Lefty NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s ‘public safety plan’ panned by policing experts: ‘Pie in the sky’

Lefty mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani wants to spend $1.1 billion on a new department overseeing mental health callsinstead of the NYPD — a proposal panned as “another pie in the sky idea” by law enforcement experts Tuesday.

The democratic socialist state assemblyman from Queens unveiled a 17-page public safety plan that did not call to hire more police officers, as other mayoral candidates have proposed.

Instead, Mamdani wants to create a new Department of Community Safety focused on increasing mental health outreach teams in the subways and beefing up “gun violence interrupter” programs in neighborhoods to drive down crime.

Mamdani, who has backed the “defund the police” movement, insisted that cops are being relied on too often to “deal with the failures of the social safety net.”

“A reliance that is preventing them from doing their actual jobs,” he said at a press conference Tuesday. “This is part of the reason why so many crimes are left unresolved in our city.”

Law enforcement and public safety experts slammed the plan as unrealistic and claimed cops would eventually be forced to clean up the mess.

“They keep trying to reinvent the wheel but it will always fall back on police officers,” a law enforcement source said.

“Another pie in the sky idea that will fall short again – with police officers picking up the pieces like everything else.”

Mamdani, who has landed in second place in recent polling, claimed to reporters he would not cut from the NYPD’s budget to pay for the new agency. His plan calls for about $600 million to be transferred from existing programs that would fold into the new department, while another $455 million would be new funding.

His campaign said the funds could come from raising taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers and on corporations – both of which would need to be approved by state lawmakers.

Mamdani’s plan would also expand a current program, the Behavioral Health Emergency Assistance Response Division — dubbed B-HEARD — that sends mental health professionals and EMTs to respond to 911 calls involving mental health crises instead of cops.

The program, launched as a pilot under then-Mayor Bill de Blasio, has faced scrutiny in recent years over its inability to hire staff and failure to respond to all calls.

Michael Alcazar, an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, called the plan “100% a waste of money” and said cops need to be on the scene to handle most cases involving an emotionally disturbed person.

“The candidate has never responded to an EDP job so he’s putting this out on paper,” said Alcazar, a retired NYPD detective. “It sounds great because everyone hates the police.”

Chris Herrmann, an associate professor at John Jay, called Mamdani’s plan “innovative” and worth a try, but questioned if dispatchers are best equipped to decide whether cops or mental health staff respond to a 911 call.

“The problem obviously is when the social work teams show up to the place where the cops really need to be,” he told The Post.

A Mamdani campaign spokesperson said emergency dispatchers, under new protocols, would decide if medical workers and peer counselors would respond to a call or if police would handle the situation, and B-HEARD teams can also call for cops once they are at the scene.

Still, Alcazar and Herrmann both said candidates should be focused on drawing in more police officers.

“The reality is the numbers are going down,” Herrmann said of the NYPD, which is experiencing a staffing crisis.

The NYPD currently has a 34,000-person workforce — a notable drop from the 36,300 officers the department had five years ago before the COVID-19 pandemic and the Minnesota police killing of George Floyd that stoked anti-cop sentiment.

The department had an all-time high of around 40,000 cops in 2000 under then-mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Several other candidates in the June Democratic mayoral primary, including former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and City Comptroller Brad Lander, have unveiled public safety plans that involve hiring more cops.

Mayor Eric Adams, who is also running for re-election and has consistently called for more cops, brushed off Mamdani’s proposal.

“When you talk about that, where are you going to get the money from … you want to continue hemorrhaging the high income families going to pay into our tax base?” he said during his weekly press briefing later Tuesday.

Under his plan, outreach workers would flood 100 different subway stations to offer help to people in need and add more “violence interrupters” – who usually live in the community and have a criminal past — would attempt to “de-escalate potentially violent situations and mediate conflicts.”

He also wants to grow B-HEARD so every Big Apple neighborhood has at least one team, including one mental health professional and two EMTs.

“I have released a comprehensive evidenced-based plan that will address violence and crime at its source, deploy trained mental health crisis responders across our subway system, relieve the excessive burden we’ve placed on police officers, and keep New Yorkers safe,” Mamdani said in a statement responding to Adams’ criticism.

“It’s time to turn the page on Eric Adams’ four years of failed governance and elect leadership that takes these issues seriously.”

— Additional reporting by Joe Marino and Craig McCarthy.