By Sonali Kolhatkar

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly subscriber-funded television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her books include Talking About Abolition: A Police-Free World Is Possible (Seven Stories Press, 2025) and Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and was a senior editor at Yes! Magazine covering race and economy. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

Credit Line: This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

As part of his proposed city budget for 2026, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani just canceled the NYPD’s plan to hire 5,000 more police officers, undoing a key component of his predecessor Eric Adams’s initiatives. The move aligns with Mamdani’s campaign promise to keep police budgets and hiring in check. The young mayor also promised to create a Department of Community Safety while campaigning, an agency that, in theory, would divert certain emergency calls away from police. Although he did not include a line item for this department in his proposed budget, there are strong indications that the mayor plans to deliver on his abolitionist agenda by creating nonpolice alternatives to manage emergencies.

In 2020, when millions of Americans marched to protest the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd, many, including Mamdani, called for a defunding of police. But, five years later, Mamdani announced he would not, in fact, be defunding the police if elected as mayor, disappointing racial justice activists and critics of the police. And soon after his election, the mayor-elect announced in January 2026 that he would askNYPD Police Chief Jessica Tisch to stay on in her leadership position.

Alex S. Vitale, a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and the coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project, isn’t discouraged by these moves. Author of the bestselling 2017 book, The End of Policing—considered a “bible of the movement to defund the police”—Vitale was invited in December 2025 to join the mayor’s transition team to work on community safety issues. While he disagrees with Mamdani’s decision to keep Tisch on, he speculates that the New York City mayor is protecting against “the risk of a real big political backlash” if he had started his term with an aggressive removal of Tisch and dismantling of the NYPD.

Vitale says, “We need to start by building credible alternatives in the communities to produce real public safety before we start talking to the community about somehow dialing down or dismantling policing.” In other words, ordinary people need institutional alternatives to the police that they can turn to when faced with an emergency.

Vitale, who spent a lot of his time on Mamdani’s transition team working out the details for the Department of Community Safety, says such an agency would create a “robust civilian mental health crisis response capacity that is independent of the police, independent of the hospital system, which is tied to community-based service delivery [and] peer-to-peer outreach.” Additionally, “There are plans to address hate crimes, subway safety, all through a lens of what I consider to be a crisis stabilization.” The mayor’s approach, at least in theory, is to understand the needs of the city’s most vulnerable and underserved residents and work to meet them. This stands in stark contrast to the standard approach of criminalizing low-income and unhoused people and those struggling with mental health challenges.

Across the country, there are thriving models of nonpolice alternatives. A Department of Community Safety in Albuquerque, New Mexico, has been in place for more than four years and has diverted more than 85 percent of emergency calls away from police. The city hired a new type of emergency responder: “trauma-informed professionals with a background in social work, mental health, and community engagement.”

In Durham, North Carolina, a similar nonpolice approach is showing great promise. Durham’s emergency response now includes dispatching “unarmed teams led by mental health professionals to behavioral health and quality-of-life emergencies.” These teams are labeled with the appropriate acronym HEART, which stands for Holistic Empathetic Assistance Response Team, and are seen as a “fifth branch” of public safety, alongside 911, police, fire, and emergency medical services.

Although these sound like commonsense approaches to public safety, Mamdani faces an uphill battle to realize his Department of Community Safety, one that Vitale says is far more ambitious than existing models in other cities. “I don’t think there’s any one city that has tried to cobble together this particular range of interventions,” he says. Moreover, there exists nothing at the scale of New York City, the nation’s most populous city.

Mamdani’s proposed freeze on police hiring is already facing stiff opposition, in spite of the fact that violent crime dramatically dropped in the city in 2025. While Tisch takes credit for bringing down crime, according to Vitale, “nationally, crime is coming down, so, to say that this is the result of the strategic actions of one police leader in one city seems to really be a kind of parochial understanding of the nature of what is clearly a much larger and broader range phenomenon.” Regardless of who is responsible, a drop in crime means fewer police are needed, not more.

There is a danger that Mamdani could face substantial opposition to his community safety plans, forcing him to backtrack—as many progressive mayors have done across the country. Take Los Angeles, where Mayor Karen Bass, who has roots in grassroots community organizing and was once considered a strong ally of abolitionist activists, is now a champion of police, urging a budget-strapped city to fork over millions of dollars for more cops. One of LA’s leading abolitionist activists, Melina Abdullah, has called Bass out over the betrayal of her past principles.

But Vitale points out that what sets Mamdani apart from other progressive mayors is his clear critique of capitalism. He saysmayors like Bass “were still enamored with the politics of neoliberalism and austerity, and their criticisms of the police were very thin and had to do more with, ‘we are upset about a particular act of violence or some racial disparities in arrests, and we’re going to fix that with some superficial procedural reforms like some training and some body cameras.’”

Contrary to that, from the start of his campaign, Mamdani articulated a politics of democratic socialism that doesn’t see policing as a necessary mechanism to enforce wealth inequality, and instead indicts an economic system that generates inequality as a central feature.

Given that economic inequality is one of the greatest drivers of crime, Mamdani’s launch of a universal child care program, his promised rent freeze, and his ideas for city-run grocery stores all feed into that socialist vision of reducing crime without the need for police. Making police obsolete is the first step toward abolishing them.

The new mayor hopes to hire a deputy mayor by this spring to lead his new agency. And, some members of the city council are on his side, having introduced a resolution to create a new Department of Community Safety.

“While we don’t see a dismantling or a dialing back of police power at this time, I think there is a pretty strong commitment to not expanding and over legitimating that system,” says Vitale. “The proof will be in the pudding, so to speak.”