It’s not an easy question to answer.
In the early 1990s, when New Yorkers murdered one another at a clip of 2,000 a year (compare this to the 309 murders in 2025), I served as a federal prosecutor, heading up the Organized Crime Unit in the Southern District of New York. My storied predecessors had laid low the mob through a series of landmark racketeering cases, but I began to turn attention to New York’s street gangs — who, while much less famous than La Cosa Nostra and with monikers not at all as picaresque as Vincent “The Chin” Gigante and Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo, wreaked carnage in the city’s poorest neighborhoods. To give some sense of relative scale: In 1992, a bloody war for succession inside the Colombo crime family left 12 people dead. That same year, more than 30 people died in a three-block area in the Bronx after two street gangs whose names have been forgotten got into a rivalry.
This marked a new entry of the feds into the world of violent street crime, which had been the exclusive purview of local prosecutors. I was in close touch with Washington because for every racketeering indictment we wanted to file, we needed approval from the mothership Department of Justice. My colleague there never failed to start each conversation by asking: “How many people have you put in jail today?”
At the time, not 15 years distant from the Vietnam War, it didn’t seem out of place to be measuring progress by body count. In fact, it was positively modern to be measuring anything at all, let alone setting a goal like reducing crime. The New York City Police Department had only recently staked its reputation on what seemed at the time an either incredibly foolhardy or courageous claim: that they could control crime. And yet through a department-wide, painstaking and disciplined twice-weekly look at what the numbers were saying and where the cops were deployed — which everyone now knows as CompStat — they were able to mobilize the department to help drive a crime reduction that was nothing short of miraculous. While there were many factors behind the drop in crime, the “New York miracle” stands as one of the steepest and most durable reductions in the history of recorded crime.
I recite this ancient history because, like living with a kid whose growth spurts you don’t notice, it’s often hard to see how far we’ve come in thinking about crime. We’re way beyond that “aha” moment that crime is controllable. We now understand that many people and conditions, beyond cops, affect crime. Crime has more than one cause and so requires more than one solution. Strong evidence shows that, well before anyone is arrested, a change in someone’s conditions can affect a life’s course. For example, summer youth employment reduces arrests for violent crime by double-digit percentages in numerous cities where it’s been implemented. Street lighting, in randomized controlled trials in New York City, has been shown to drive down serious crime by 36%. While no one is shouting (yet!) “turn on the lights” when crime goes up, this among many approaches both strengthens civic life and also reduces crime. What makes a city hum is more often than not also what keeps crime low.
All of this poses a unique opportunity for an ambitious and creative mayor like Zohran Mamdani. He ran on a platform that hinted in this direction, suggesting that his public safety plan would look beyond the police to engage a wide variety of civic resources. At a conceptual level, this makes perfect sense. But now comes the hard reality of governance. How does Mamdani turn these vague inclinations into a concrete plan? What role will the police play in all of this? And perhaps most important, who in the administration is responsible for public safety?
The good news is that many of the pieces of a blended strategy that keeps the use of police force to a minimum and focuses on the promotion of vibrant civic life are already in place. Among just a few: The Mayor’s Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety, which I helped to launch when I was the director of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, brings together residents, a score of city agencies and community-based organizations to address issues relating to neighborhood life in a civilian “NeighborhoodStat”; the Brownsville Alliance has been modelling a program that provides largely civilian response to 911 calls; the Crisis Management System fields scores of violence interrupters to quell disputes before they turn deadly. These are all pieces of what can and should be a larger safety strategy, of which the police are an important piece, but not the only part. But someone needs to put all of these pieces together and figure out how they should intersect with the formal criminal justice system and how progress should be measured.
The criminal justice system — and all the systems that it touches, like agencies dealing with homelessness and mental illness — doesn’t run itself. It is vast, sprawling, crosses many domains, and reports to many bosses. Within the criminal justice system itself, the mayor oversees the police and the jails, but prosecutors are independently elected, judges and prisons are under the state, and defenders owe an obligation only to the zealous defense of their clients. As the mayor will soon discover, if he hasn’t already, any strategy requires a deft touch, a bit of gravitas and a way to navigate among the different interests to produce a common goal. Without clear goals and constant attention, the entire enterprise devolves to entropy.
To be fair, the new administration is not even two months old. But thus far its public safety plans seem modest, cramped and rudderless. The two visible pillars, the creation of a new Department of Community Safety and the use of the Police Department, stand in awkward and unbalanced counterweight to one another.
Left unanswered: What are the public safety goals? How will these two pieces connect to one another and to the larger network of agencies and entities? Who will synthesize the work into a strategy? How will the public know whether they have achieved results?
As sketched so far, the Department of Community Safety will house many civilian-run programs related to crime and justice, from violence interrupters to organizations offering alternatives to jail and prison, reentry services and B-HEARD, a civilian-only response to calls relating to people in mental distress. The new department has turned out to be a Rorschach test, with each group filling it up with meaning. From the point of view of some advocacy groups that have rankled under previous forms of city control, it represents an opportunity to have more prominence and control over their activities. From the point of view of some in the business community and in law enforcement, it seems a naïve and dangerous way to address crime, a “defund” agenda in sheep’s clothing.
To work, both the department and its relationship to the rest of the city need to be better defined. As described, DCS seems to be the inheritor of the tradition of the turn to civilianization of many functions that have traditionally been the purview of the police or that the police have accreted over time because, well, they are there. Prominent among these functions are interactions with people living on the street, sometimes suffering from serious mental illness. This strand of thinking evolved not just as an affirmative search for the best way to achieve safety but also as a reaction to a bitter and brutal history of police violence and wanton patrolling, concentrated most often in traditionally Black neighborhoods in our city and beyond. These excesses have been well-documented, from the LaGuardia and Kerner Commissions, to Ferguson and George Floyd and, in our own city, where the practice of widespread stop and frisks reached a citywide high of almost 700,000 stops before being declared unconstitutional by a federal court. It has been a phantom limb, an unerasable reminder of the misuse of force and authority, and the role of race that may be a part of the motivation behind DCS. Deaths of people suffering from mental illness at the hands of police have become the most prominently expressed reason for DCS.
With the recent deaths of 18 people in the cold, questions have sharpened about what DCS will do and how a massive expansion of civilians responding to calls of mental distress without the police will operate. The unanswered questions here could stand in for questions about DCS as a whole. B-HEARD has struggled, answering only a third of eligible mental health calls, failing to stabilize those it does respond to and overall suffering from a lack of governance. This is not surprising because — putting aside the looming issue of whether a civilian-only approach is best — it does not have adequate places to bring people in need. That is, the rest of the system is not built out or coordinated so that B-HEARD can function.
Beyond B-HEARD, what is the role and function of DCS? It is unclear. Right now, it looks like a rearrangement of the many programs run by nonprofits that already operate in the city. They are united under the DCS umbrella less by topic than by form. Each of those needs to be coordinated and connected to the various systems that surround it. For example, diversion programs need judges (and prosecutors who make recommendations) to be confident that they will place defendants in them. Violence interrupters need connections to the Police Department so that they have, at a minimum, additional information about where violence is brewing. And the City, which spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on nonprofits, needs to carefully track what results they are producing and ideally hold them accountable. This is a tall order even when the City directly supervises its workers. But it becomes even more challenging when, through a glass darkly, the City has to eke out performance through the contracting process.
Without knowing that this is the case, I guess that DCS was conceived as a counterweight to police and police alone occupying the field of safety. I understand and appreciate that instinct. But as presented, the department does not appear to have the power or place or mandate to be that balance. In fact, the lack of clarity over function, governance and connection leaves the field of public safety to the police. Of course, police will always be a part of safety when force is necessary. They can do things that no one else can do. They have the budget, manpower, range and coverage of the city to be the mainstay as they have been for decades. But they can’t and shouldn’t do everything. As has become plain over the decades, public safety is about more than investigation, arrest and prosecution. It touches on many aspects of visible distress — homelessness and mental illness. It can be secured through many avenues — the design of public places, the development of work and of housing.
Pulling back the camera to the great array of ways to reduce risk and control behavior — at the heart of crime reduction — shows why the police department alone is not a public safety strategy. But because of their size and prominence, despite knowing all this, the city defaults to the primacy of the police. Structurally, the police commissioner reports directly to the mayor. Symbolically, the mayor and even presidents traditionally make the pilgrimage to police headquarters when there is a crime announcement, the police commissioner doesn’t come to City Hall. In a world where all the resources that contribute to public safety were mobilized, the police department and the other civic resources important in this endeavor, whether housed in DCS or arranged another way, would report to one responsible person in City Hall, preferably a deputy mayor for public safety with the power to devise and execute on a blended and coordinated strategy.
What has always been 3-D chess — trying to make a criminal justice system with no boss and many cross currents function well — has now become even more complex with an erratic president driven by vindictive and destructive impulses. The entry of the feds into the world of street violence in the 1990s is a stark contrast to the aggressive and brutal presence of the president’s growing army of ICE agents. We do not know whether that presence will grow and how it might, among many other things, threaten the relationship of New Yorkers to the NYPD and require new safety strategies. We face some uncertain times ahead that will require New York City to marshal all its resources in the most focused way. We will likely face cuts from the federal budget that could send us hurtling off a fiscal cliff even steeper than the one that the mayor has recently spoken about. And there are so many other twists and turns that we cannot even guess now.
But we should expect that the feds’ diabolical inventiveness this past year in undermining the law, untrammeled by any restraints of custom, history or decency, is prologue to the next three. The antidote to all of this will be the creation of a citywide strategy led by someone who thinks broadly — and every day — synthesizing the power of both enforcement and civic authorities toward common goals.
What is the plan?