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It’s not a department and it’s not about safety or any recognizable community — but Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s launch of his Department of Community Safety otherwise checked all the boxes.
That is, the entity the mayor rolled out last week will symbolically honor his vow in last year’s campaign — and symbolism is what this mayoralty is all about.
Witness the great fanfare as Mamdani posed before a packed City Hall staircase to sign an executive order creating an Office of Community Safety.
He’d need City Council approval to create a new department, and apparently won’t even try for that OK, since the council might ask too many questions about spending cash this way amid multibillion-dollar budget deficits.
His promise was to move $1.1 billion a year worth of work addressing some mental-health-emergency calls from the NYPD to social workers under an all-new department; yet the staff of this office — both of them! — will merely oversee a $260 million budget as they study that (possible) shift.
Another symbol: Mamdani tapped Renita Francois, who previously headed a de Blasio-era “neighborhood safety initiative” as the first deputy mayor for community safety.
Maybe that will appease the coalition of black clergy and activists who’ve been complaining that the socialist big tent of the city’s first African-born mayor hadn’t found room for a top African-American deputy.
On the other hand, she’s only overseeing a potpourri of safety-related agencies (the Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes, the Division of Community Mental Health, gun-violence prevention work and so on), which makes the whole thing look like a Potemkin “department” — a false front with not much real work going on.
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With two chiefs (Francois and a “commissioner” to run the new mayoral office) and no soldiers, it’s not even obvious what the $260 million will go for — just the stuff that its bits and pieces were doing before, or something truly new?
It’s hard to see this appeasing the Defund-the-NYPD crowd, but maybe symbolism was all they ever wanted, too.
What should anyone have expected of a guy who won this job via TikTok videos and vaporous talk about city-run groceries, frozen rents and so on?
Problem is, it looks like cardboard cutouts are the best he can do on any front; good luck deploying them to close that budget gap.