The safety dance begins.
A progressive City Council member pushed a bill on Thursday to create a controversial “Department of Community Safety” pushed by Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani that would reshape the way the city responds to 911 calls.
Brooklyn Democrat Lincoln Restler introduced the legislation as he claimed a majority of his council comrades support the new department intended to send civilian mental health professionals instead of cops to respond to many emergency calls.
“We have a long way to go to negotiate the exact responsibilities of the agency, the staffing that will be required, the budget that will be necessitated, and we’ll work through those issues with the administration in the weeks and months to come,” he said.
But despite Restler’s boast of majority support, the reality of pushing it through the council – and funding and creating a new bureaucracy – isn’t so simple.
The bill has 26 other co-sponsors on the 51-member council – but five of the supporters are set to leave office next year, leaving Restler without a majority.
Perhaps even more troublesome for Mamdani and Restler, the council’s presumptive next Speaker Julie Menin has not signed onto the bill.
Whether Menin would put the bill up for a vote next year wasn’t immediately clear.
“It gets introduced and dies in 2 weeks,” one insider quipped, calling the bill “clickbait.”
Mamdani campaigned on creating the agency as a way to remove police from responding to 911 calls for a person in emotional distress.
The far-left mayor-elect put the price tag for the new department at $1.1 billion.
Restler said the city can find the money, although he didn’t mention the projected $6.5 billion budget gap Mamdani will have inherited from Mayor Eric Adams.
“We have a $116 billion budget,” Restler said. “I’m confident we can identify the resources to, you know, make this new agency a reality.”
The plan has been hailed from the progressive wing of the party, however, opponents have argued it would add more bureaucracy to the complex response system.
Few details have been put forward by the Mamdani team about how they would ensure the calls would be redirected properly with an antiquated 911 system and staffing shortages among dispatchers.
Currently, mental health calls where there is no threat to the public or others are already supposed to be directed to a set of mental health professionals under the B-Heard program.
But the pilot program launched by ex-Mayor Bill de Blasio and continued by Mayor Eric Adams has struggled to ensure all those calls are redirected away from cops.
“No matter what other agencies our city leaders create, there is no substitute for an adequately staffed and supported police department,” said Patrick Hendry, president of the powerful Police Benevolent Association union.
“Mental health emergencies only account for a small fraction of the calls we respond to each year. Reassigning those calls alone won’t make a significant dent in our workload.”
