Will Mamdani Live Up to His Public Safety Promises?

“NYPD set to hire 580 extra cops under Mayor Mamdani’s latest budget.” “Mamdani promised removing cops from psych emergencies, but Tisch says no talks yet with the NYPD.” “Broken windows under Mamdani? Frustration mounts with mayor’s policing policies.”

For many New Yorkers, these headlines come as a surprise. Mamdani rightly campaigned on transforming the way we view public safety, recognizing that police aren’t the answer to every societal problem.

He pledged to send outreach workers and health professionals to respond to people in crisis instead of police, and to connect them with services. He promised to end the cruel and counterproductive practice of sweeping away the homeless. And he committed to disband the NYPD’s notoriously violent Strategic Response Group, and to scrap the NYPD’s vast, unaccountable, and racially-biased gang database.

No one was under any illusion he could do this all overnight – and he has ushered in some welcome changes – but there are reasons to be worried he’s veering away from key promises.

First, the good. The Mayor ordered an end to the NYPD’s draconian criminal summons crackdown on bicyclists, which had sowed unnecessary fear among immigrant delivery workers and was never grounded in real traffic safety concerns. He announced that the NYPD would formalize its policy on releasing body-worn camera footage of critical incidents for public scrutiny. And he announced the creation of an Office of Community Safety to promote non-law enforcement response to New Yorkers’ safety.

These steps matter and can be built upon. After all, we are still in the early days of this administration.

But not only are many of the Mayor’s core promises still unaddressed, but some of the administration’s early policing practices signal backtracking.

Despite the Mayor promising that we are not returning to the era of broken windows policing, NYPD enforcement of minor offenses is skyrocketing. The first three months of 2026 saw a 29 percent increase in the issuance of criminal summonses compared to that same period in 2025.

Summonses for minor subway infractions not including fare evasion nearly doubled in the first four months of 2026 compared to the same period in 2025. This builds on a trend that began before Mamdani took office. NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch oversaw a 3,000 percent increase in the number of court cases where the most serious charge was lying down or taking up more than one seat on public transit. And there are stark racial disparities in who officers are targeting. These tactics disproportionately criminalize unhoused people, an already vulnerable population, when what the city needs is longer-term investment in housing.

We hope Mamdani’s time as mayor marks a break from the Adams administration’s over-reliance on both street and vehicle stops. But the first few months of Mamdani’s term saw NYPD pedestrian and vehicle stops are continuing at the high rates we witnessed under the Adams administration.

Tisch’s continued reliance on broken windows policing and her ramping up of stops and arrests is at odds with the Mayor’s campaign commitments and risks police harassment and racial profiling.

The Mayor and the NYPD Commissioner have also been at odds over Mamdani’s pledge to disband the SRG and delete the gang database. Pressed on the former, Mayor Mamdani has stressed that he remains committed to disbanding the SRG and indicated that he would overrule his police commissioner if needed. But the unit continues to operate and is fully funded in the Mayor’s executive budget proposal.

As for the gang database, the Mayor has actually moved closer to Tisch’s position, backing away from his commitment to put an end to the racially-biased dragnet and suggesting that the focus was now on the implementation of prior reforms within the NYPD – reforms that do not go far enough to remedy the database’s immense harms.

When the Mayor announced the new Office of Community Safety (OCS), we were optimistic it signaled a real desire to shift from police as the default response to mental health crises. But we were dismayed by Commissioner Tisch telling City Council members at a recent hearing that “no programmatic responsibility is being shifted from the NYPD to OCS at this time, and none that I know of going forward.”

Shifting responsibility from the NYPD – which too often responds to mental health calls with aggression, escalation, and deadly force – is the entire point of a new office like this. If the NYPD commissioner is not on board, then the Mayor needs to intervene.

We’ve also heard the Office of Community Safety will continue to focus on an expansion of what’s known as B-HEARD as its crisis response model. This model does not follow proven best practices and it falls short of the kinds of response models we’ve long called for.

OCS has the potential to become a truly meaningful alternative to police for New Yorkers with mental health or substance-use-related needs, but only if it gets the support it requires and only if it is committed to implementing the right response model in the first place.

Another surprise from that same hearing was the news that the Mayor’s latest budget proposal included the hiring of nearly 600 new uniformed NYPD officers. During the campaign, candidate Mamdani was clear: keep NYPD headcount flat.

There were some early positive signs that he was committed to following through on that pledge when he canceled former Mayor Adams’ last ditch attempt to add 5,000 new officers on his way out. But now – especially given the fiscal pressures facing the city and the mayor’s commitments to building out alternatives to policing – there’s no good reason for adding more officers.

The Mayor will instead be expanding policing to the highest level seen in years. Those resources could better go toward investments in mental health, housing, and the types of services that would make this a fairer and more livable city.

Mayor Mamdani has long emphasized the need for a whole-of-government approach to community safety as opposed to policing as a one-size-fits-all solution. He campaigned by recognizing our overreliance on policing and that our decades-long failure to invest in supports for communities had contributed both our over-policing and our affordability crisis. He was right.

Now the new administration is at a critical juncture. As the Mayor himself said in his election victory speech, there can be real gaps between the poetry of campaigning and the prose of governance.

It is still early. The Mayor still has the chance to realign his promises with his policies and deliver real community safety.

Update: On June 29, 2026, the Mayor and City Council agreed upon a budget that sticks to one of Mamdani’s campaign promises. It scraps the almost 600 new police hires previously included in the proposed budget.