New York City socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani is putting $260 million into his new Office of Community Safety even as the city struggles with a major budget shortfall, the Washington Free Beacon reports. The office is designed to send social workers, rather than police, to some hate crimes, mental health emergencies, and other incidents usually handled by law enforcement.
Mamdani created the office through a March 19 executive order and announced the initial funding at the same signing ceremony. The money was shifted from existing city programs, and he said more funding could be added later, according to the New York Times. During his campaign, he had promised to eventually fund the larger effort at $1.1 billion.
The move comes as Mamdani’s proposed $127 billion budget has drawn warnings from credit rating agencies about the city’s long-term finances. He has said he wants to find $1.7 billion in cuts, but so far has only identified about $200 million in savings, according to the Free Beacon.
Critics say the timing is especially striking because the city faces a reported $5.4 billion budget gap through fiscal 2027. John Ketcham of the Manhattan Institute argued that the new office alone amounts to roughly 5 percent of that shortfall and pointed out that the mayor has not announced a hiring freeze, even though personnel costs make up the biggest share of the budget.
There is also uncertainty about what the office will actually do. The executive order gives the office oversight of several existing agencies and programs, including crime victim services, gun violence prevention, hate crime prevention, domestic violence services, and community mental health, but it offers few concrete details beyond that.
According to the outlet, “As the Free Beacon reported during the campaign, Mamdani said during a 2020 podcast appearance that a list of ‘different situations that would be far better handled by people trained to deal with those specific situations, as opposed to an individual with a gun,’ includes ‘domestic violence.’” The overview on his campaign website also explained that Mamdani would fight hate crimes through creating ‘restorative justice processes,’ instituting ‘community-based bystander training,’ and enlisting ‘mental health navigators.’ Several hate crime survivors told the Free Beacon in August that having anyone other than police respond to those crimes would have serious consequences.”
Mamdani has named Renita Francois, who previously worked for a Soros-backed nonprofit, as deputy mayor for community safety, and he says he will appoint a commissioner soon. Supporters of the plan describe it as an early step toward a broader Department of Community Safety, but even that larger vision was vague, with more than $600 million of the proposed $1.1 billion budget coming from unspecified “transfers of existing programs.”
The proposal has also revived scrutiny of Mamdani’s past criticism of the NYPD. He once called for defunding the department and described it as “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety,” though during the campaign he said he was not running to defund the police. Critics, including some former law enforcement officials, say the new office could strain city resources without meaningfully reducing the NYPD’s workload.
Councilwoman Vickie Paladino (R) reportedly told the Free Beacon, “while it’s true that this executive order might not be everything he promised his radical base on the campaign trail, it nonetheless represents the beginning of what will inevitably be a relentless grind by the left to make the NYPD subservient to the activists who will run this department.”