Mayor Zohran Mamdani has made only baby steps toward fulfilling his campaign pledges to overhaul New York City’s public safety apparatus — and police reformers who backed him say that’s just fine.

Prominent criminal justice advocates who championed Mamdani’s election say they’re optimistic about his policing reform agenda, even as he has scaled or walked back several campaign promises nearly three months into his tenure.

The mayor promised to ban the NYPD’s controversial Strategic Response Group, end the department’s gang database, launch a new billion-dollar community safety agency and give police watchdogs more authority over police discipline.

But so far, he has tempered his rhetoric on the SRG, a unit deployed to protests that has faced steady criticism for use of force and civil rights abuses. Mamdani has also stayed silent on the NYPD’s gang database while his police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, defended it. During his campaign, Mamdani said the database included people with little or no connection to gang activity.

Mamdani’s billion-dollar Department of Community Safety is, for now, just an office and the city hasn’t said how much funding it will receive.

Advocates who pushed for his election say the incremental approach is a feature, not a bug.

"If you make massive wholesale changes and then there's some kind of statistics with crime that someone can point to and claim that there's a correlation, then you get set back," said Andrew Case, senior counsel at LatinoJustice, a civil rights group.

He pointed to the early months of former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration, when the murder of two NYPD officers derailed a reform agenda, as a cautionary tale.

"If you make modest changes and show modest success, it builds strength, confidence and community support,” Case said.

Mamdani signed an executive order last week creating the Office of Community Safety, a scaled-back version of his campaign promise to build a standalone Department of Community Safety. The office will oversee the Division of Neighborhood Safety, the Office to Prevent Gun Violence and the Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes, among other existing groups.

Advocates said they accepted the administration has been prioritizing housing and affordability first, with public safety taking a backseat.

"It feels like certain things are taking a long time because there's been so much anticipation for change," said Janos Marton, chief advocacy officer at progressive nonprofit Dream.org, who served on Mamdani's transition team. He said the administration deserves at least a 100-day window before facing serious criticism. That deadline arrives in a little over two weeks.

Alex Vitale, a Brooklyn College professor who also served on the transition team, said the mayor’s smaller launch of the community safety agency was deliberate.

"When the Mamdani people make a decision, it is a real decision that they are committed to, that there is a plan behind," Vitale said. "Contrasted with the Adams administration's approach of symbolic gestures and czar appointments that led nowhere.”

Mamdani bypassed what Vitale described as an uncooperative City Council speaker to get the office running rather than haggling for months over the scope of a new department, the professor said.

A spokesperson for Council Speaker Julie Mennin did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Public Advocate Jumaane Williams offered a preemptive defense of the administration's pace of reform when news of the office was first announced.

"We cannot overhaul public safety overnight because we didn't get here overnight," he said. "And to try to do that would threaten both success and safety."

Still, some progressive advocates have criticized Mamdani’s administration for leaving several of his campaign’s key public safety promises unfulfilled.

“It's not the transformative approach to public safety that he was really campaigning on,” said Yul-san Liem, deputy director at Justice Committee, a police reform advocacy group.

Mamdani also has yet to name an inspector general to independently monitor the NYPD.

"The inspector general's office, we haven't seen any movement there," Vitale said. "I think it’s slow.”

A City Hall spokesperson listed a number of Mamdani’s recent public safety actions, including ending criminal summonses for traffic violations by cyclists and e-bike riders and codifying a 30-day deadline to release police body-camera footage.

And a City Hall official said Mamdani and the NYPD were still discussing how to disband the SRG and decouple protest response from counterterrorism.

“The Mamdani administration is just getting started on its public safety agenda,” spokesperson Sam Raskin said. “The mayor will have more to share on these critical issues in the weeks ahead.”