Is the Working Class of NYC Safe Under Mamdani’s “Department of Community Safety”?
1. A Typical Turncoat
On July 30th of this year, DSA darling[1] and New York City mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani, took a turn typical of the so-called “socialists” the DSA props up and pulled a policy 180. During an interview with CNN, when pressed about his previous pro-“Defund the Police” posturing,[2] Mamdani rejected the idea entirely, telling reporters, “I am not defunding the police,” and, “I am not running to defund the police.”[3] Despite claiming to be a “democratic socialist” who “has fought for the working class in and outside the legislature,”[4] his blatant betrayal of what is primarily, despite its flaws, aslogan of working and oppressed people (“Defund the Police”) can clearly be seen as capitalist co-option and opportunism. The poor and working people are being sold out, yet again, by a bourgeois democrat in socialist’s clothing.
Despite Mamdani’s abandoning it, “Defund the Police” remains a relevant slogan to his lower-class constituents due to the presence of their material oppression at the hands of the NYPD, which has grown increasingly more intolerable. For example, the city paid out a whopping $207 million in police misconduct lawsuits just last year;[5] up 80% from 2023.[6] Some of their most notable transgressions of recent years include breaking into homes without warrants and putting people under false arrest,[7] murdering unarmed people at traffic stops,[8] in stairwells,[9] and even a 66-year-old woman because she brandished a pair of scissors.[10] Violence and oppression at the hands of the NYPD is the norm for the majority of New Yorkers – a consequence of their subordinate position around the productive forces of the bourgeoisie. It is no surprise then that many of the people of New York, especially the lower classes, sympathize with the sentiment to “Defund the Police,” however impractical this is to achieve under a capitalist government.
The Disney film rapper,[11] Zohran Mamdani, became DSA “socialist” and entered the call to “Defund the Police” not as a true socialist – a representative of the working and poor masses – but as a grifter. He attached himself to their slogan to gain notoriety among the politically ascending lower classes of New York City, who adopted it themselves, despite all its theoretical failures, out of a genuine response to their oppressed condition. Now that his notoriety is sufficient enough to gain the attention of the bigger bourgeoisie however, he has abandoned the poor and working masses in favor of the kind of political careerism and parasitism that comes from towing a bourgeois line, saying, now, that he will not defund the police or even decrease its headcount.[12]
Such shameless betrayal is typical of “socialist” electoralism as it exists in our objectively bourgeois and severely class unconscious period (though this situation is rapidly changing).
Because he is campaigning as a candidate for the working class and oppressed minorities, Mamdani must still address the actual problem of police brutality, since it directly affects his supposed constituents. However, he has abandoned his lower-class constituents’ radical slogan of “defund” for the capitalist one of “add more,” adopting a bourgeois “answer” to the problem of the police that is in-keeping with capitalist profit – meaning not actually answering the problem at all. He has attempted to sell this bourgeois “solution” to the lower classes, inviting them yet again to be the vigorous mass support behind capitalist policy that acts against their interest.
Juxtaposed against the city’s problem of police brutality, Mamdani proposes an entirely new city department, the Department of Community Safety (DCS), which (despite the proposal’s claims to the contrary) will provide a new field in which a supposed “humane” policing-of-a-kind can take place, complete with all the personal violence, capitalist investments, contracts, non-profit grubbing, and labor valorization that goes along with expansions to the capitalist state machine.
2. Bourgeois Backers
With a massive proposed budget of $1.1 billion, Mamdani’s DCS aims to prevent “violence before it happens by taking a public health approach to safety,” transferring existing social programs produced by the current alliance between the city and non-profits under its wing, as well as requesting an additional $455 million in taxpayer funding in order to create new alliances of this kind.[13]
A flow chart of Mamdani’s proposed “Department of Community Safety” [14] showing its subdivisions and the offices below each of them. Despite posturing itself as an answer to state violence, a massive increase in the bureaucratic structure of capitalist government and the empowering of numerous new municipal authorities over the public can only harm the lower classes of New York, opening them up for greater oppression at the hands of the state and the bourgeoisie.
The capitalist character of his proposal is very clear. For example, “peer clubhouses,” or half-way homes for those who suffer from “serious mental illness,” is a growing industry within the non-profit sector, heavily supported by the psychological industries ever since the National Institute of Mental Health funded the National Clubhouse Training Program in 1977. The majority of clubhouses today (326 of them across 33 countries and 36 U.S. states in 2016) are affiliated with the non-profit Clubhouse International,[15] which boldly advertises its corporate partners from their website and has a number and even a “Teri Chadwick” to call in order to “start the conversation on how your corporation can become a Clubhouse International Corporate Partner.”[16] Mamdani‘s DCS would “create more Peer Clubhouses and support existing ones,” reversing a mayoral decision which currently restricts small clubhouses from receiving city-funding.[17] Additionally, with the DCS’ establishment of the Division of Public Safety, local “violence-prevention” non-profits, such as Save Our Streets (S.O.S.), which is owned by the parent non-profit, Center for Justice Innovation,[18] and is mentioned by Mamdani by name,[19] will see their funding and their parasitism grow immensely. In 2023, the entire executive team for the Center for Justice Innovation had salaries surpassing $130,000, with the CEO making more than $271,000 after benefits.[20] Proposals like these reveal that Mamdani’s real constituents are not the working class, but a small section of capitalists and petty bourgeoisie who, (perhaps) wish to work towards the betterment of oppressed people, but do so as a liberal – with their capital – which of course means to not do so in any real way at all.
Mamdani also aims to expand funding by 275% to the city’s Crisis Management System (CMS), a DCS-like bureaucracy the city already maintains.[21] With the extra funding, the CMS would be able to perform its duties of connecting quote “high-risk individuals” end quote to extensive networks that provide job training, employment opportunities, mental health services and legal services”[22] —which, in reality, means that these individuals will become clients of the non-profit sector, sold their wares, and transformed into a more efficient source of labor for the capitalists of the city generally. The 67th Precinct Clergy Council, Inc, or “God Squad,” which, according to their website, purports to “heal and empower communities impacted by gun violence using a holistic, faith-based model”[23] – deluding the people with religion – is the first of the CMS’ “Corporate Partners” listed on their website.[24] Yikes.
Bringing all of their typical chauvinism and reaction with them, the bourgeoisie and labor aristocrats in the non-profits will utilize the DCS’ hefty budget for social services to create what is, in the final view, their only real product: the public conception of legitimacy in their field, which, once established, allows them access to lucrative grants and contracts, as well as high salaries. Using these salaries and benefits, the bourgeois individuals in the non-profits will become financiers in the capitalist market broadly, and even greater parasites to working people. On the ground and beyond this final ideological product sold to the ruling class, the non-profits funnel their clients through a long line of bourgeois suppliers, all grubbing at tax revenue and ultimately serving to transform their clients, through work and therapy, into more productive wage-slaves of society. This is the height of their “charity.”
3. Easing the “Burden” of the Police
Mamdani postures his proposal to supercharge the funding of the non-profits and substantially increase the city’s bureaucracy as a direct answer to the problem of the police, establishing a whole network of social services and mental health “professionals” at least partly to offset the responsibilities of the NYPD, saying that the police are “burdened” with “being mental health first responders, a role for which they are not equipped, and encounters which in fact too frequently lead to police violence and even death.”[25] Despite this acknowledgment of police brutality (a crumb thrown to the oppressed classes) Mamdani holds that “police have a critical role to play. But right now, we’re relying on them to deal with our frayed social safety net — which prevents them from doing their actual jobs.”[26]
The erroneous liberal mystification that admonishes the violence of the capitalists’ guard dogs due to them being “unequipped” to serve the “mentally ill” underlies the philosophy of the DCS, but it is not a new one. This shameful distraction has, in fact, been the base of many experiments involving mobile, unarmed, “mental health care professionals” throughout numerous polities in the country. The Oregon non-profit, White Bird Clinic, which is currently chaired by a software developer for a health insurance company,[27] established its program, CAHOOTS, in 1989, linking up with the cities of Eugene and Springfield in order to provide “mobile crisis intervention” geared towards mental health and homelessness.[28] Further east, Denver, CO’s Support Team Assisted Response (STAR) Program is, in their words, “an alternative response team that includes behavioral health clinicians and paramedics to engage individuals experiencing mental health distress and substance use disorders.”[29] Olympia, Washington’s “Familiar Faces” is a similar “crisis response” organization that responds “to any person within the City of Olympia who is experiencing urgent mental health distress, poverty, unhoused persons, problems related to substance use, resource needs, and more.”[30] All three of these organizations are dispatched either through their municipalities’ respective police departments or a 911 call-center, often making police operators the actual determiner of which callers receive supposed “community care” in the form of these organizations, and who receives the typical agents of the carceral state.
Probably the DCS’ most ambitious program acts within and expands this tradition, aiming to supposedly offset violent police calls by “establishing a new Community Mental Health Navigators (CMHNs) program across the city.” [31] Despite posturing itself against the violent actions of the NYPD, the program will “coordinate across city agencies, including with the NYPD,”[32] ensuring “interoperability between 988 (the suicide and crisis hotline) and 911.”[33] In addition to bolstering the current police apparatus of the city, the CMHNs program would be a massive insertion of the psychological industries into the everyday lives of New Yorkers. It would employ workers who are “supervised by licensed mental health professionals,”[34] and would be present in every neighborhood in the city in order to “conduct community outreach/relationally organize to advertise their services,” “screen for anxiety, depression, and stress,” and “identify and manage risk as part of a treatment team including an on-call licensed supervisor,”[35] creating waystations for their activities out of vacant commercial property.[36] Most egregiously, CMHNs “will provide an outlet for neighbors, parents, or partners who notice someone struggling but who do not know how to intervene,”[37] meaning that the DCS would be providing the people of New York City with a new and dangerously amorphous method to report each other to the state.
4. Pathologizing the Proletariat
As Communists, we cannot support such efforts for “community safety;” in New York, or anywhere else. Empowering new goons of the psychological industries within every neighborhood in the city, and goading the people to reporteach other to the state due to “mental health crisis,” as Mamdani’s DCS would have the people of New York City do, will disproportionately target the working and lower-classes for being “mentally ill,” just as they are already disproportionately targeted for prosecution as criminals by the current police apparatus due to their alienation from the productive forces.
What is wrong with being targeted as “mentally ill”? The very foundation of psychological “science” is erroneous, idealist individualization of social phenomena. It rejects material reality and relegates a social experience tothe solitary brain of an individual, endowing them with the responsibility of “personal mental health” and denying the collective reality of society and our shared responsibility to each other. While modern-day psychological “science” and its professions have had to evolve to include some semblance of causation beyond the individual mind in their theories – they have had to accept that life events or circumstances impact “mental illness” – the discipline’s capitalist character as a purveyor of services to an individual consumer populace dooms it to forever “treat” the “minds” of individuals as if they have a physical disease, or it is their brain itself which is the main cause of the problem (which no evidence has ever supported).[38] Psychology mostly serves as the ideological field for selling therapy and medications, portraying adverse thoughts and emotions as a broken brain and treating the problem with the same philosophy as a doctor treating a broken bone.
Disruptive behavior, social non-conformity, public outbursts, fits of passion, painful mental afflictions, and other experiences are reduced within the capitalist field of psychologyinto personal mental health disorders when any accurate analysis reveals them as symptoms of the much larger problem of societal violence and trauma; trauma which originates, in the final view, from the basic antagonism concerning the productive forces and the uneven struggle of the bourgeoisie and proletarian classes.
The proletariat and the poor sections of oppressed cultural and racial minorities — any who have been sufficiently traumatized by the oppression of their low station within the class domination of the capitalists — will, on occasion and at a higher rate than their more privileged overlords, disrupt the fragile sensibilities of their societal prison. Under Mamdani’s DCS or any other legal definition of personal “mental health” as it exists under the capitalist system, “disruptions” of this kind will be clearly identified as someone displaying symptoms of a “mental disease,” necessitating clinical action. Being targeted as “mentally ill” in this fashion invites the state, its bourgeois actors, and the psychological industries to further dictate their will over the people in the name of “health,” even to the point of labeling them disabled (which has political and financial consequences like losing power of attorney or being placed under conservatorship) or labeled “a danger to themselves or others,” which often implies imprisonment in mental health facilities. At the very least, psychology deludes the people into a regressive, individualist worldview, where, typical of capitalist society, they are told that their life and their mental health is their own, and that individual responsibility and hard work will bring individual reward – the basic philosophical building blocks of wage-slavery.
Far from making the city “mentally healthy,” the servants of the DCS would serve a similar role of maintaining the capitalist public order as already existing police forces, constituting a new and energetic impetus to administratively remove, process, detain, diagnose, disrupt, or otherwise antagonize the already hurting masses of NYC. In fact, the DCS and NYPD’s purview overlaps, with Mamdani “deploying dedicated outreach workers in 100 subway stations,”[39] localities which are already heavily surveilled by the NYPD and would, presumably, continue to be so, since Mamdani does not plan to limit the NYPD, its purview, or its manpower in any way.
While Mamdani’s DCS is one of the starkest examples, Communists should be aware of the increasing closeness between the carceral state and mental health professionals generally. The American Psychological Association (APA), the largest association of psychologists in the world, is getting cozier with cops. In 2022, the APA passed a resolution recommending “that police departments partner with mental health and other human services organizations to determine the best use of local behavioral health resources,” calling for “increased collaboration and potential partnerships among law enforcement agencies, police unions, community members and their organizations, and psychologists.”[40] In September of that year, the APA was part of a virtual roundtable hosted by the U.S. Department of Justice to “issue guidance on best practices for responding to calls and interacting with persons in behavioral or mental health crisis,” specifically advocating for “alternative responder models, mobile crisis response teams,” and “community-based crisis centers” much like the DCS proposes.[41] As the organization at the head of the country’s growing psychological industries, forming the policy and upholding the “science” utilized by numerous on-the-ground psychiatrists, counselors, and mental health professionals, the APA is simply acting within its own material interests when it throws its support behind the growing trend of augmenting existing police forces with organizations empowered to police “mental health.” The alliance they make with law enforcement and local municipalities results in the continual propagation of their intellectual authority over the people, the continual employment and growth of the psychological industries as a whole, as well as the perpetuation of the carceral state and traditional police, which becomes energized with new life due to the backing and organizational support of psychological “science” and its industries…and at a time when the livelihood of policing is being severely critiqued by the masses.
Dangerously, the proposal’s own verbiage clearly targets the working poor and oppressed sections of the city. For one, it specifically calls out national minorities, saying that “the most severe shortages (of mental health providers) include providers of color” and “those who can support New Yorkers who speak languages other than English.”[42] While such a statement fits perfectly into neo-liberal “inclusion” and “intersectionality,” conflating the oppression of national minorities with mental illness is a distraction from their actual oppressed situation – oppressed, in the first place, not because their mind is “ill,” but because of their subordinate position among the productive forces, which puts them in opposition to both the capitalists and the reactionary sections of the white majority.
Mamdani’s so-called “humane” DCS would perpetuate this persecution most clearly regarding homeless people. He directly and dangerously conflates mental illness with being homeless, stating that homeless people “are disproportionately experiencing mental health issues” and “suffer in subway stations and on the streets.”[43] He does throw in the modifier that “the best way to address homelessness is by providing people with lasting homes,” but Mamdani’s direct conflation of homelessness with “mental health issues,” not to mention the entire philosophical foundation of psychology and the DCS’s “Division of Community Mental Health,” which conflates the miserable conditions of the masses with problems of the mind, and, relatedly, portrays these material conditions as something that can be “fixed” with proper therapy, medication, and mental health services, denies the lumpen’s role in constituting the “industrial reserve army” of labor,[44] in addition to significantly rejecting the fact of class oppression generally. Moreover, we who understand capitalism know that his half-baked ideas to offset homelessness by building “affordable housing for all New Yorkers in need,”[45] — now, under the domination of the bourgeoisie and using their government apparatus — is dripping in supremely absurd idealism (if he even believes it himself). The only housing the Democrat Mamdani will bring to the homeless will be incarceration in mental health facilities and within the temporary work-programs of the bourgeois non-profits.
5. The Economic Backdrop
The unity between the psychological industries and the non-profits by way of Mamdani’s DCS proposal fulfills the broader aims of New York City’s bourgeoisie as a whole. The DCS comes into play to “solve” several contradictions plaguing the city, redirecting this tension back into the capitalist system. For one, the growth of NYC industry is stagnating, with job growth decreasing a whopping 98.5% within the first half of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024.[46] With the dramatic economic decline signified by such a stark statistic, homelessness among New Yorkers is also on the rise. Keeping in mind that the actual number of homeless people is generally much higher than the official statistics, the number of homeless people throughout New York State as a whole grew 53.1% between 2023 and 2024, totaling more than 158,000 people and with NYC accounting for 93% of the growth.[47]
Second, and related to the rise in the homeless population, there is the increasing number of migrants who flock to the city in response to strife or the growing imperialist conflict between nations, a group who is widely low-class. In all the major metropolitan areas of the United States, the increase to their populations between 2023-2024 was primarily due to the influx of immigrants from abroad,[48] with NYC receiving an increase of over 287,000 international migrants within that year, while its domestic migrants (meaning U.S. citizens moving in from other states) dropped by 146,000 in the same period.[49] The recent burst of international migrants serves as a boom in a marked downward trend when it comes to biting into the “Big Apple” generally, with the city’s total population declining by 5.3% between the years of 2020-2022.[50] The new New Yorkers are majority working class, with the mean average of NYC immigrant salaries being only $23,000 a year in 2021,[51] and in a city where the required cost of living is a yearly salary of over $60,000 today.[52] Their arrival has stifled the city’s already beleaguered migrant services and exacerbated homelessness, especially after March of last year when the city decided to severely walk back the migrant protections in its decades-long “right to shelter” rule, limiting the amount of time many adult migrants can stay in shelters to only 30 or 60 days.[53]
Mamdani’s proposal for the Department of Community Safety has gained legitimacy and traction within this context of declining industry and the influx of a widely low-class, and, due to the rapidity of their arrival, at least somewhat untapped section of labor. The massive $1.1 billion budget of the DCS would fulfil the bourgeois task of bureaucratically processing this influx of the lower class, funneling them into non-profits and work programs to extract labor from those who can work and growing the economy of the city in the process, revitalizing it with new labor forces. For those who cannot work, or who show symptoms of a “mental disorder,” they would be thrown into a den of state-subsidized psychological shamans and the sellers of pills, to hopefully come out the other side “rehabilitated” into an employable wage-slave, ripe for the plucking by the capitalist labor-owners. Either way, profit is made from the poor.
6. When Reaction Rules…
If the DCS is established, we also must consider the probability that such state machinery will fall into the hands of an overtly reactionary administration, which will take up the DCS’s task of repressing the lower classes, only supplanting a neo-liberal definition of “mental illness” for one in which the objective political opponents of reaction are pathologized outright. This will set up a fertile field for the fascist government to make new accumulations on the backs of political dissidents, racial and cultural minorities, and the masses as a whole.
This is already being attempted due to the idealist backwardness of the psychological “sciences” themselves, which have always allowed for the supplanting of reaction within their dogma. Just this year two different legislatures both put forward motions to modify the legal definition of mental illness to include “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” which, according to Rep. Warren Davidson of Ohio, is “behavioral or psychological phenomenon involving intense emotional or cognitive reactions to Donald J. Trump, his actions, or his public presence.”[54] Senator Eric Lucero[55] provides the following definition in two sections of his proposed amendment to current Minnesota statutes:
“Trump Derangement Syndrome” means the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal persons that is in reaction to the policies and presidencies of President Donald J. Trump.
Symptoms may include Trump-induced general hysteria, which produces an inability to distinguish between legitimate policy differences and signs of psychic pathology in President Donald J. Trump's behavior. This may be expressed by:
(1) verbal expressions of intense hostility toward President Donald J. Trump; and
(2) overt acts of aggression and violence against anyone supporting President Donald Trump or anything that symbolizes President Donald J. Trump.[56]
Lucero offers this description after explicitly defining “mental illness” as “Trump Derangement Syndrome or any of the conditions included in the most recent editions” of, bizarrely, a “membership-based” non-profit’s guide to early childhood development,[57] and the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM),[58] the most recent of which is 2013’s 5th edition, the DSM-5, the veritable “Bible” of the psychiatric field among other psychological industries. We can see here a clear connection being made between political opponents of a growing fascist tide, and the supposedly “mentally ill,” with “mental illness” becoming a weapon to use against dissident populations. This trend will grow as long as the reactionaries continue their clawing for power, and so long as the masses do not form organizations of their own in order to combat their power.
Mamdani’s DCS sits right in the middle of the boiling pot of reaction that has yet to be challenged by the masses and continues to grow. If implemented, the DCS would perform many fascistically nightmarish duties under his own neo-liberal administration, but it constitutes itself as a powerful ready-made weapon for political repression under even a moderately reactionary government.
7. Conclusion
The bourgeoisie within the non-profits and bloated government bureaucracies, which are already receiving more funding from the city than they ever have before,[59] will become even more entangled with the state by the successful adoption of Mamdani’s DCS proposal. They will be even more empowered to set themselves above the people, raking in substantial grants and catapulting their executives into higher levels of parasitism – all while deluding the masses that their business plan is capable of solving the ills of society that their own capitalist accumulation actively reinforces.
Communists stand on the side of the working class and all oppressed people before any “well-meaning” bourgeoisie who has decided they can help out the lower classes at the same time they enrich themselves at their expense. Marxists and anyone interested in actual liberation for the oppressed must correctly see the capitalists as antithetical to the workers and the people generally. They must reject the deals made between capitalists and so-called “democratic socialists” to expand the jurisdiction of the violent capitalist state — as well as the profit of certain sections of bourgeoisie — more and more over the lives of the people as a solution to oppression. We know that the “solutions” offered by the capitalist state and non-profits are no solutions at all.
Moreover, we understand that whatever can be accurately considered an individual “mental illness” does not have its origin or existence within the individual’s mind, but in the process of development between the individual and the lived experiences that individual has endured. As the overwhelming “experience” of life is the domination of the capitalist class over all the world’s productive forces, there is no “mental illness” that can be understood without taking the oppression of the capitalist class into account as the primary antagonizer, the creators of an all-encompassing oppressive economic force that has formed the entire structure of human social life, and which the Communists, in-particular, are disposed to deal with.
Despite what happens in November regarding the New York City mayoral election, we can expect many more liquidators and many more “humane” proposals for massive boosts to the forces owned by the non-profit bourgeoisie and their many allies in corporations, psychological industries, and the state. It is our duty as Marxists to speak in the interest of the working masses, and their interest remains, as it was in Marx’s own time, to reject the authority of their masters and establish themselves as master, understanding that it is only themselves who can break the chains of their oppression, and that no bourgeoisie or lap-dog of the bourgeoisie – as representatives only of profit – will ever do so.
Endnotes
[1] New York City Democratic Socialists for America (DSA). “Zohran Mamdani for New York City Mayor.” Accessed on 8 Aug 2025. https://socialists.nyc/zohran-mayor-nyc-dsa.
[2] Mamdani, Zohran (@ZohranKMamdani). X post that begins “We don't need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist...”. 28 Jun 2020. https://x.com/ZohranKMamdani/status/1277414510131916801
[3] Pazmlno, Glorla. “Mamdani confronts his past calls to defund police after an officer’s death in New York.” CNN. 31 Jul 2025. https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/31/politics/mamdani-defund-police-shooting
[4] Zohran for New York City. “Meet Zohran.” Accessed on 22 Aug 2025. https://www.zohranfornyc.com/#about
[5] The Legal Aid Society. “NYPD Misconduct Lawsuits Cost Taxpayers Over $205 Million in 2024.” 18 Feb 2025. https://legalaidnyc.org/news/nypd-misconduct-lawsuits-over-205-million-2024/
[6] Rayman, Graham. “NYPD misconduct, wrongful arrest lawsuit settlements cost NYC taxpayers $114.5M in 2023.” New York Daily News. 29 Feb 2024. https://www.nydailynews.com/2024/02/29/nypd-misconduct-wrongful-arrest-lawsuit-settlements-cost-nyc-taxpayers-114-5m-in-2023/
[7]United States District Court, Southern District of New York. “Cheyenne Lee against the City of New York, Brian Query, Macciel Restituyo, David Perez, Lissa Solermarte, Praveen Davis, Alex Alamonte Pichardo, Jason Gonzales, Daniel Reisert, and Flamur Gashi.” 21 Feb 2024. https://www.bronxdefenders.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Lee-Settlement-Paperwork-2.20.2024.pdf
[8] Bisram, Jennifer. “Civilian Complaint Review Board calls for NYPD officer's firing in deadly 2019 shooting.” CBS NEWS. 11 Jul 2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/deadly-nypd-shooting-firing-allan-feliz-jonathan-rivera/
[9] Brookyln District Attorney. “NYPD Officer Convicted Of Manslaughter for Shooting
Unarmed and Innocent Man in Building Staircase.” 11 Feb 2016. https://www.brooklynda.org/2016/02/16/nypd-officer-convicted-of-manslaughter-for-shooting-unarmed-and-innocent-man-in-building-staircase/
[10] Rodriguez, Cindy. “EMT Testifies Mentally Ill Woman Was Unarmed Moments Before Death, at NYPD Trial.” WNYC News. 1 Feb 2018. https://www.wnyc.org/story/emt-testifies-mentally-ill-woman-was-agitated-nypd-trial/
[11] Gee, Andre. “People Are Discovering NYC Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani’s Rap Past.” Rolling Stone. 17 Jun 2025. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/zohran-mamdani-rap-mr-cardamom-1235366310/
[12] Pazmlno, Glorla. “Mamdani confronts his past calls to defund police after an officer’s death in New York.” CNN. 31 Jul 2025. https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/31/politics/mamdani-defund-police-shooting
[13] Zohran for New York City. “Proposal for the Department of Community Safety.” Last accessed on 22 Aug 2025. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1a7ejjSZWWIAcxfcWnkYaqvnjihTb0LAOQkj8g10-npg/edit?pli=1&tab=t.0
[14]Ibid. Pg. 1.
[15] Colleen McKay, Katie L. Nugent, Matthew Johnsen, William W. Eaton, Charles W. Lidz. “A Systematic Review of Evidence for the Clubhouse Model of Psychosocial Rehabilitation.” Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research. 31 Aug 2016. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10488-016-0760-3
[16] Clubhouse International. “Corporate Partners.” Accessed on 22 Aug 2025. https://clubhouse-intl.org/our-impact/partners/
[17] Zohran for New York City. “Proposal for the Department of Community Safety.” Pg. 3.
[18] Centers for Justice Innovation. “Save Our Streets (S.O.S.).” 27 Jun 2024. https://www.innovatingjustice.org/program/save-our-streets-s-o-s/
[19] Zohran for New York City. “Proposal for the Department of Community Safety.” Pg. 12.
[20] Justice Innovation INC. “Form 990 Return of Organization Exempt from Income Tax.” 30 Apr 2024. https://www.foundationsearch.com/990/LATEST/8H/JUSTICE%20INNOVATION%20INC%202022%20852810883.HTML
[21] Ibid. Pg. 10.
[22] NYC Mayor’s Office to Prevent Gun Violence. “Interventions, The Crisis Management System.” Accessed on 22 Aug 2025. https://www.nyc.gov/site/peacenyc/interventions/crisis-management.page.
[23] The 67th Precinct Clergy Council, Inc. “Our Mission.” Accessed 22 Aug 2025. https://67clergycouncil.org/
[24] NYC Mayor’s Office to Prevent Gun Violence. “Community Partners.” Accessed 22 Aug 2025. https://www.nyc.gov/site/peacenyc/interventions/community-partners.page.
[25] Zohran for New York City. “Proposal for the Department of Community Safety.” Pg. 5.
[26] Ibid. Pg. 1.
[27]Erickson, Mark. Linked-In Profile of Mark Erickson. Accessed on 11 Aug 2025. https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-erickson-3465b715.
[28]White Bird Clinic. “Crisis Services, CAHOOTS.” Last accessed on 22 Aug 2025. https://whitebirdclinic.org/cahoots/
[29] City of Denver. “Support Team Assisted Response (STAR) Program.” Accessed on 22 Aug 2025. https://denvergov.org/Government/Agencies-Departments-Offices/Agencies-Departments-Offices-Directory/Public-Health-Environment/Community-Behavioral-Health/Behavioral-Health-Strategies/Support-Team-Assisted-Response-STAR-Program
[30] City of Olympia. “Crisis Response Team and Familiar Faces.” Accessed on 22 Aug 2025. https://www.olympiawa.gov/services/police_department/crisis_response.php
[31] Zohran for New York City. “Proposal for the Department of Community Safety.” Last accessed on 22 Aug 2025. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1a7ejjSZWWIAcxfcWnkYaqvnjihTb0LAOQkj8g10-npg/edit?pli=1&tab=t.0. Pg. 3.
[32] Ibid. Pg. 1.
[33] Ibid. Pg. 5.
[34] Ibid. Pg. 3.
[35] Ibid. Pg. 4.
[36] Ibid. Pg. 6.
[37] Ibid. Pg. 3.
[38] Coen, Bruce M. Z. Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness. Palgrave MacMillan. 2016. Pg. 205. http://ndl.ethernet.edu.et/bitstream/123456789/49047/1/80.Bruce%20M.%20Z.%20Cohen.pdf.
[39] Zohran for New York City. “The Platform.” Accessed on 22 Aug 2025. https://www.zohranfornyc.com/platform
[40] American Psychological Association. “APA RESOLUTION on Psychology’s Role in Addressing the Impact of, and Change Required With, Police Use of Excessive Force Against People of Color and Other Marginalized Communities in the United States.” Aug 2022. https://www.apa.org/about/policy/resolution-policing.pdf.
[41] American Psychological Association Services, INC. “Informing Department of Justice about necessary policing reforms.” 4 Oct 2022. https://www.apaservices.org/advocacy/news/department-justice-policing-reforms
[42] Zohran for New York City. “Proposal for the Department of Community Safety.” Pg. 2.
[43] Ibid. Pg. 9.
[44] Marx, Karl. Capital. Volume 1. Chapter 25. Section 3. 1867. Progress Publishers. 1977. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch25.htm.
[45] Zohran for New York City. “Proposal for the Department of Community Safety.” Pg. 9.
[46] Haag, Matthew. “New York City Companies All but Stopped Hiring in First Half of the Year.” The New York Times. 13 Aug 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/13/nyregion/nyc-jobs.html.
[47] Office of the New York State Comptroller. “DiNapoli: Numbers of Homeless Population Doubled in New York.” 22 Jan 2025. https://www.osc.ny.gov/press/releases/2025/01/dinapoli-numbers-homeless-population-doubled-new-york.
[48] Frey, William H. “Recent immigration brought a population rebound to America’s major metro areas, new census data show.” The Brookings Institution. 10 Apr 2025. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/recent-immigration-brought-a-population-rebound-to-americas-major-metro-areas-new-census-data-show/
[49] Ibid.
[50] Office of the New York State Comptroller. “NYC's Shifting Population: The Latest Statistics.” Dec 2023. https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/reports/osdc/pdf/report-15-2024.pdf.
[51] Immigration Research Initiative. “New Immigrants Arriving in the New York City: Economic Projections.” 8 Jan 2024. https://immresearch.org/publications/new-immigrants-arriving-in-the-new-york-city-economic-projections/.
[52] Living Wage Institute. “Living Wage Calculation for New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY.” Accessed on 22 Aug 2025. https://livingwage.mit.edu/metros/35620.
[53] Ferré-Sadurní, Louis. “What to Know About the Migrant Crisis in New York City.” The New York Times. 19 Aug 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/article/nyc-migrant-crisis-explained.html.
[54]119th Congress of the House of Representatives. “H.R.3432 - TDS Research Act of 2025.” 15 May 2025. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/3432/text.
[55] Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes. “SF 2589 Status in the Senate for the 94th Legislature.” Accessed on 22 Aug 2025. https://www.revisor.mn.gov/bills/bill.php?b=Senate&f=SF2589&ssn=0&y=2025.
[56]Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes. “SF 2589 as introduced - 94th Legislature (2025 - 2026).” 25 Mar 2025. https://www.revisor.mn.gov/bills/text.php?number=SF2589&version=0&session_year=2025&session_number=0.
[57] Zero to Three. “Introducing ZERO TO THREE: Experts in Child Development.” Accessed on 4 Oct 2025. https://www.zerotothree.org/about/.
[58]Minnesota Revisor of Statutes. “SF 2589...”
[59] New York City Office of the Major. “Mayor Adams Announces Unprecedented $5+ Billion in Advance Payments to Be Made to City-Contracted Nonprofit Providers, Providing More Upfront Cash and Contracts to Providers Than Ever Before.” 29 Apr 2025. https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2025/04/mayor-adams-unprecedented-5-billion-advance-payments-be-made-city-contracted.