City Council leaders press top cop Tisch about coordination with Mamdani over ‘Office of Community Safety’

Tisch’s response came after City Council Speaker Julie Menin asked about the new office, which Mayor Zohran Mamdani formed by executive order in March.

“Have any programs shifted from the NYPD’s purview to OCS?” Menin asked Tisch during the June 1 hearing.

“No,” Tisch responded.

“To what extent is NYPD engaging with the administration on what specific roles and coordination will occur between NYPD and OCS?” the speaker followed up.

“Those conversations have not yet commenced,” the top cop answered.

Menin expressed concern, noting that the mayor had pledged $260 million to launch the OCS, and again pressed Tisch about communications between the city’s police force and the administration’s effort to ramp up public safety without increasing the number of uniformed officers.

Tisch reiterated to Menin that no such talks had yet occurred, but added that she expected they would begin soon.

Sources in City Hall, however, disputed the characterization of the encounter, telling amNewYork that Tisch and the office’s leader, Deputy Mayor for Community Safety Renita Francois, scheduled a meeting for later this week ahead of Monday’s budget hearing. Tisch did not mention the scheduled meeting during her testimony.

“The Office of Community Safety’s leadership looks forward to meeting with the Police Department to discuss ongoing efforts that advance the Mamdani administration’s whole-of-government approach to public safety and crisis response,” said Sam Raskin, a deputy press secretary for City Hall.

An NYPD spokesperson told amNewYork, “The police commissioner was responding to a question about specific funds and programs, not whether she would be meeting with them.”

Creating OCS fulfilled a key campaign promise from Mamdani to rethink the way the city approached public safety, specifically around New Yorkers experiencing mental health crises. A police involved shooting in January of a Queens man wielding a knife while experiencing a psychotic break again renewed the public conversation about the NYPD’s role in mental health calls.

During the budget hearing, Tisch reiterated that the city already has a team in place to handle mental health crises called the Behavioral Health Emergency Assistance Response Division (B-HEARD), run by NYC Health and Hospitals and the FDNY, and formed in the de Blasio administration. However, City Council member Lincoln Restler (D-Brooklyn) called the program “essentially irrelevant” when questioning Tisch.

Under the current system, B-HEARD is authorized to respond to 911 mental health calls when an individual is nonviolent and does not have a weapon, amounting to around 2% of the over 4 million 911 calls annually, according to Tisch.

Restler found that number troubling, but even more disconcerting, he said, was that in the first four months of 2026, the B-HEARD team responded to only about 8% of the 17,961 911 mental health calls eligible for a non-police response, totaling about 1,411. It amounted to less than 1% of the total 911 calls, Restler said.

“That is so small, it’s negligible, it’s a rounding error,” Restler said. “Does the program even exist? We’re spending gosh knows how many hundreds of millions of dollars on this program; it was functioning at some point, but it doesn’t seem to be functioning today.”

Restler’s points echo the reasons advocates argued for a different approach to policing mental health calls, but questions remain about the OCS’s mandate and authority.