Mamdani said. The new office will house three divisions: The Division of Neighborhood Safety, the Division of Community Mental Health, and the Division of Strategic Initiatives.
"By centralizing that work within the same division, we will be able to bring unprecedented strategic focus to preventing violence in this city," Mamdani said.
Francois said her past work as the director of the Mayor's Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety helped her to understand how New Yorkers have been waiting for government to do its part to scale back violence and mental health disparities, especially in minority neighborhoods.
"I've seen the power of NYCHA residents to identify threats to their safety, to study deeply to understand its complexities, and create a plan of action to address it, all while waiting for the government to show up and do its part at scale," she said. "Yet we've still been waiting. Waiting for a transformation of our government that acknowledges that we cannot punish our way to better lives. We must do the hard thing and build not just a program, but a government that responds to the needs of its people."
The city cannot overhaul public safety overnight, nor can it continue to do what has already failed our communities, said Public Advocate Jumaane Williams.
"By gradually rebuilding existing infrastructure and creating innovative systems, we can sustain transformational change in the long term," he said in a statement.
Every year, thousands of New Yorkers experiencing the crises of homelessness, mental health challenges, and substance misuse are not connected with the support and resources they need, said The Legal Aid Society.
"These individuals – who are disproportionately low-income people of color – are met with force from New York City Police Department officers that oftentimes leads to avoidable arrests or, in dire cases, injury or death," the organization said in a statement. “The Office of Community Safety must direct the long overdue work that requires de-escalation of these crises and reduces overall harm by diverting responses
