New York’s socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani wants “mental health experts” to lead the way in responding to certain crises, he seemed to suggest during Wednesday night’s debate.
The questioner asked all of the candidates — Mamdani, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), and Curtis Sliwa (R) — if they would ask police commissioner Jessica Tisch to stay on as police commissioner.
Mamdani said he would ask her to stay and stated that his administration would be “relentless in its pursuit of safety and affordability for every New Yorker.”
“And the delivery of that will require us to put together a team of the best and the brightest. Eric Adams stacked the upper echelons of the
NYPD with corruption and incompetence. Commissioner Tisch took on a broken status quo, started to deliver accountability, rooting out corruption, and reducing crime across the five boroughs,” he said.
“I have said time and again that my litmus test for that position will be excellence and the alignment will be of that position and I am confident that under a Mamdani administration we would continue to deliver on that same mission,” he said, explaining that they would do so by creating the “Department of Community Safety to ensure that mental health experts were the ones responding to the mental health crisis.”
“Because safety and justice is at the cornerstone of our pursuit of public safety and in doing so we will also be able to deliver our agenda for affordability,” he added.
In the past, Mamdani has expressed that he is against sending police on domestic dispute calls, for instance. During a “cross-cultural conversations” segment on the “Immigrantly” podcast in July 2020, he said:
Police do not create safety… there are so many responsibilities we’ve given to police that, frankly, should have nothing to do with their departments… if somebody is jaywalking, if somebody is surviving, going through domestic violence — there are so many different, different situations that would be far better handled by people trained to deal with those specific situations, as opposed to an individual with a gun.
During the debate, Republican candidate Sliwa added that he would ask Tisch to stay as well but predicted she would not stay with either Mamdani or Cuomo as mayor, because “she has railed against no cash bail.”
“Cuomo, the architect of no cash bail, Zohran, the apprentice of no cash bail. That’s why criminals are running in the street,” he said.
Cuomo also said he would ask her to stay on as police commissioner but doubted that Mamdani would follow through with his pledge to do so.
“The DSA’s position, his position has been to defund, disband the police. She wouldn’t take that. His current position, today’s position, was freeze the budget. That would cause a reduction in police. She has called for more police. I’ve called for more police. Mayor Adams has called for more police… DSA calls for eliminating misdemeanors. He wants to decriminalize prostitution,” Cuomo pointed out. “I don’t think she would support any of that.”
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The election takes place November 4, 2025.
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