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Photo: Angelina Katsanis/The New York Times/Redux

A win by Zohran Mamdani on November 4 would make the 33-year-old New York’s youngest mayor in a century. But even in a contest against men twice his age, Mamdani has begun to sound like the adult in the room on issues of public safety, offering detailed, thoughtful policy proposals while his opponents — Mayor Eric Adams, former governor Andrew Cuomo, and Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa — continue to campaign on the traditional idea that channeling more money, manpower and technology to the NYPD is the only way to keep the city safe.

By contrast, Mamdani backs a slate of criminal-justice reforms and innovations from around the country that can be replicated or expanded in New York to deal with issues like gang violence and disorder in the subways involving homeless people. We talked about it in an hourlong conversation co-sponsored by Vital City and Columbia University’s School of Journalism.

“A lot of times for New Yorkers, what is experienced or understood as an example of social disorder is then tasked to the police as if it’s their responsibility,” he told me. “What we have ended up with is police officers responding to 200,000 mental-health calls a year, and that cannot be separated from the fact that response times have increased by 20 percent over the last few years, where now the average time is closer to 16 minutes.”

Mamdani wants to create a billion-dollar Department of Community Safety that would handle non-emergency calls. “Evidence and outcomes have to be the North Star of our administration and frankly of any administration,” he said. “What’s frustrating is that we have evidence of approaches that work, but they are not operating at the scale that they could be.” The new agency would become the home of the city’s violence-interrupter and crisis-management programs, along with an expanded version of the B-HEARD program, which dispatches counselors along with cops to emergency calls that have a low risk of violence.

“Thirty-five percent of calls that B-HEARD was eligible for, it did not respond to and the police responded to. And part of that is because it has been underfunded, part of it is because it has completely been deprioritized,” Mamdani explained. “The vision of B-HEARD has to be one where we have it present in every single neighborhood, and where in the 20 neighborhoods of the highest need we have two or three teams. And where we increase funding for it by about 150 percent.”

That is a world away from what the other candidates are saying. Cuomo promises to hire 5,000 new cops, while Sliwa says he’ll bring 7,000 onboard, and Adams recently launched quality-of-life policing that will send officers and other resources to high-crime neighborhoods. All three insist that crime is the top issue facing the city and frequently attack Mamdani for past social-media posts in support of reducing the NYPD’s budget. (He now disavows talk about defunding the police.)

But voters appear to be warming up to Mamdani’s approach: the most recent New York Times/Siena College poll shows Mamdani leading all candidates on the question of who would do the best job on tackling crime (Adams, the ex-NYPD captain, finished last). The openness to new approaches is a sign of New York’s long-overdue need for a substantive debate about crime and disorder. We’ve learned the hard way that medical and social-service professionals should be leading the response to more of the thousands of mental-health distress calls that routinely end up with the NYPD by default.

Every year, the headlines report at least one tragic situation — or more likely, half a dozen — in which a person in urgent need of medical help is instead shot to death by cops. The long, sad roll call includes names like Eleanor Bumpurs, Gidone Busch, Deborah Danner, Saheed Vassell, Kawasaki Trawick, Win Rozario, Khiel Coppin, Ariel Galarza, and others.

Mamdani deserves credit for educating himself about proven innovations like CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets) a successful program in Eugene, Oregon, that has nonviolently resolved tens of thousands of cases without police intervention and inspired similar efforts around the nation. But he’s fighting an uphill battle against cynical voices of the status quo, including the New York Post editorial board, which recently dismissed the idea of shifting mental-health calls away from the NYPD as “barely even voodoo.”

“What has been so frustrating is that we’ve seen the complete lack of will from this executive means that so many of these kinds of programs have been prejudged to failure from the very beginning because they’ve never been given what they needed,” Mamdani told me, rattling off programs around the country that might work in New York.

“In Denver, they had a STAR program. This is a program that focuses on low-level crime. In the neighborhoods where they focused, crime went down by 34 percent. Over the period of a number of years, they had 12,000 clinical interactions. Of those, only 3 percent required a medical hold,” he said. On the subject of helping homeless New Yorkers in the subways, he name-checked a program in Philadelphia’s SEPTA mass-transit system that might work here.

While both men would surely object to the comparison, Mamdani’s willingness to bring new programs and a new mind-set reminds me of the long-ago 1993 campaign of Rudy Giuliani, an eager student of early theories of how focusing cops on low-level disorder could lead to major reductions in street violence. Notwithstanding later abuses of stop-and-frisk, in the early 1990s it was a smart and reasonable approach that saved lives and helped him win an election.

History may be about to repeat itself. “None of this is simple. None of it is going to be easy. But what has been so frustrating is it has seemed for many years as if there are many who are not even trying,” Mamdani told me. “They are simply at peace with a status quo that we know is broken for so many. And I am confident in our ability to actually deliver a new chapter.”

Mamdani’s New Ideas on Crime Show Make His Opponents Look Old

Mamdani’s New Ideas on Crime Show Make His Opponents Look Old