Police will most likely keep showing up as the city’s first responders to mental health and other emergency calls even if Mayor Zohran Mamdani builds the new Department of Community Safety he has promised, according to an analysis by the news outlet THE CITY.
Mamdani campaigned on reforming how the city handles police encounters, pledging to create a Department of Community Safety that would shift many of those encounters away from the NYPD and toward mental health workers, THE CITY reported. But the outlet’s review of existing city programs concluded that officers would still be dispatched in most cases, raising questions about how far the proposed overhaul would go in practice.
THE CITY framed its analysis around the police shooting of Jabez Chakraborty in Queens. The NYPD has said the shooting was justified, asserting that Chakraborty lunged at officers with a large kitchen knife, according to the outlet. THE CITY said it examined the sequence of events leading up to the shooting alongside the city’s current response efforts.
The outlet, which titled its account “Why police show up 86 percent of the time,” said the case illustrates the gap between Mamdani’s stated goal of moving mental health crisis response out of police hands and the reality of who currently answers such calls. The administration has cast the Department of Community Safety as the vehicle for that change, THE CITY reported.
As of publication, the analysis indicated the proposed department had not yet displaced police as the default responders in the situations it is meant to address.
