Mamdani’s Mental Health Response Wins Fans in Adams Turf as NYPD Role Debated

As New Yorkers tire of policing’s limitations, a mayoral front-runner’s plan to overhaul mental health response signals a pivotal shift in urban public safety—and in how cities define civic order.

Sirens still pierce New York’s nights with metronomic regularity, each wail a reminder of a city whose faith in policing remains fraught. Yet in places once reliably pro-cop—Coney Island, Wakefield, Rochdale Village—change is in the air. The upcoming mayoral election, weeks away, finds locals not clamouring for more blue uniforms or batons, but voicing unexpected support for Zohran Mamdani’s plan to sideline police from most mental health emergencies.

The proposal, articulated by the Democratic nominee and poll leader, is as simple as it is radical: rather than dispatch NYPD officers, often carrying little more than pepper spray and pistols for tools, the city would send teams of clinicians and social workers to attend to non-violent mental health calls. The police, Mamdani argues, should focus on serious criminal threats. He proposes a new Department of Community Safety—initially underwritten by over $1 billion from reallocated city funds and projected new taxes on the wealthy.

It is a departure from New York’s political recent past. In 2021, under a backdrop of resurgent concern about shootings and homelessness, Mayor Eric Adams—himself a former NYPD captain—sailed to victory by promising more, not fewer, police. His bet: fear of disorder would trump misgivings about enforcement excess. Four years later, crime remains the city’s top electoral concern—yet in numerous precincts Adams won handily last time, voters now question not if but how police should intervene.

This is not an abstract debate. Data from NYPD and advocacy groups record dozens of fatal police encounters with mentally distressed individuals in the past decade. The city’s mishmash of mental health programmes—the most prominent being the poorly funded B-HEARD pilot—has failed to scale, hampered by budget limits and institutional entropy. In the past year, while overall crime fell citywide, high-profile incidents in the Bronx and Brooklyn have rekindled anxiety about the costs of treat-everything-with-policing as a default.

In interviews across five disparate borough neighbourhoods, Gothamist reports a striking new consensus: few want to eliminate the police, but most do not want them as first responders for garden-variety crises. East Harlem shopkeepers and East New York tenants alike agree the status quo “just isn’t working.” One Coney Island resident summed it up with the precision of a ballot slogan: “You shouldn’t have to shoot someone with mental issues.”

If complex in its administration, the logic of the policy is straightforward. Trained professionals can de-escalate situations where guns are likelier to do harm than good. The Department of Community Safety, as envisaged, would coordinate clinical response and connect distressed individuals with housing or treatment, not the trauma and paperwork of jail. Meanwhile, Mamdani promises police will retain primacy in high-risk calls—enough, perhaps, to reassure the segment of the electorate still haunted by the memory of the city’s early-1990s nadir.

Sceptics, inevitably, abound. Opponents—most notably former Governor Andrew Cuomo and Republican Curtis Sliwa—are pledging thousands of new police hires, evoking a hard-hats-vs-eggheads debate that dates back at least to the Dinkins-Giuliani years. A muscular law-and-order stance still resonates with parts of the electorate, and polling suggests that perceptions of public safety, however misleading, matter as much as hard figures.

Funding may pose as much of a headache as institutional inertia. Mamdani’s plan relies on taxes aimed at New York’s high earners and big business, subject to approval from skittish legislators in Albany. Past mayors’ social-justice moonshots—De Blasio’s “ThriveNYC” comes to mind—foundered on the rocks of fiscal conservatism and union opposition. Implementing a parallel public safety bureaucracy will demand sustained political capital and deft fiscal engineering.

A new urban consensus, locally and beyond

Yet for all its ambition, the Mamdani plan’s embrace of “de-policing” mental health is hardly sui generis. Cities across North America—Denver, San Francisco, Toronto—have launched similar clinician-led response teams. Early data is cautiously encouraging. Denver’s STAR programme, for instance, resolved 1,400 calls without a single arrest or use of force in its first year; Toronto’s equivalent saw a drop in unnecessary hospital transports. Yet scaling such efforts in a city of New York’s size and social complexity is an order of magnitude harder.

Globally, the basic insight—that urban order cannot be maintained purely by policing—is gaining purchase. London’s Metropolitan Police, for example, has raised alarms that triaging mental health emergencies distracts from violent crime. Public attitudes, too, appear in flux. Surveys reveal that in major Western cities, faith in uniformed enforcement is brittle, particularly among millennials and communities of colour.

History abounds with pivots in public safety philosophy—for better and worse. The “broken windows” turn of the 1990s achieved real gains but begat new injustices. New York’s looming experiment could, if executed well, mark a belated correction: shifting from reflexive enforcement to nuanced intervention. At stake is not just a single city’s emotional pulse, but an urban governance model many others watch keenly.

We hesitate to declare victory before the ink is dry on city and state budgets—and before the first cohort of social workers withstands the rough realities of the South Bronx on a steamy July night. But data, not nostalgia, should guide the city’s hand. Dispatching police to every societal ill is both costly and, increasingly, seen as counterproductive. If Mamdani’s proposal bodes a new “public safety” compact for big cities, it at least signals a readiness to question stale assumptions.

Few things in New York are as durable as civic scepticism. Yet in a campaign season notable for its precarious optimism, consensus quietly bubbles beneath the din: perhaps policing is not the only—or even the best—tool for every crisis. If that lesson holds, it may mark the city’s most consequential swing in decades, not just for the anxious boroughs of today but for the restless metropolises of tomorrow. ■