NYC NOW - Public Safety Takes Center Stage in NYC Mayoral Race

Episode Date: October 11, 2025

With less than a month until Election Day, public safety remains a top concern for New York City voters. WNYC’s Brittany Kriegstein and Ben Feuerherd report on how residents across the city are responding to each candidate’s plans for policing and mental health response.

New York City voters have consistently measured mayors by a single question. Can they keep the city safe? Four years ago, that question helped send a former police officer, Eric Adams, to City Hall. This election, polling shows public safety remains a top issue. But many voters are focused on a deeper question. What exactly does safety look like? Does it mean more officers on patrol or more social workers answering 911 calls? or a greater focus on preventing low-level crime.

From WNYC, this is NYC Now. I'm Jenae Pierre. With the election less than a month away, we wanted to understand how voters are thinking about these questions around police resources and deployment and how they're viewing each candidate's approach to public safety. My colleagues, Brittany Krikstein and Ben Fewer-Hurt, have been reporting across the city,

and they both join me now. So, Brittany, Ben, you. You visited five neighborhoods across the city that backed the current mayor, Eric Adams, in the last election, but these neighborhoods are still struggling with violent crime right now. Why did you pick these neighborhoods and what did you find? Yeah, sure, Jena. So we basically split up and we visited East New York and Coney Island in Brooklyn, Brotchdale Village in Queens, Wakefield in the Bronx, and then East Harlem near the 125th Street Transit Hub. And these are places where we identified that some categories of major crime, as you mentioned, like, Homicides, assaults, and robberies and a few others have actually risen this year, despite overall crime drops citywide.

Now, it's one thing to hear New Yorkers in low crime neighborhoods talk about public safety and policing, but oftentimes New Yorkers in what I like to call the heat of that fire have a much different take. What you mean? So picture of this, Janay, if your house is in flames, you want to call firefighters right away to put it out, right? Right. So for people in those higher crime neighborhoods, calling for more police feels like a matter of survival. Exactly. That's how some New Yorker see police. If they're directly affected or they've directly experienced gun violence or other major crimes, they often say they want more officers out and about in their communities.

Yeah, so we were curious about how they might be thinking about the plans the mayoral candidates have shared for addressing public safety around the city. And just to review a Republican nominee Curtis Leewa, an individual. dependent candidate Andrew Cuomo both have public safety plans focus on police and law and order. Fliwa wants to hire 7,000 more NYPD officers and expand the department's gang and anti-crime units and focus on targeting repeat offenders. Cuomo says he'll hire 5,000 more officers and deploy them in high crime areas through what he calls precision policing. He also wants to continue the crackdown on quality of life crimes and strengthen the city's ability to commit people to mental. health treatment in severe cases. And that's in pretty sharp contrast to Zeramam Dani, who's the Democrat in the race, right?

Right. Mamdani, the frontrunner, says he'll keep the department at its current headcount of about 34,000 officers while creating a new what he calls Department of Community Safety, which would be staffed with mental health professionals to help respond to 911 calls for someone in a mental health crisis. And to pay for this new department and new employees, Mamdani says he'll push for. for raising the state's corporate tax rate to match that of New Jersey. He'll also try and raise the personal income tax for the top earners in the city by 2%.

Okay, so not fewer officers, just a different kind of response when it comes to mental health and homelessness. Yep, that's right. Of course, Mayor Adams dropped out of the race last month, but you have to remember, he rode to City Hall in 2021 as a pro-law enforcement candidate during a time when public safety was a top issue in the city following the pandemic. crime spiked, and Adams is a former NYPD captain himself. Right, right. So what were some of the themes that came out of these conversations, you guys had? Well, one thing we realized pretty quickly is that we reporters tend to be a lot more clued in on politics. For sure.

Than the average voter, you know, especially with the election still weeks away. Some of the residents we spoke to said they didn't know much about any of the candidates at all. Yeah, yeah. That's not uncommon, Brittany. People aren't always tuned in. in an election, especially a local race. That's true. So we tried to explain their plans.

And when we did, most voters seized on Mamdani's idea to invest more resources in responding to people in mental health crises. It was interesting. People kept bringing it up basically unprompted, talking about how mental health connects to safety in their communities. And so one person who explains pretty well, his concerns, was a guy named Michael Thompson. He was one of the first people I spoke to in East Harlem. Which strategy do you think is most helpful?

Um, I do think mental health is a severe concern right now. I don't think Cecil or Cuomo are equipped to handle mental health in a proactive kind of way. Yeah, Michael sounds pretty frustrated. Yeah, and he wasn't alone. Just a few blocks away, another voter, Tunisia Brown, said almost the same thing. I feel like they do need to have more like mental health. people because there's a lot of people out here that has mental health issues. And I feel like sometimes the cops can't really handle people like that. And over in Queens at Rochdale Village,

a voter named Abzal Amate said this. Cuomo wants to hire 5,000 more cops. Sliwa, the Republican, he wants to hire 7,000 more cops. And Mom Dani says, I'm going to keep the number of police the same, but I'm also going to add some mental health professionals to respond to certain 911 calls. Yeah, I think that's much better. What would you do? I would take the last candidate because he's helping more of the mental stay of this community. So even in neighborhoods where people are living with violent crime every day, there seems to be this openness, a willingness even, to try something new. Yeah, that's right. Now, it's important to mention that some 911 mental health calls are already handled by what are known as B-Hard teams, which include mental health professionals that respond to situations where the subject does not seem at risk of harming.

themselves or others. The city also runs mobile crisis teams with clinicians for less urgent calls, plays through 988. And Mamdani says he wants to expand both programs. And regardless of whose platforms they support, residents told us very clearly that they didn't think enough was currently being done to tackle mental health in the city, particularly as it plays out on the streets and on the subways. Okay, so voters seem open to Mumdani's plan. What did they say about the idea of hiring more police officers like his opponents, Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Lewa. Are they proposing anything? Yeah, Janay, so some voters were conflicted about this. Many said they thought it was important to have police in their communities, but they didn't necessarily feel like hiring more officers was the

best way to address these pervasive concerns they have about people struggling with mental health issues. Some people, like Stacey Rosario, were literally trying to figure this out in their minds while we were talking. I also spoke to her at the 125th Street subway station in East Harlem. I'm stuck in between the 7,000 and the padding mental health professionals because there's a lot of just unhinged crazy people out there with no help at all, especially like riding for just staying in the subways, like living here. That's pretty hard. So Stacey wants safety, but she's also aware that not everyone on the street needs a badge and a gun. Yeah, and that tension between wanting police, but also being critical of how they respond to mental health calls,

came up again and again in the neighborhoods we visited. A woman named Naomi Hall in Coney Island brought up a story that really stuck with her. The cops, now, you remember we had an incident where the young man had a, he had a mental issue and they killed them. Now, I can see them because they did not know. They're not trained in that field for doing that. So, yeah. And we also heard the same worry from Sukki Ada in Coney Island.

And to respond to them with force first, I don't think is a great thing. That's something Mamdani explicitly says is motivating his push for mental health professionals to handle more incidents. Here's what he says in a video about that plan. Police have a critical role to play. But right now we're relying on them to deal with the failures of our social safety net, which is preventing them from doing their actual jobs. It's one of the reasons so many crimes are left unresolved. So the question now is, could a plan like this?

actually work? Could New York City really move some of the responsibility for responding to mental health and homelessness calls away from police and toward trained professionals and still keep the city safe? After the break, we'll look at what it would take to pull that off and the challenges any next mayor will face trying to make it happen. We'll be right back. Before the break, we heard from New Yorkers in neighborhoods where violent crime remains high. People who said they want police to focus on serious crime and leave mental health calls to social workers. So could New York City realistically build a system where police aren't always the first to respond? Now, Ben, you've been talking to experts about what it would take to make

something like this reality. So what do experts say about how that could go? Yeah, so there are some mixed perspectives here. I spoke to Jeff Coots. He's a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and he specializes in public health. And he says that limiting police presence when responding to homeless or mentally ill New Yorkers could ultimately be popular with some police officers. And that's because officers are often forced to deal with these situations due to what he said is insufficient investment in social services. But he adds that staffing could prove challenging

because there is already a shortage of them due to a workforce crunch in public mental health workers. These types of plans and these types of programs run into the grinder is if you can't staff the program that you've designed. So even if there's support for the idea, the staffing might be the biggest roadblock. But what about the police themselves? Do they actually want this shift?

Yeah, so Patrick Hengry, who's the president of the Police Benevolent Association, it's the union that represents sort of rank-and-file officers, says reassigning mental health calls won't do much to help officers' workloads because they only make up a small percentage of 911 calls that they respond to anyway. He told us in a statement that the focus should instead be on hiring and retaining police officers to keep the current headcount. He said about 300 officers a month

or retiring or resigning, leaving the NYPD without enough patrol coverage in many precincts. And it's true the NYPD has been struggling with hiring, retention, and attrition, leading the department to lower the minimum age and the required number of education credits for new officers in order to boost recruitment. It also waived testing for fees and increase the number of anxious exams for a given year, which has helped increase applications. Okay, so Brittany, as we mentioned earlier, the city already responds to some mental health calls with trained clinicians.

Has that been successful at all? And have any other places tried doing something similar? Yeah, some places actually have. Mamdani's campaign points to states like Oregon, Colorado, and Washington that have used similar approaches, though everyone agrees New York would really have to bolster its investments in hiring. to dispatch mental health team citywide. The programs we already have have had some success, according to officials,

and now they're responding to thousands of 911 calls every year, but they'd have to really, really grow that. The bottom line, Janeie, is New Yorkers told us they're ready for a fresh strategy. I was with a man named Sam Jones in Wakefield, which is a neighborhood in the Bronx that struggled with a pretty sharp increase in violent crime over the past year. I literally watched as he helped two paramedics load in on concold. man who appeared to be having an overdose into an ambulance. But Sam said something interesting.

He said that while these are things that people in his community deal with quite often, they don't necessarily want to call police. He said people go through their struggles. And that's what he and other members of the community are for to kind of, you know, help those people on their way without having to call in law enforcement. The cops were either lock them up or not even say that they'll detain them. and then they'll call it EMS. There's not a lot of people out here helping the community with mental health.

And a lot of New Yorkers echoed this point. They just don't want over-policing in their communities, especially when it comes to people struggling with mental health. But ultimately, whatever happens next year will hinge on Election Day next month. That's right. That's WMYC's Brittany Craigstein and Ben FewerHeard. Thank you both so much. Thank you so much, Jene.

Thanks a bunch. And thank you for listening to NYC now from WMYC. If you got a mail-in ballot, send it in now. Do your thing. We'll be back on Monday.