Recent police shootings of people in mental health crises have raised the stakes for Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s push to take the NYPD out of mental health responses.
Public safety experts and some of Mamdani’s own advisers say there are significant failures in the city’s emergency response system that contribute to fatal outcomes, even before officers arrive on the scene. They cite 911 dispatchers who don’t gather enough information, call classifications that automatically trigger armed police responses regardless of what families request, and officers who enter scenes and react without pausing to assess them despite training to the contrary.
“We are spending all of our energy discussing the point in the system where the least can be done,” former FDNY commissioner Laura Kavanaugh said. “As you move upstream, you get many, many more options on the table.”
Those issues appear to have played a part in two recent incidents: Chaz Fray’s fatal shooting by police in December, and Jabez Chakraborty’s shooting by police in January. In both cases, family members said, their sons were in mental health crises. Police said both men wielded knives when officers arrived.
In both cases, families explicitly asked 911 for medical help, not police. But both calls were classified under categories — “family dispute” and “involuntary removal” — that automatically trigger armed police responses, according to the NYPD.
After Chakraborty’s shooting on Jan. 26, Mamdani said he would expedite the creation of a Department of Community Safety, which he says will help shift the city’s crisis response away from police and toward clinicians and trained peers.
But the mayor has also said in recent days that he’s still figuring out how that department will operate and what the boundaries and limitations of a civilian response will look like. He seems to be dialing back his plan to remove police from such calls altogether, and said he’s exploring the use of co-response teams that pair police with clinicians or peers. He’s also discussed expanding the city’s existing B-HEARD program, which diverts some mental health calls away from police altogether.
A family member tries to intervene as Jabez Chakraborty approaches officers in his Queens home.
A police spokesperson did not respond directly to the criticisms but provided a detailed timeline of how police responded to the 911 call for Chakraborty, which indicates the call was coded as having the potential for violence. The caller explicitly stated Chakraborty wasn’t acting violently, but did say he threw glass at the wall.
Policing and mental health experts who spoke with Gothamist, including some who are advising the mayor, said reforms need to go beyond simply swapping out personnel at the point of crisis.
Kavanaugh and others said 911 dispatchers lack access to callers’ mental health histories, diagnoses and past interactions with first responders — information that could help determine whether police are needed. She said that kind of information would have mattered in the case of 22-year-old Chakraborty, who has schizophrenia.
“Knowing that this was someone with a history of mental illness, knowing that it was schizophrenia specifically,” she said. “Being able to send people specifically equipped to deal with that, I think, would’ve made a difference.”
A 911 call released this week shows a family member told a dispatcher Chakraborty was not violent, no one was injured and he had no weapons. The caller asked for “involuntary transportation” to the hospital, but clarified that they wanted an ambulance, not police. The dispatcher told her that “normally both parties respond” — meaning police and EMS.
Police officials said the 911 dispatcher attempted to connect the caller to EMS but wasn’t successful after six rings. According to the 911 logs and body camera footage, police arrived at the scene about four minutes after the 911 call. EMS didn’t respond to the call until 30 seconds before Chakraborty picked up a kitchen knife and an officer shot him four times.
It’s about the need for de-escalation skills and being able to connect with someone in crisis.
Jordyn Rosenthal, director of advocacy at the mental health nonprofit Community Access.
The Queens DA has since charged Chakraborty with attempted assault, despite Mamdani’s objections. The mayor said of Chakraborty, who remained hospitalized and appeared by video for his arraignment Friday: “His handcuffs should be removed and he should be receiving the care that he needs.”
Mariela Ruiz-Angel, director of alternative first response initiatives at Georgetown Law Center and an adviser to Mamdani on the new department, said having access to a caller’s history of mental health episodes and prior 911 interactions could change who gets sent, how fast and how they approach a scene.
She pointed to the shooting of Fray as another example of 911 not relaying the right information and sending the right response team.
“That would be the thing that maybe could have made a difference there,” she said. “If he had a history of that having happened and knowing what had happened before, I think very much could have helped.”
Fray’s family also told 911 their 29-year-old was acting erratically but wasn’t violent and needed hospital transport. Police say he charged at officers with a box cutter. The family disputes that. Fray was shot and killed.
Mamdani appears ready to continue involving police in some capacity whenever there’s a weapon involved, though some mental health advocates say trained peers or clinicians might be better at de-escalating such situations in some cases.
“When there is a violent situation, such as with a weapon, NYPD will be on the scene and the North Star that we are building towards is one where every single person is safe,” Mamdani said at a press conference earlier this month.
Chakraborty, in an image provided by his family. Family members say they sought a medical intervention — not a police response — when they called 911 last month.
Courtesy of the Chakraborty family
Asked whether police would always be involved in the case of an involuntary hospital transport, Mamdani said that’s one of the open questions his administration is working to figure out.
Removing police from situations where they are now the default, such as involuntary hospital trips, would require a highly coordinated and “very well-trained civilian force that knows how to do some of these other things,” according to Liz Glazer, founder of the policy magazine Vital City and former head of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice during the de Blasio administration.
B-HEARD’s limits
As it stands, the city’s main police alternative, B-HEARD, is constrained by geographic coverage and eligibility rules. The pilot program launched in 2021 and is currently operational in 31 of the city’s 78 NYPD precincts. That represents about 40% of the city, with nine teams available across that area at any given time. Dispatchers determine which calls can be routed to the program, screening out those in which someone may pose a danger to themselves or others.
In fiscal year 2025, 47,656 mental health calls came through 911 in the pilot area during the program’s operating hours, but only 11,968 were eligible for a B-HEARD response, or about 25%, according to FDNY data.
Mamdani has vowed to expand B-HEARD to operate citywide, but has not yet given a timeframe for doing so. He will also have to answer key questions about whether 911 will remain the only way to access B-HEARD, the kinds of calls the teams will be able to respond to, and what staffing will look like.
A coalition of mental health advocates has long called for B-HEARD to include trained peers who have their own experiences with the mental health system — a move Mamdani has said he supports.
“It’s about the need for de-escalation skills and being able to connect with someone in crisis and understanding what they’re going through and what they’re thinking,” said Jordyn Rosenthal, director of advocacy at the mental health nonprofit Community Access.
She said the question of when that person would still have to be accompanied by police is “very complicated.”
Staffing has been one of the key challenges to expanding the program so far.
NYC Health and Hospitals, which operates B-HEARD alongside the FDNY, initially struggled to hire enough social workers. City officials said in November they had largely overcome that challenge — but were now facing a shortage of EMTs.
EMTs typically earn about $44,000 to start and up to $76,000 after five years — thousands of dollars less than either their firefighter colleagues in the FDNY, or NYPD officers.
At the time, then-Mayor Eric Adams said the city would cut EMTs out of B-HEARD, allowing them to focus on other types of emergencies — a move their union, DC 37, opposed, saying members in the program had become “experts in the response, treatment and transporting [of] people having a mental health crisis.”
Body camera footage from the moments before police shot and killed former NYPD officer Michael Lynch at a Brooklyn hospital. Police say he had barricaded himself in a room and threatened to kill two people with a broken part of a hospital toilet.
NYPD
To hire more clinicians and other staff to do this work, experts say the city may have to sweeten the deal.
“Pay parity, to some extent, is going to be extremely important,” Ruiz-Angel said. “Benefits are extremely important.”
More officers may not mean a better response
The city has more police officers on hand to respond to crisis calls. But Ruiz-Angel said sending more officers doesn’t necessarily improve outcomes.
Ruiz-Angel pointed to last month’s shooting of Michael Lynch, a 62-year-old former NYPD and FDNY officer who barricaded himself in a room at NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital after cutting himself with a broken piece of a toilet. He was threatening two people inside the room and approximately a dozen officers responded.
Ruiz-Angel reviewed the body camera footage and said officers spent roughly three minutes shouting commands before anyone attempted a conversation.
“It wasn’t until three minutes into the yelling that finally one cop was like, ‘Hey, can you tell me why you don’t wanna drop the knife?’” she said.
To effectively overhaul the city’s crisis response, Ruiz-Angel said, the administration must first understand 911 call volume and types, assess existing nonprofits doing crisis work and get buy-in from police, fire and health agencies.
A realistic timeline for that is months, not weeks, Ruiz-Angel said.
“Do I anticipate you can move on some of these fast? Yes,” she said.
“Do I think the other things we want to really think through? Absolutely.”
She described the challenge as “flying the plane while you’re building it at the same time. And it’s because people are dying.”