Mamdani: Social workers, “transit ambassadors” should replace the cops on the calls of 911

Social workers and other non-political professionals such as “public transport ambassadors” should manage certain calls from 911 to facilitate NYPD workloads and improve the retention of officers, said the candidate for the New York Democrat Town Hall on Monday, Zohran Mamdani.

Mamdani’s position on police and public security forces took the scene after a mass shooting in Manhattan on July 28 who killed four people, including a police officer. In the light of the tragic shooting, Mamdani’s criticisms began to slam it for remarks spent on police financing in New York.

Mamdani was again asked about his approach to crime and public security on Monday during a press conference with senator Elizabeth Warren, D-MASS., When he offered his idea.

“I have said many and many times that each decision I make with regard to NYPD will work from a public security result and that public security, we know, that is also to listen to the officers themselves,” said Mamdani on Monday.

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Zohran Mamdani speaks during the debate of the mayor of New York on June 24, 2025, when questions are looming on his opinions on the police. (Getty)

The self -proclaimed socialist candidate then quoted “forced overtime” as the main cause for many police officers from the City of New York to leave their jobs, noting that NYPD officers receive around 200,000 emergency calls for a mental health crisis each year.

“The fact that each year, we ask them to assume additional responsibilities – we make them more and more difficult for them to respond to the very responsibilities that attracted them first,” said Mamdani. “New Yorkers rightly have concerns about public security, and I want to allow the police to respond to serious crimes and to hire mental health professionals to respond to mental health calls.”

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Zohran Mamdani was criticized for calls to finance the police in 2020 in the midst of public security and crime proposals which he pushes as candidate to the mayor. (Susan Watts / New York Daily News / Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

To explain the question more, Mamdani underlined a hypothetical incident involving a tourist in difficulty, argued agents are forced to use resources to answer these calls, but this could end if the city was to hire a “public transport ambassador”.

“This forced extension is something that we can expect. It is not a surprise. It is a requirement for a large part of the requests we make of these officers,” Mamdani told journalists, in response to questions on his proposal to help reduce extensions of the law application.

“When we make sure that it is not an officer who must be held in the middle of the Times Square metro station and answer a question of a tourist on which the exit works, and which escalator they can take, and which line works with delays or without them, but that we really have a transit ambassador such as this officer can focus on serious crime, it starts to reduce the type of transit time.”

Zohran Mamdani is joined on the campaign track by senator Elizabeth Warren on August 4, 2025, in New York. (Fox 5 New York)

Meanwhile, during an appearance in podcast in 2020, the same year, Mamdani did his now sadly famous social media publications calling to finance the NYPD, the socialist candidate for the mayor also suggested that the police should not be the one who responded to calls for domestic violence.

“If someone survives, to go through domestic violence – there are so many different and different situations that would be better managed by people trained to meet these specific situations as opposed to an individual with a firearm that received fairly limited training in general,” said Mamdani at the time.

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In response to Mamdani’s calls to have social workers, not police, respond to certain calls from 911 linked to mental health crises, the outgoing mayor Eric Adams, himself a former NYPD captain, called the “irresponsible” and “reckless” idea.

“So when you put civilians in danger to respond to an incident of domestic violence, it is irresponsible and it is reckless,” said Adams while criticizing Mamdani’s public security platform, according to CBS News.

Zohran Mamdani’s plan to replace the police with social workers for certain 911 calls has been described as “irresponsible” and “reckless” by the outgoing mayor of New York, Eric Adams. (Getty Images)

In the 17 -page public security plan of Mamdani published earlier this year in the middle of his race to be the candidate of the Democratic Party for the Mayor of New York, he diverged from several of his main opponents insofar as he did not plan to hire more officers, according to the New York Times. On the contrary, according to his plan, Mamdani would work to create a community of community security aimed at extending mental health teams and other members of non -applied staff who may respond to certain calls from 911.

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Mamdani’s proposal also spoke to the elimination of the NYPD’s overtime budget and his working group which is responsible for the demonstrations, according to Times.

The former New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, who was a faithful criticism of Mamdani’s approach to public security and police, published its public security platform Monday, calling for increasing the number of officers on the NYPD force by around 5,000.

Cuomo, who presents himself as independent after losing Mamdani to the primary of the Democratic Party, also wants to increase the salary of officers and improve access to benefits and pensions for retired officers.