Canceled hires, slower response times, and a new Department of Community Safety — a debate that won’t wait
A Mayor Who Ran on Reimagining Public Safety Now Has to Govern It
When Zohran Mamdani canceled plans for 5,000 new NYPD hires shortly after taking office, he framed it as a down payment on a different vision of public safety — one where mental health professionals, community intervention workers, and social services handle crises that do not require a badge and a gun. His critics framed it as recklessness in a city that, by some measures, is still recovering from a post-pandemic surge in certain categories of violent crime. Both framings contain partial truths, and the debate between them is now playing out in real time as Mamdani’s first year in office takes shape.
The Case Against the Hire Cancellations
Rafael Mangual, writing in Fox News Opinion, marshaled statistics to argue that Mamdani is gutting the NYPD at precisely the wrong moment. His data: a 26.9% overall increase in major crime since 2018, including a 14.2% rise in rapes, 16.7% in robberies, 47.7% in felony assaults, and a 149.1% increase in vehicle thefts. He also cited significant slowdowns in NYPD response times — increases of more than 50% in some categories — and warned that a wave of retirements expected in coming years would compound the reduction in force caused by the hire cancellations. These are not trivial concerns. Police staffing levels and response times are real factors in public safety outcomes, and the burden of slower response falls most heavily on communities that are already under-resourced and underserved. Critics of Mamdani’s approach argue that canceling hires without a robust alternative system in place is not a reform — it is a gap.
The Case for a Different Approach
Mamdani is working with Brooklyn College sociologist and policing scholar Alex Vitale, who has been advising the development of a new Department of Community Safety. The concept draws on models from cities that have experimented with non-police crisis response, including Albuquerque, New Mexico, where more than 85% of 911 calls have been successfully diverted to alternative responders, and Durham, North Carolina, where HEART teams have handled mental health calls without police involvement. Vitale has noted publicly that Mamdani’s explicitly socialist political analysis sets him apart from other progressive mayors who have attempted policing reform without addressing the underlying economic conditions — inequality, housing insecurity, lack of services — that generate the conditions for crime in the first place. The City Council has introduced a resolution to formally create a Department of Community Safety. Plans under development include independent mental health crisis response, a dedicated hate crime response program that does not route through traditional policing channels, and expanded subway safety initiatives.
The Surveillance Question
Separately, civil liberties advocates at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.) have released a report urging Mamdani to use his mayoral authority to scale back the NYPD’s surveillance infrastructure — without waiting for the City Council or state lawmakers. The report’s eight recommended steps include blocking ICE from accessing city surveillance data, abolishing the gang database (in which Black and Latino New Yorkers make up 98% of those listed), ending facial recognition use, grounding routine drone patrols, and prohibiting so-called dragnet warrants. The NYPD currently deploys drones more than 1,000 times per month, at a cost of $2.6 million in new equipment in 2024 alone, with more than 60 reported crashes. The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project argues these tools strip away privacy without demonstrable public safety benefits.
Commissioner Tisch and the Tensions Within
Mamdani retained Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch from the previous administration — a signal that he was not going to make wholesale personnel changes at the top of the department. Tisch has overseen a genuine reduction in gun violence and has defended tools like the gang database as essential to that work. The snowball fight dispute — in which Tisch called for a criminal investigation while Mamdani declined to back charges — has surfaced publicly what observers have long suspected: that the mayor and commissioner have meaningful policy differences on use of prosecution and surveillance. Both have insisted their relationship is functional. Whether it remains so as the Department of Community Safety takes shape is an open question.
What the Evidence Says About Reform
The academic evidence on police reform is genuinely mixed — which should caution both sides against certainty. Research from the Policing Project at NYU School of Law suggests that the most durable reforms combine transparency, community input, clear use-of-force standards, and investment in alternative response systems. Simply cutting police budgets without building replacement capacity does not reliably reduce crime or improve community safety. Equally, the research does not support the claim that more police officers automatically produce less crime — staffing levels are one factor among many, and the quality of community relationships often matters more than raw numbers. Mamdani has time to build the alternative system he is envisioning. What he does not have is the luxury of a gap between the old approach and the new one. The city will not wait.
