What Mamdani Can Learn from a de Blasio Administration Safety Innovation

Despite decreases in murders and shootings to prepandemic levels, public polling and sentiment data suggest that New Yorkers still don’t feel safe. This may be because, despite reductions in some crimes, many city crime rates — especially assaults — remain stubbornly high. It may reflect a disconnect between reality and sensationalist news reports. But a large part of the disconnect may be a measurement problem: The way we view safety varies widely depending on several factors ranging from the condition of the physical space we occupy to the levels of economic opportunity in a given neighborhood. 

For instance, a female New Yorker may consider catcalling and comments on the subway, something that isn’t necessarily a crime and isn’t captured in crime data, a violation of her sense of safety. Illegal commercial dumping near public housing units creates serious concerns for families and residents. Or, poorly lit areas in neighborhoods can significantly erode a tenant’s feeling of security.

Police, whose core job is to respond to and investigate crime, are and should remain an essential part of the safety apparatus. But in order to build a sustainable sense of security and well-being, there has to be a larger investment in a community’s ability to stop crime before it has a chance to manifest. We already know things like addressing the physical infrastructure of long-ignored neighborhoods, promoting economic vitality through job readiness and job-creation, providing access to treatment services, improving housing stability and investing in our young people and their development are in fact the ounces of prevention that are worth pounds of cures — we just have to orient our policy priorities accordingly. 

Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani's plan to create a Department of Community Safety is an important step to tackle the variety of public safety issues facing the city. But any policy has to be successfully implemented to make a real difference. In this case, the implementation plan has to include a solid approach to tracking results and communicating them back to the public — and as the old adage goes, you can’t track what you don't measure. 

Fortunately, a foundation for coordinating and tracking safety approaches that are not just about crimes and arrests was laid during the de Blasio administration by the Office of Neighborhood Safety (ONS) in the Mayor’s Office, prior to it being moved from City Hall to the Department of Youth and Community Development (DYCD). As part of ONS, the team responsible for creating the Mayor’s Action Plan developed NeighborhoodStat (NStat) — a management system that brings New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) residents together with all relevant city agencies to identify problems, coordinate solutions and track outcomes at both hyperlocal and systemic levels. When MAP was used as initially envisioned, it not only improved safety but also worked together with residents, with NStat at the center of the program’s operations. 

So how does NStat work? 

NeighborhoodStat brings together neighbors, community organizations and city agencies to convene in a series of local meetings where participants share, analyze and use data to identify public safety priorities and what they deem to be responsive solutions. MAP staff then track progress over time and report out regularly to ensure government accountability and responsiveness. 

In its early years, NStat was used in the NYCHA developments MAP focuses on to reclaim and activate greenspace in East Harlem that had been a hotbed for illegal activity; to secure capital investments to reopen a community center in Brownsville Houses that had been closed for 20 years, limiting safe space for young people in the development, despite the constant demand of residents to reopen; and to address open air substance abuse in the Bronx through a combination of physical space, mental health and stewardship interventions.  

That’s not all NStat does. Each NStat identifies, tracks and monitors metrics relevant to site priorities to inform future NStat meetings. Better collection of on-the-ground data and insights helps identify chronic issues that often transcend a single neighborhood, giving city executives timely insights so they can develop more systemic, sustainable solutions to these challenges.

When it works, NStat can extend ownership and accountability for a more comprehensive definition of safety, making more agencies answerable to the public for results on shared problems. For example, Brownsville’s community center being closed on its own was problematic, but showed that the deeper issue was the territoriality in the neighborhood that prevented the youth of that development from venturing the short distance to a neighboring development to use their facilities and benefit from their programming. DYCD reopening a community center alone wouldn’t solve the underlying issue. It would be an expensive band-aid that wouldn’t address the underlying issue, which affects more neighborhoods than just Brownsville, and would require the support of several city agencies and nonprofit partners. 

Or consider what happened at Castle Hill Houses a few years ago. Residents were grappling with a surge in illegal dumping: furniture and construction debris piled in courtyards, cracked sidewalks and poorly lit areas that felt unsafe, particularly for families with children. This wasn't a problem any single agency could solve. Through MAP's NStat process, MAP staff facilitated a series of meetings with residents, NYCHA, Sanitation, Parks, NYPD and other NYC agency partners to share information, analyze data and problem-solve collaboratively. The result was a coordinated response. 

While much can be said about the very insular way the NYPD deals with accountability, there’s no disputing that the department has both internal (i.e., Compstat) and external accountability mechanisms (i.e., CCRB). Over the years, the department has created structures and systems that support the NYPD in mobilizing its workforce to achieve certain outcomes while also creating space for some form of civilian feedback. We’d be hard-pressed to find another agency that is required to withstand anywhere near the level of public scrutiny or engagement with the public on how they could be better. 

Indeed, many agencies have not shown they have the structure or systems necessary to be responsive to the needs of New Yorkers. Pushing the NYPD out front as the sole solution to crime and disorder lets other agencies off the hook. Rather than each agency responding separately or pointing fingers about who owns a given problem, NStat creates shared ownership and accountability for problems that cross jurisdictional lines. 

Outside of NStat, which is currently focused on a select number of NYCHA developments that are part of the MAP initiative, there's no citywide mechanism that routinely brings together agencies with residents to address safety concerns. While residents report issues constantly — via 311, to council members, at community board meetings — there's no formal framework for sustained problem-solving. The result? Trash piles up, unsheltered people struggle in public spaces and disinvested infrastructure eventually collapses. The problem isn't always the lack of resources or policy innovation — it's the lack of political will, exclusion of the public from problem-solving and no shared organizational framework to ensure results across partners. 

The case for NStat

MAP’s core tenets — treating safety as a public health, place-based, community-driven challenge — are echoed in other cities and lauded nationally. Some of MAPs tenets are visible in Mayor Brandon Scott’s Public Safety Action Plan in Baltimore, Mayor Brandon Johnson’s Neighborhood Safety Strategy in Chicago and former mayor Tishaura Jones’ Plan for St. Louis, all of which have seen results.

Unfortunately, MAP, a signature initiative of the de Blasio administration and part of the Office of Neighborhood Safety, has been deprioritized under the Adams Administration with the move from the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice to the Department of Youth and Community Development (DYCD), which lacks the political muscle necessary to effect change citywide. MAP’s Nstat model requires those leading it to have the authority and visibility to get things done swiftly and efficiently. Quick wins, being able to honor commitments in a reasonable amount of time, can make the difference between having the trust and partnership of residents or not.

There is a deep need for a leader who is empowered to facilitate and manage across agencies on safety priorities. One agency simply does not possess the authority to secure the commitments, resources and prioritized attention over another in the same way a mayoral unit does. Public safety requires innovation, rapid response and cross-cutting solutions that are not always in line with how our more bureaucratic, legacy agencies operate. Despite these changes, MAP remains a force on the ground in NYCHA communities across NYC, thanks to its network of community and resident partners, its wildly popular community engagement ethos and its innovative solutions to physical space and place-based challenges. Its proven success in the original 15 and now 30 developments makes it ripe for the City to be able to translate the learnings to a citywide context.

Mamdani’s next steps

The Office of Neighborhood Safety — where MAP, the Office to Prevent Gun Violence and the Atlas program sit — should be considered the foundation for Mamdani's future Department of Community Safety. And NStat can chart the way forward. There's no need to start from scratch when you have a significant knowledge base, evaluated strategies, existing resources and 10 years of lessons at your disposal. 

Also, there needs to be a concerted effort to better understand, measure and track safety beyond traditional administrative data. Between 2020-2022, the NYC Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice (MOCJ) funded something called the NYC Neighborhood Navigator, which we were fortunate enough to have helped design, to support ONS’ work. The objective of the tool was to create a neighborhood-level platform to support ONS programming which could be used by residents to track and measure safety and well-being as defined by MAP residents during NSTAT meetings — rather than relying solely on crime data or program utilization. While the transition out of MOCJ occurred before the tool could be implemented, and ONS was separated from the research infrastructure needed to sustain it, the Navigator illustrates what such a platform could offer: a community-grounded, multidimensional way to monitor safety and well-being that aligns with residents’ lived definitions, not just police or administrative metrics. Today, the tool remains dormant, but its original vision points to what is still possible.

Public safety cannot be improved or sustained by any one agency. The infrastructure to support the coordination and collaboration needed for agencies to work together to solve our most pressing and complex challenges does not yet exist at scale. But it can be built if the Department of Community Safety, leveraging the NStat model, creates it.

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