New York’s smaller neighbor has made great strides in broadening responsibility for public safety beyond police.
Though pilloried by many, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign vision for putting community safety at the heart of public safety is an achievable reality. While the mayor has taken initial steps to create the Office of Community Safety (OCS) and made key appointments, including tapping Renita Francois as the city’s first deputy mayor for community safety, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch’s recent statements about coordination between the NYPD and OCS reveal that nearly six months into the administration, the work to build this vision has “not yet commenced.” The city need not fear what this future might hold. To see what community safety smartly integrated into the public safety architecture could look like, New York should peer across the river to its neighbor Newark. As a former assistant attorney general for New Jersey who led efforts to build the state’s community safety playbook, I helped model many of our public safety policies on lessons from Newark. New York should do the same.
Community safety offers a point of contrast to traditional public safety approaches, which are led by law enforcement who rely on investigation, arrest and prosecution. Community safety is led by trained community members who take proactive approaches to preventing crisis and violence. They respond to incidents in non-punitive ways that focus on solving root causes of the issue, bringing to bear a capacity law enforcement simply doesn’t have by using their credibility as peers in the community and their skill at persuasion to help individuals choose a different path.
Community safety approaches do not replace law enforcement but they can supplement it. Take for example a crime scene after a shooting: Police are there to start the process of finding and bringing the perpetrator to justice, while groups that focus on violence prevention (“Community Violence Intervention” or “CVI”) also go to the scene but for a different purpose. They are there to contain the fallout of trauma and retaliation, to find the victims and people who are hurting so they can start the healing process with therapeutic services — an essential step towards stopping further violence. They may get to the heart of the beef that caused a shooting and work towards reconciliation so no further violence happens, or they may provide critical support to a grieving family member that steers them out of desperation and away from retribution. Meanwhile, the police continue conducting their investigation. With police and community working in parallel, the perpetrator may be brought to justice and no further violence occurs as a result of the shooting.
No other major city in the country has achieved the level of adoption within government of community safety approaches to reduce violence Newark has. The foundation has been the consistent leadership of Mayor Ras Baraka who has pursued the vision over three terms through investment and intentional reworking of relationships at the top of city government. The results have been historic reductions in homicides and shootings that outpace national declines. For example, both New York and Newark have experienced decreases in shooting incidents, but Newark’s declines outpace the city’s: Comparing 2019 to 2025, shootings in New York dropped 11% whereas in Newark they dropped 49%.
Newark, New Jersey’s largest city, with a population of 320,000 —roughly twice that of the Lower East Side — has a decades-long history of violence. And while shootings have declined at a faster rate there than in New York, data suggests you’re still four times more likely to get shot in Newark.
But cutting shootings in half over six years means something right is happening — what can New York learn from its neighbor that could save more lives?
Since Baraka took office in 2014, he has steadily implemented his vision for having community take ownership of safety through five concrete steps: (1) driving integration between his police force and community violence prevention by setting expectations and forcing relationships at the top; (2) making the coordination between police and community responders non-negotiable by building it into procedures that front-line workers must follow; (3) empowering his community safety leaders to get the help of other agencies who can help address the drivers of violence, and backing this policy with a mandate to follow through; (4) reshaping public perception so violence prevention is seen as "real" public safety and (5) investing in community safety in key ways that help them scale the work.
To be sure, Newark never took its focus off of traditional law enforcement approaches, but it did invest in making sure policing was smarter: for example, early adoption of body-worn cameras, stronger policies and training on use of force, piloting the Trauma to Trust program, where community and police meet in groups to talk about the psychological pain each has experienced, and working with the county, state and federal authorities to pursue prosecution of the most dangerous individuals, all while promoting more constitutional policing under a federal consent decree. But, Newark shows that community safety is not a replacement for or a threat to traditional public safety, it can occur in parallel to it as a dynamic complement.
New York already has the programmatic elements in place, mainly in the form of its network of Community Violence Intervention (CVI) providers, who make up the Crisis Management System (CMS). CMS consists of over 20 community-based nonprofits led by professionals who use their credibility in the community and skill at persuasion to prevent violence and stop retaliation by helping people choose a different path. Although evidence of the effectiveness of CVI is somewhat mixed nationally in part due to inconsistencies in implementation, including in what methods are being used and the quality of execution, New York’s investment has shown that when you put trained violence prevention professionals in some of the neighborhoods that experience the most violence, this strategy can work: By one estimate, over a 12-year period, violent crime declined nearly 10% more in New York neighborhoods where violence prevention groups were active than in neighborhoods where they were not.
The question for New York is whether it has the willingness to position the pieces on the board into a functioning strategy. The City needs clear direction from the mayor and a set of processes that ensures that all arms of government are working towards this goal — starting with the NYPD — building relationships and following directives to coordinate and solve problems in concert with community providers.
Here are five specific lessons from Newark about how Mamdani can get there, lessons I have gathered largely from working with and learning from Newark Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Lakesha Eure, who is a walking blueprint for bringing community strategies into the mainstream of public safety. These lessons focus on violence, which is only one aspect of the broad scope of the new Office of Community Safety, which also includes mental health response, crisis response, domestic and intimate partner violence response and a range of other services. But the lessons here apply to all areas of community response, and what Newark did can guide OCS.
The first lesson is that Mamdani must drive integration between the new Office of Community Safety and the NYPD. As Tisch revealed in a June City Council hearing, discussion between the NYPD and OCS on specifics about roles and what coordination will look like hadn’t started six months into the administration. Even still, coordination takes more than just starting conversations. In Newark, successful coordination occurred because Mayor Baraka chose to direct the flow of information in a way that forced police and community groups to work productively together. When there was a shooting, he expected updates from one person, and that was Eure in her then role as head of the Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery (OVPTR), the Newark equivalent of OCS. It meant she had to know everything — who was shot, what happened and where the victim was. It meant law enforcement had to get her the information so she could relay it to the mayor; and if she didn’t have the information, it probably meant law enforcement hadn’t shared it. The mayor didn’t just tell them, “you have to coordinate”; he required a deliverable that forced them to. In one instance, the mayor called into a meeting of department heads while he was on a trip to Africa. He made it clear to agency heads that he wanted one update, and it was to come from Eure: “What is the violence and violence response report?” In other words, police were no longer at the permanent center of the city’s response to violence.
Eure relates stories of how Baraka would take her to task in meetings when she didn’t have the information he requested. But she came to realize what he was really doing was signaling to all the other agency heads — particularly to their head of police — that while Eure might be in the hot seat, she was there because others hadn’t worked with her. Baraka was not just hearing reports — he was checking to see whether the system was actually integrated. Are agencies aligned? Are people talking? When there’s no follow-up with a shooting victim by the violence prevention teams, where’s the holdup? Over time, the shift in expectations changed the culture.
It also led to a close relationship between police and community safety officials. Before meetings with the mayor, the public safety director and Eure would talk and coordinate to make sure their data matched, that they had a clear plan for how trauma recovery, victim response and retaliation prevention would be coordinated. They each had their lanes, but they coordinated to make sure that they were able to do what was needed to meet expectations. Out of that process, they built trust and a lasting relationship.
Mamdani can foster a similar relationship at the top by convening Tisch and Francois and setting common expectations. For example, he can require joint updates from both the NYPD and the deputy mayor for community safety around the same data points: Mismatches will reveal breakdowns in coordination, but when there is consistency, it is a strong signal that coordination is happening. The relationship will be built from this work.
Second, the mayor must put together teams that create playbooks for how community members can contribute to safety in coordination with the NYPD. One clear way Newark accomplished this was through a mandate that the police notify the Office of Violence Prevention after every shooting so they can deploy social workers and other professionals immediately to the victim and family — a critical step in addressing trauma and tending to needs like food or childcare that can ratchet up stress during already highly tense and vulnerable situations. This is critical to avoiding retaliation.
Partnerships between community groups and the NYPD are happening throughout the city, but it is not a function of a uniform policy or a comprehensive strategy — it’s happening where it is, like in the innovative Brownsville Safety Alliance, due to the efforts of local NYPD commands and precincts who’ve decided to work with the community.
The City can make efforts like those in Brownsville the norm by putting together planning teams to scale the work across neighborhoods. The mayor can create working groups of law enforcement members, other emergency responders and violence intervention groups to build joint protocols for how all systems should respond and coordinate around instances of violence and community crisis, with mirror policies that reflect their respective roles. He must then back up their recommendations with mandates to implement, and a process for ensuring that adoption and implementation run out of City Hall. The NYPD commissioner and the deputy mayor for community safety could lead this effort, with support from other senior officials. While culture can certainly eat policy for breakfast, it won’t if Mamdani builds both methodically.
Third, the Office of Community Safety needs to be empowered to be a driving force within city government across agencies. This isn’t just about giving OCS a leadership role as a convenor of actors and agencies; it must be given a mandate to resolve policy differences. This means more than just putting the new deputy mayor and the commissioner on the same page. It means making clear that the deputy mayor has the power to twist arms, if not knock heads, in other agencies — another key lesson from Newark — because public safety outcomes are also determined by health, housing, parks, transportation, sanitation, children’s services, schools, probation, corrections and finance. Other agency heads must know that if they’re not moving on a joint initiative, they will have to answer to the mayor. In Newark, Baraka made this explicit to his agency heads: If the city doesn’t reduce violence, we all fail. That directive makes clear that when something breaks or falters, the responsibility for failure is shared across departments.
To operationalize this, the City could adopt a cross-agency task force for integrating the public safety mission. The task force would establish joint policies, and agencies would then have to turn these into hundreds of pages of procedures for their staff. OCS can serve as a lead organizing force or key advisor, identifying the opportunities for improved collaboration, so agencies can put together joint policies. But OCS also needs to be empowered with clear direction or support from City Hall to speak up when other agencies slow down, get stuck or oppose change. So, if an OCS provider has identified someone — a crime survivor, or someone who is at high risk of victimization — who needs a housing referral to get out of a situation that is dangerous and could lead to retaliation or victimization, the housing agency will know they must deliver and cannot get away with the casual drop-off or bureaucratic churn that leads to the referral failing.
Examples of executing this approach are both legion and mundane: When the community identifies crime hot spots that need more lighting, the Department of Transportation should respond with urgency; when schools see bubbling conflicts between kids, the Department of Education should provide direction to connect them to violence prevention outreach workers so feuds don’t spill into bloodshed at dismissal; the Department of Homeless Services should direct shelter providers to move swiftly to relocate someone if they’ve placed them in an area where they have beefs; and youth in detention under the Administration for Children’s Services need to be given access to mentors from the community who can help stabilize them during high trauma periods.
The task force can methodically catalog the hundreds of instances where policies and systems clash, with clear recommendations for resolution. Then City Hall can guide implementation, forcing agencies to contend with recommendations through clear expectations, and ensuring that when there is interagency conflict, it is escalated and resolved.
Fourth, we need to transform how the city at large sees this work. Communities do not always see violence prevention and trauma recovery as “real” public safety. Even in Newark, when the city was converting an old precinct that had been the locus of decades of protest due to its involvement in the police violence that sparked the 1967 uprising, the new trauma and healing center that was to take its place was perceived by some residents as a threat to safety. The Newark public safety director backed the change, and eventually the community came to see the value.
The police force has centuries of institutional legitimacy behind it (even if that legitimacy is not always felt in every pocket of every community). Community safety offices and agencies, on the other hand, are relatively new. Law enforcement should extend some of its credibility to community safety workers through something as simple as sending a clear message from the police department that it values the community’s role.
As part of this process, the rest of our public safety system, city government and the public at large need to be informed about what community safety is. In Newark, community-based work was organized across multiple lanes that did not just focus on gun violence, but also trauma response, mental health and other functions. City agencies, elected officials and other community leaders learned the roles, understanding where responsibility began and ended. This matters because confusion kills coordination and can dash public hopes and expectations. Right now, “community safety” still sounds mushy to many New Yorkers. Mamdani should make clear what he’s talking about.
Fifth and finally, for community safety professionals to become a permanent part of our public safety system, we have to resource them and require accountability. Right now, the NYPD has data, technology, infrastructure and vast resources; violence prevention professionals, for example, do not. The NYPD is funded to work 24/7 and gets overtime; violence intervention responders, whose job is to run into high-risk situations unarmed, with only their wits about them, are underpaid and do not get overtime. They typically work weekday shifts even though most violence happens in the evenings and over the weekends, which means they often are called to do the high intensity parts of their jobs during hours when they receive no compensation. It can’t be government policy to rely on their compassion and charity. Elevating community safety into a dependable and realistic strategy means treating violence prevention workers with mutual respect. If police receive resources, violence prevention groups must also receive investment. If police stand before the press after a street shooting, leaders in prevention must stand there too, because their role in healing the community is part of public safety. That goes for obligations too: If police have to report data, so must community safety, telling us what services they are deploying, and where and when they are deploying them, so that we can gauge whether they’re putting resources to work in the places and with the people we need them to.
When these pieces come together, we get safer and stronger communities with less violence. I have worked with countless law enforcement professionals who have come to cherish what the community has that the police don’t: the trust to get people in moments of extreme grief and distress to put the gun down and take a different course.
Progress towards these goals is not always straightforward, and Newark has certainly had its share of bumps, which Baraka has attributed to the difficulty of merging the two cultures of policing and social work. For example, in 2024, the arrest of antiviolence activists underscored a potential rift between the Newark Police Department and the city’s violence prevention office, with police accusing community of obstructing their work. This incident shows that even after years of implementation, conflict can still arise between rank-and-file police officers and violence prevention professionals over their respective roles, and we have to keep up training of all parties. Other incidents show that the police still need training in de-escalation. The police union has also opposed efforts to resource Newark’s equivalent to the Office of Community Safety, specifically the reallocation of 5% of the police department’s budget to violence prevention — New York has not proposed such a measure, but would surely meet opposition if it did. Finally, changes in police leadership bring durability challenges: Newark’s former head of police, Brian O’Hara, had been instrumental in building community-oriented approach to public safety, but subsequent chiefs have not always had this same zeal, either not understanding community safety approaches or not always believing the rules governing officers allow for coordination. This means that governance over the integration of community safety — the systems, mandates and accountability measures — has to be continuous. What matters is how a city recovers from challenges like this and whether it keeps going.
New York has laid much of the groundwork for successfully knitting together policing and other community safety strategies. The irony is that it started this work before Newark, but has now been surpassed by its smaller neighbor who has made it a permanent fixture in government infrastructure. Now, New York needs leadership and alignment across city government, and more investment. Its New Jersey neighbor points the way.
