New Yorkers in several neighborhoods where Mayor Eric Adams won handily on a platform of reducing crime through increased policing now say they’re ready to embrace policies meant to minimize NYPD involvement — and potential harm — in mental health crises.
Gothamist visited five neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan and the Bronx where Adams, a former NYPD officer, won by wide margins in 2021 and where some categories of major crime have risen this year despite an overall drop citywide. While more than two dozen residents interviewed disagreed about who should be the next mayor, almost all voiced support for front-runner and Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani’s proposal to have police focus on serious crime and have clinicians handle mental health emergencies where the risk of violence is low.
Recent polling indicates crime remains a top concern for voters, and most New Yorkers believe the city is facing a mental health crisis. Yet the majority of those Gothamist spoke with said police are not the best equipped to address many mental health cases, and are concerned that officers’ actions too often escalate into lethal force. Asking social workers to tackle more mental health calls instead would “be a whole lot better, because you shouldn’t have to shoot someone with … mental issues,” Coney Island resident Naomi Hall said.
Public safety and mental health experts said Mamdani’s plan is ambitious and would take time to enact, assuming his administration could secure the necessary funding. But most of the voters Gothamist interviewed — in East New York, Coney Island, Rochdale Village, Wakefield and East Harlem — said they’re willing to take that chance. Even among those who said they will vote for former Gov. Andrew Cuomo or stay home this election, most spoke favorably about a proposal like Mamdani’s and said police should concentrate more on dangerous crimes.
Residents said their thinking was driven by an increased awareness of mental health incidents in their communities and the city as a whole. Adams, who ran on a pro-law enforcement agenda in the 2021 election, dropped out of the current race in late September. Cuomo and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa are pledging to hire thousands of extra police if elected.
Mamdani, who most polls show is leading by double-digit percentages, wants to maintain the current number of budgeted NYPD officers, while establishing a new Department of Community Safety that would coordinate the city’s responses to many mental health and homelessness calls. He says the agency would be funded using more than $1 billion from existing revenue, as well as proposed new taxes on affluent New Yorkers and corporations. Those new taxes would require the approval of state lawmakers.
“Police have a critical role to play, but right now we’re relying on them to deal with the failures of our social safety net, which is preventing them from doing their actual jobs,” Mamdani said in a campaign video on his plan. “It’s one of the reasons so many crimes are left unresolved.”
While the city and state deploy mental health teams for some 911 calls, the approach put forward by Mamdani’s campaign remains untested at scale.
“ I feel like adding more NYPD officers probably won't really solve anything,” Bronx resident Tanasia Brown said at the Harlem-125th Street Metro-North station. “They need people that actually work with mental health patients and can calm them down or take action when they see something going on.”
Mamdani’s plan draws popular support but some skepticism
Mamdani, a democratic socialist and state assemblymember, has campaigned partly on overhauling the city’s B-HEARD pilot program, which dispatches mental health professionals to certain 911 calls where the subject does not seem at risk of harming themself or others. He wants peer counselors to be included on every B-HEARD team and expand the program citywide. Although official data shows the teams are responding to an increasing number of mental health calls, police still handle the vast majority.
Mental illness is a very, very serious issue in all five boroughs.
Abzal Amate, 40, with his 9-month-old son Remy in Rochdale Village
Other aspects of Mamdani’s platform include utilizing vacant commercial space in the subways to treat homeless New Yorkers and tripling the size of the Mobile Crisis Team program, which also brings in mental health professionals for less urgent incidents in response to 988 calls. But New Yorkers with serious mental health issues have been left on waitlists when trying to enroll in the program, and city officials and advocates say the teams sometimes take several hours to arrive after a 988 call.
Jeff Coots, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who specializes in public health, said limiting police presence when responding to homeless or mentally ill New Yorkers could ultimately win over some police officers — because officers are often forced to deal with these situations due to insufficient investment in social services.
Coots noted Mamdani’s proposal identified evidence-based practices that have worked in other states, like Oregon, Colorado and Washington. Revamping the city’s mental health services, and investing money in the issue, could be an important signal to residents that city leaders are prioritizing it.
But Coots added that staffing could prove challenging, because there is already a shortage of public mental health workers.
“These types of plans and these types of programs run into the grinder if you can’t staff the program that you've designed,” Coots said.
Patrick Hendry, president of the Police Benevolent Association union, said reassigning mental health calls would not significantly relieve officers’ workload as they only account for a small fraction of all 911 calls.
“Right now, the NYPD does not have the staffing to provide adequate patrol coverage in many precincts, and we’re still losing more than 300 cops every month to resignation and retirement,” he said in a statement. “Solving our city’s police staffing crisis requires meaningful improvements to police officers’ quality-of-life and compensation to help keep them on the job.”
Still, experts said Cuomo’s and Sliwa’s plans to add 5,000 and 7,000 additional NYPD officers, respectively, could also run into hurdles due to challenges in hiring, retention and attrition. Mamdani says he does not intend to grow the department’s budgeted headcount of 35,000 officers.
A recent study by the civic group Vital City found having more officers doesn’t always equate to more public safety. Crime in the city fell consistently across multiple years where the number of uniformed NYPD officers also waned, the study found.
“More important is where those officers are deployed and what they are asked to do,” author John Hall, a former department executive, wrote in his report. It found that adding 5,000 officers to police ranks would cost about $500 million a year, which would eventually grow to $1 billion if they reach top pay, though bigger staffing could help reduce NYPD overtime costs.
‘Not a lot of people helping with mental health’
Across multiple interviews, New Yorkers who were previously unfamiliar with Mamdani’s plan said they supported adding mental health professionals to public safety responses after Gothamist laid out the mayoral candidates’ respective proposals.
“I would take [Mamdani] because he's helping more of the mental state of this community,” Rochdale Village resident Abzal Amate said, rocking his 9-month-old son. “It’s just a whole different aspect of something, a change, something different.”
Other voters from areas that leaned toward Adams in 2021 expressed similar opinions.
“They got people out here that is really out of they mind,” said Timothy Grant, a 65-year-old East New York resident and retired plumber, adding he generally doesn’t trust police to handle mental health crises. “Mental illness is a very, very serious issue in all five boroughs.”
On a September morning in Wakefield, Gothamist stood by as Sam Jones helped two paramedics lift an unconscious man who appeared to be having an overdose into an ambulance. Jones, a social worker, said similar emergencies are a near-daily occurrence in the neighborhood, but he and other community members try to avoid getting police involved because people “go through struggles” that don’t always require a law enforcement response.
“The cops will either lock them up or … they'll detain them and then they'll call an EMS,” he said. “There's not a lot of people out here helping the community with mental health.”
