New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani signed an executive order Thursday at City Hall to create a new office dedicated to community safety. The Office of Community Safety launched with two staff members and will be led by Renita Francois, who previously oversaw former Mayor Bill de Blasio's plan to reduce violence in public housing.

The new office will house existing city programs to reduce shootings through violence interrupters, combat hate crimes, and provide services to victims of sexual assault. The administration plans to scale up the community safety office over time, though the new office has few immediate plans to shift the city's approach to 911 calls.

"Officers have to handle 200,000 mental health calls a year. That is not a system that is working. Today marks the end of it," Mamdani said. The mayor delivered the announcement surrounded by criminal justice advocates.

The administration plans to expand funding and support for the B-HEARD program, which dispatches mental health workers in response to 911 calls for people in emotional distress. The B-HEARD program started in 2021, but a recent audit found that the program lacked sufficient funding and support in New York City.

The mayor cited the recent police shooting of Queens man Jabez Chakraborty as an example of an encounter that would benefit from a mental health worker. Chakraborty's family called 911 because he was acting erratically, and the police department said Chakraborty lunged at officers with a knife.

At a City Council hearing Wednesday, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said that about 2% of calls for service could be removed from the department's jurisdiction. "You need to send the police when there's a call for a violent person," Tisch said.

The creation of a community safety agency was a core campaign promise for Mamdani. As a candidate, Mamdani proposed a $1 billion-per-year agency that would dispatch civilian workers instead of police officers in non-criminal emergencies and broke with his opponents by refusing to call for an expansion of the police department.