Committee on Public Safety

Hello, good afternoon. Welcome to today's New York City Council hearing for the Committee on Public Safety, joint with General Governmental Operations, State and Federal Legislation. At this time, please silence all phones. If you wish to speak in today's hearing, please fill out an appearance card with one of the sergeants. Moving forward, no one is to approach the dais.

Chair, you may begin.

Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Councilmember Oswald Feliz, Chair of the Committee on Public Safety. Good afternoon and welcome to today's hearing on the Office of Community Safety. At today's hearing, we'll examine the newly created Office of Community Safety. and other non-police solutions to reduce violence. I would like to thank Councilmember and Co-Chair Gil Brewer and the Committee of Government Operations for co-chairing today's hearing.

And I'd also like to acknowledge members who have joined us, including Speaker Julie Menin, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, Councilmembers Riley, Wong, Murano, Nurse, and Wilson. Before I begin my opening statement, I'd like to pass it on to Speaker Julie Menin.

Thank you, Councilmember Thank you, Chair. And I want to welcome everyone to today's committee hearing. I'm Julie Menin, Speaker of the New York City Council. Let me begin by thanking Chair Feliz and Chair Brewer, chairs of these committees, for convening this very important oversight hearing on the Office of Community Safety and non-police solutions to reducing violence. We will also be hearing 3 pieces of legislation that the chairs will discuss. shortly.

A crucial aspect of community safety is establishing and fostering trust between government and the people it serves. That trust is earned over time through transparency, through ensuring impacted New Yorkers have a seat at the table, and mostly through proven results. This past March, the mayor established an Office of Community Safety tasked with developing citywide community safety strategies and to supervise and coordinate the work of mayoral offices that operate in furtherance of community safety. including crime and violence prevention initiatives, victim assistance services, and community mental health services.

As part of the establishment of OCS, 5 existing mayoral offices moved under its umbrella: the Office of Crime Victim Services, the Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes, the Office of Community Mental Health, the Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence, the Office for Neighborhood Safety and the Prevention of Gun Violence. All of them were previously independent offices.

Some have existed for over a decade. So it's important for us to come away from today's hearing with a greater understanding of why the offices were shifted from operating independently to being managed by the new OCS. We also want to learn which advocates were consulted before the change was made. Thank you. made, and whether those organizations that have been working in these spaces for years are part of the decision-making moving forward.

Certain providers have contacted us and have testified at prior hearings, particularly a hearing we held in the Gender Equity Committee about the move of the Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence, and voiced a concern at our hearing. Safe Horizons CEO Liz Roberts said that she was concerned that they had not been contacted prior to the restructuring, and Sanctuary for Families specifically said that the move occurred without meaningful collaboration.

So one of the goals we have today is to understand what can happen moving forward to increase that level of collaboration and make sure that those organizations have a seat at the table. Most importantly, we want to understand the overarching goal of the office and what approach has that it plans on taking moving forward. And we do want to say that the goal of keeping New Yorkers safe is obviously incredibly important.

We are concerned that compared to 2025, reported rapes have increased nearly 4%, subway felony assaults have climbed by 11%, and hate crimes are up 13%. So these are all questions that we plan on asking, and we look forward to having a really fulsome hearing and conversation, and I'll turn it back over to the chair for his opening statement.

Thank you.

Thank you, Speaker. Earlier this year, New York City Mayor Mamdani issued Executive Order Number 15, which established the Office of Community Safety, known as OCS. Broadly tasked with developing citywide community safety initiatives, OCS is also empowered to supervise and coordinate the work of 5 existing mayoral offices that operate with similar safety-related goals. These offices are the Office for Neighborhood Safety and Prevention of Gun Violence, the Office of Community Mental Health, the Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence, the Office for Prevention of Hate Crimes, and the Office for Crime Victim Services.

The executive order also directs OCS to coordinate citywide mental health crisis response programs including the Be Heard program, an emergency response initiative that sends teams of mental health practitioners to certain mental health emergency calls. Today's hearing is an opportunity for the council to examine the administration's plan and vision for the newly created Office of Community Safety, to better understand what OCS has accomplished since it was established, learn about how OCS plans to coordinate the work of the 5 offices under its jurisdiction, and other city agencies as well, including our New York City Police Department.

The council also wants to know what changes have been made to existing programs and how OCS will measure whether its efforts are improving safety and connecting New Yorkers with needed services. Through today's hearing, the committee seeks a clear understanding of OCS's authority, staffing, budget, and plans for the future. Establishing an office is one step. We need to know what it is doing, how is it working with the agencies and organizations responsible for delivering services, and what measurable results the city expects to achieve. 2 specific areas of OCS's work that I plan to closely examine include how we're responding to mental health emergencies and the crisis management system which operates anti-violence initiatives citywide.

The committees will also examine how OCS is working with community-based organizations that deliver violence prevention services, notably via the Crisis Management System, which relies on community members and violence interrupters to mediate conflicts, connect people with services, and help prevent violence. We want to understand how OCS is supporting these efforts how it evaluates their effectiveness, and whether existing programs have the resources and coordination needed to reach the communities they serve.

Public safety is one of the most important responsibilities of city government, and we have to continue to explore new initiatives, but at the same time, we have to make sure that they're effective. So I look forward to a conversation on these new initiatives and this new office. Finally, the committees will hear related legislation, specifically 2 bills being heard by the Public Safety Committee.

Introduction number 414, sponsored by Councilmember Riley, which would require the city to establish a 3-digit emergency hotline known as the Gun Violence Intervention Hotline to aid individuals seeking assistance with mental health and supportive services and programs related to gun violence intervention. And introduction number 667, sponsored by Councilmember Williams, which would require that judges at the oath offer the option to complete community service in lieu of paying civil penalties for violations given for improper disposal of garbage.

I would like to thank the leadership team at the Office of Community Safety and all the stakeholders who have joined us today. I would like to thank also my staff, including the committee staff, Josh Kingsley, the senior counsel to this committee, Chad Benjamin, the policy analyst, Esperanza Diaz, my chief of staff, and Santiago Baena, my legislative director.

I look forward to productive discussion, and I would like to now turn it to Co-Chair Brewer for her opening remarks before offering the bill sponsors an opportunity.

Thank you very much, Councilmember Felice, and we appreciate this bill. I am Gail Brewer. I chair the Committee on Government Operations, State and Federal Legislation, and it is important to talk about the Office of Community Safety. I noticed it already has an acronym, OCS, and everything to do with non-police solutions to reducing violence We're obviously going to hear from Intro Number 403, sponsored by Councilmember Wessler.

I want to give him credit for really working on creating a Department of Community Safety. He's been very focused on this, to his credit. As you've heard, in March of this year, the mayor created this Office of Community Safety to develop safety strategies. It's made up of several already existing offices and was built as the first step toward fulfilling the mayor's campaign pledge to create this department.

That pledge contemplated the creation of an agency with more expansive powers and duties than those of the current Office of Community Safety. And in proposing this, the candidate Mondavi imagined a department that would fill the gaps of our programs and services and would address, more importantly, violence with the public health focus. The Department of Community Safety, as envisioned by the mayor, was meant to help decrease the myriad tasks police officers perform and allow trained health and social professionals to take the lead in addressing issues that have strained our social safety net.

With a proposed budget of $1.2 billion, the Department of Community Safety would mark a drastic change in how New York City would deal with so many different safety issues. We know that there are many of them. Intro 403 would create a department, as you heard, of community safety based on a similar principle of removing police response from certain interactions where the main need is access to services, often mental health.

This new agency would build upon the infrastructure of non-police response currently exemplified in the Office of Community Safety, and that infrastructure is one that advocates and members— that advocates and members of the council have called on for years. The Department of Community Safety contemplated by 403 would be tasked with promoting community safety, providing emergency responses that support the preservation of public safety and health and welfare.

And it would involve collaboration with emergency responders, social service, professionals and public health officials, and the maintenance of field operations to facilitate the delivery of services. Today we will take a hard look at these— administration's efforts to take a public health approach to public safety. This means examining how the Office of Community Safety has worked so far in its 6 months of existence.

We can analyze what works, what doesn't, where there needs to be more, and what we shouldn't do at all. We will evaluate how this office meets promises made by the mayor and the goals of the council, look at what the consequences, good or bad, of expanding this office into an agency. And the creation of the Office of Community Safety indicated a step toward a drastic change to both public safety and community safety in the city, and the primary oversight authority in the city.

It is the council's job to make sure we are making that change right. I do want to say one thing about the topic that the speaker mentioned about the gender aspect to it. I visited the place at the District Attorney's Office where women and families go after some kind of horror sexual assault situation, and I hope that that would be part of this discussion also.

Very important part of community safety. From government operations staff, I want to thank Johari Frazier, Erica Cohen, And obviously, and Sameed Hamid, and from my staff, Schuler Puder. And I thank everyone. I'll turn it back over to Chair Feliz.

Thank you so much, Chair Brewer. Next, we'll hear from our public advocate, Jumaane Williams. Peace and blessings. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just want to make sure I'm focused. The Knicks have won 2 straight, and they're going to beat the 76ers tonight. But thank you. Mr. Chair and Madam Speaker and Chair Brewer, as mentioned, my name is Jumaane Williams, Public Advocate for the City of New York.

I want to thank the chairs and the members of the committee for holding this very important hearing today. In March of this year, the Office of Community Safety, OCS, was established to coordinate efforts across neighborhood safety, victim and service— survivor services, domestic and gender-based violence prevention, hate crime prevention, and community mental health. I'm encouraged by this administration's desire to build a safer city for everyone and want to see the office become its own department.

So I'm thankful Councilmember Ressler's Intro 403, of which I'm a proud co-sponsor, would codify a full Department of Community Safety. Building out OCS requires close coordination with agencies such as NYPD, FDNY, DSS, and others, ensuring adequate resources to centralize violence prevention and crisis response initiatives. The action our city takes to prevent violence and strengthen communities does not just impact everyone. across the 5 boroughs, they set a blueprint for what's possible across the entire country. 10 months into this administration, New Yorkers have seen genuine public safety wins like the continued downward trend of most major crimes.

As we heard, unfortunately, some are up, including rape and sexual assault. However, citations for low-level quality-of-life crimes like turnstile jumping have increased by 12%. Any increase in police presence, especially when directed at commonplace low-level offenses, will by definition and intention increased the number of arrests for these incidents. OCS can play an important role in providing the targeted services and programs that are more appropriate for addressing the underlying causes of many of the low-level offenses, so NYPD can focus on responding to and investigating more serious crimes.

Additionally, the NYPD's response to people in mental health crisis continues to be a major concern. In 2024, 19-year-old Win Rosario was killed during a mental health crisis. What's your name? by responding police officers. NYPD officers agree that allowing clinicians to respond to those who need mental health care frees them up to do their jobs— investigating and responding to crime.

Our law enforcement should not be expected to serve as mental health professionals. OCS has the opportunity to strengthen mental health response initiatives like Be Heard, but it will take close collaboration across agencies to make it successful. The creation of OCS represents an opportunity— an An important opportunity to align our city's current community safety initiatives under a single strategic vision to scale promising practices and deliver deeper impact for New Yorkers.

A fully operational office, and eventually a department, will enable us to build safer, thriving communities across the 5 boroughs. I do want to say we're at a really critical time here, so I'm excited this office is built. But wherever I see this working, there is full integration with the office. There's full coordination, there's full buy-in. And I'm not sure that that is the case across the board in the administration.

So I'm really hoping that we can figure out how we can have OCS not treated as an aside, but actually a full integrated partner when it comes to public safety, at the meetings, at the press conferences, at every place that they need to be, helping develop the strategy. And I don't think that we've reached that point at this moment in time, and we're hoping that we can.

And Of course, I did a lot of work around gun violence. I'm very proud of the work CMS is doing. Shout out to them. I think some of that work has stagnated now. And so now is a great time to look at how we can build on that work that was there, continue to build on infrastructure, and build on it.

The whole world, the whole country can be— can see what New York City is doing, as they've done before. So I believe that we can get this right, and we have to get it right. So I'm very much looking to this— Thank you. hearing to figure out how we can do this better and actually building some things so we can measure it even, even better.

So thank you so much. And I want to shout out Kay Bain, my brother from another mother, who's not here now but was very helpful and instrumental in helping build this out from CCD. Thank you. Thank you so much. I'd also like to recognize Councilmember Stevens and also Councilmember Ariello, who has joined us virtually. Next, we'll hear from Councilmember Kevin Riley, whose bill introduction number 414 is being heard today.

Thank you, Chair Feliz and Chair Brewer, for hearing my legislation, Intro 414, establishing a 3-digit, 24/7 gun violence intervention hotline. Let me start by saying what so many of us are feeling. We are tired. Tired of the shootings. Tired of losing our young people. Tired of families burying loved ones. Just yesterday, 15-year-old Javis Frimpong was tragically shot and killed while walking to school in the Bronx.

The day before he marked, which would have been today, one year since he arrived from Ghana. A young boy with his entire future ahead of him stolen by senseless gun violence. As a father, I am heartbroken, but most importantly, I'm outraged. No parent should have to bury their child. No child should fear for their life walking to school.

Thank you. While shootings have declined citywide, those statistics mean little to a grieving family. One shooting is still one shooting too many. Intro 414 would establish a 24/7 hotline staffed by trained mental health professionals connecting New Yorkers to crisis counseling, conflict mediation, youth outreach, and intervention resources. We cannot keep waiting until shots are fired to take action.

And this is not about replacing 911. Law enforcement plays a critical role in keeping our communities safe, and community-based violence intervention strengthens those efforts. We need both working together to prevent violence and protect lives. I want to thank my colleagues, advocates, and community partners for their support. Our communities are tired of mourning. They're demanding safety, solutions, and action.

And today I want us to remember his name. It's Javits Frimpong, who was 15 years old, who was killed yesterday. His family should be preparing for his future, not mourning for his loss. This is unacceptable, and we have to do more. Intro 414 is just one more tool to intervene before violence escalates and helps prevent another family from experiencing this pain.

We owe Javits and his family and every child in this city more than condolences. Thank you. We owe them safety, and we owe them action. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Councilmember Riley.

Next, we'll hear from Councilmember Lincoln Wrestler, who also has his bill being heard today. Thank you so much, Chair Felice and Chair Brewer, for having this hearing today. And I really especially want to thank the speaker for the opportunity to hear this legislation. I'd like to just also take a moment to thank Josh Kingsley, committee counsel, for his great work in drafting this bill, and my chief of staff, Molly Haley, who is absolutely brilliant and really the brains of our operation.

I'm really grateful to her on this and on everything. And I just want to start by thanking all of the people who do the work of community safety every day— city workers, nonprofit workers who help make our community safer and are helping people in need. When I ran for City Council, the idea of a new community safety agency that could address issues in our neighborhoods in real time and actually connect people to the help, to the solutions that they need, rather than just punitive enforcement, was a big part of my campaign platform.

We began the bill drafting process early in my term, and we were pleased to finally introduce the legislation last year. after the Department of Community Safety gained some traction on the mayor's campaign. The overwhelming majority of 911 calls for mental health assistance are responded to by NYPD officers rather than mental health professionals, social workers, or others trained to handle and defuse these challenging situations.

We ask our police to respond to every issue under the sun, And it distracts from their core work of preventing and solving violent crime. We need a new agency, a new city agency, that can ensure real-time response to mental health calls and other nonviolent issues, and actually connect New Yorkers to the solutions that they desperately need, like housing and healthcare.

We all know that public safety is about much more than just policing. And to deepen public safety, we must make greater investments in violence interruption strategies to help our young people get on the right track. We need to do so much more to help chronically homeless New Yorkers who are often dealing with mental illness, who are struggling daily on our streets and in our subways.

And we also need to significantly improve coordination across our siloed city agencies so so that New Yorkers will finally stop cycling through our jails and our hospitals and our shelters. Making this a city agency in our charter will offer permanence and ensure that we can continue to provide robust council oversight through budget hearings, reporting, and more. I am honored to have the support of 34 council members, a supermajority, on this bill, and our distinguished Public Advocate.

I look forward to working closely with the Speaker, with my colleagues, with the administration, with many advocates and providers doing the work on the ground every single day so that we together can refine the bill language and make sure that this agency is set up for success permanently. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Councilmember Ressler. I'll now call the first panel, representatives from the Office of Your safety. Commissioner Delaney Brumsey. Clifford LaRochelle. Edward Gill— Hill, sorry. Ranti Ogundele. Jija Ramjathan, Michael Williams, Evan Ellis Santos-Goris, and Lakeisha Grant. I'll pass it to the committee counsel to administer the oath. Good afternoon, everyone. Can you just raise your right hand and just affirm to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and to answer honestly to councilmember questions?

Please quieten the chambers. You will be escorted out if you cannot remain quiet. Do you acknowledge that? Thank you all. You may go ahead. This is the second warning. The third one, you will be escorted out. So please quieten the chambers. We have a panel who will be testifying.

Good morning, Chair Feliz, Chair Brewer, and members of the Committee on Public Safety and Committee on Government Operations, State and Federal Legislation. I am Dr. Aisha Delaney Brumsey, Commissioner of the Office of Community Safety, or OCS. Thank you for the opportunity to speak today about OCS's work. Established through Executive Order 15 in March 2026, OCS advances a whole-of-government approach to preventing violence and promoting safety.

OCS brings together 5 offices: the Office of Crime Victim Services, Office of Neighborhood Safety, the Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence, the Office of Community Mental Health, and the Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes. Our work recognizes that New York City needs multiple tools and strategies to build safer communities. This means investing in community-led solutions that prevent violence, intervening when conflicts and crises arise, and ensuring that victims, survivors, and families have the support they need to heal and recover.

Bringing OCS's offices together also recognizes that the challenges New Yorkers face do not exist in isolation. For instance, research shows that communities with high-level rates of gun violence also experience high rates of domestic violence. A survivor of domestic violence may need mental health care. Communities affected by gun violence or hate crimes may also need immediate intervention and sustained support.

Together, our offices work towards a city where New Yorkers can live safely and access the support they need. The Office of Community Mental Health, OCS, works to expand access to mental health care and improve behavioral health crisis response. The Office of Neighborhood Safety works to prevent gun violence among the people and neighborhoods at greatest risk. The Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence, NGBV, works towards a city free from domestic and gender-based violence, where survivors can access safety and support.

And the Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes works to prevent violence and bias and to build a New York where everyone feels safe and welcome. Our approaches are grounded in research and evidence, informed by what we hear directly from survivors and communities about what they need to be safe and thrive, and implemented in partnership with our fellow government agencies and community-based partners.

One way you can see this approach is in the work of the Office of Community Mental Health, or OCMH, which addresses gaps in the behavioral health system and expands access to care for New Yorkers. OCMH invests in community-based approaches that bring mental health support to where New Yorkers live, learn, and work, helping reduce stigma, promote early intervention, and strengthen community capacity.

One critical part of that work is ensuring that when New Yorkers experience a behavioral health crisis, they receive an appropriate response. Across the country, jurisdictions are increasingly bringing behavioral— bringing health professionals into 911 behavioral health crisis response. Research supports this approach. A study of Denver's STAR program, which pairs a mental health clinician with a paramedic to respond to certain 911 calls, found a 34% reduction in reports of lower-level offenses and no detectable increase in more serious crime.

Here, Be Heard, our signature 911 behavioral health response initiative, pairs 2 emergency medical services professionals with one social worker to respond to eligible calls, assess needs, de-escalate crises, and connect people to appropriate care. The program is operated by New York City's Fire Department, FDNY, and New York City Health and Hospitals, and is overseen by OCMH. In fiscal year 2026, Be Heard responded to 8,524 calls, with 42% of the individuals served receiving care in the community rather than being transported to a hospital.

Also, among surveyed patients, 96 reported that Be Heard helped them. Expanding and strengthening Be Heard is a key priority for OCS and this administration. We are working in close partnership with FDNY and New York City Health and Hospitals to strengthen operations and expand the program's reach so that many more New Yorkers can receive a response from teams of EMS professionals and social workers.

Thank you.

Different public safety challenges require different approaches. While OCMH focuses on improving behavioral healthcare and crisis response, the Office of Neighborhood Safety works to prevent community violence, assaults, and shootings that typically occur outside the home. New York City has seen declines in shooting incidents from 804 in fiscal year '25 to 673 in fiscal year '26, a 16% reduction.

And a 61% decline from a recent peak of 1,741 incidents in fiscal year 2021. ONS contributes to the city's broader crime reduction efforts through complementary strategies focused on the people and places at greatest risk of violence, improving environmental conditions, interrupting conflicts, and providing intensive therapeutic and wraparound supports to people at risk— to support at-risk populations. One way ONS works to advance a community-centered approach to public safety is through the Mayor's Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety, or MAP.

Every year, MAP hosts participatory budgeting events designed to leverage the expertise of NYCHA residents in identifying and proposing local solutions to safety and well-being priorities. Through this approach, residents draw on their experience and local expertise to identify, propose, discuss, and vote on projects and initiatives most important to them. In fiscal year 2026, 5,564 NYCHA residents participated in a participatory budgeting process, and $530,000 was invested back into communities through physical space improvements or community-based programs.

By using evidence-based crime prevention through environmental design principles, MAPS also works with residents to improve their social and physical environment. This includes enhancement and revitalization to gardens, playgrounds, basketball courts, lighting, and murals. Together, these efforts create vibrant neighborhoods that promote safety, build community cohesion, and address the immediate needs of residents. Research supports this approach. A University of Chicago Crime Lab randomized controlled trial in New York City found that installing new lighting in public housing developments reduced nighttime outdoor index crime by 36%.

Another randomized trial in Philadelphia found that restoring vacant land reduced gun violence by 29% in neighborhoods below the poverty line. In addition to addressing broader environmental conditions, ONS works to prevent violence by identifying and intervening in conflicts before they escalate. This includes supporting the Crisis Management System, CMS, where locally credible outreach workers and violence interrupters build trusted relationships with people at elevated risk of violence, mediate conflicts, and connect people to employment, education, mental health care, legal services, and other resources.

In fiscal year '26, CMS providers conducted 14,232 mediations and de-escalations and served 1,636 participants on caseloads. ONS also works closely with individuals at elevated risk of violence, providing therapeutic supports and other supports that can help prevent future violence. Through ATLAS, ONS connects participants to intensive therapeutic services and practical support, such as help accessing housing, employment, education, and other essential resources.

In fiscal year '26, ATLAS engaged 1,127 participants. Research supports this approach as well. A Chicago study found that combining mentoring and cognitive behavioral therapy reduced arrests for up to 5 years into adulthood. Together, these strategies, along with others that ONS implements, addresses both immediate risks of violence and longer-term conditions that contribute to it. Recognizing the importance of this work, this administration invested an additional $14.8 million in fiscal year '27 to expand community violence prevention and intervention, including bringing CMS to additional neighborhoods and and increasing access to clinical and mental health supports for people at risk of or impacted by violence.

The Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence, NGBV, also works to reduce future violence by working directly with people who have caused or are at risk of causing harm. Here, however, the focus is on violence in intimate and family relationships. Through the Abusive Partner Intervention Program, NGBV helps participants reflect on their behavior, take accountability for harm they have caused, and build healthier relationships.

These programs serve as— respond to what survivors have told us they need: options to stop abusive behavior, including when they are not ready, able, or willing to engage with law enforcement. Supporting survivors and their families is central to NGBV's work, not only to promote healing and well-being, but also to help interrupt cycles of violence and trauma. Research shows that children exposed to domestic violence are nearly 3 times more likely to experience domestic violence as adults.

Childhood exposure to family violence is also associated with an increased risk of perpetrating domestic violence later in life. Through the family's 5 family justice centers and the Crime Victims Assistance Program, CVAP, NGBV connects survivors of domestic and gender-based violence and victims of other crimes to advocacy, safety planning, counseling, legal services, and other supports. NGBV is also expanding a community-based access to these services so survivors can receive support regardless of whether they engage with law enforcement.

Recognizing the importance of this work, the administration invested an additional $15.7 million in NGBV in fiscal year '27 to expand programs, including services for victims and survivors. Like NGBV, the Office for Prevention of Hate Crimes, OPHC, works to address the needs of people who have been harmed. OPHC takes a big tent approach to preventing hate and bias that can escalate into violence, working closely with government partners, government agencies, community-based organizations, and affected New Yorkers.

In fiscal year '26, OPHC worked with 159 community partners, and its prevention programs served more than 280,000 participants including over 7,500 young people reached through educational initiatives with programming delivered in more than 200 languages— excuse me, in more than 20 languages. The administration has invested $26 million in new funding to expand hate violence prevention, education, community engagement, and support for affected communities.

Across all of OCS's work, partnership is essential. No one can do the work of building safety alone. OCS works closely with city agency partners, community-based organizations, service providers, and New Yorkers directly affected by violence and trauma. At its core, OCS is built on the understanding that safety is something we create together. As OCS grows and evolves, we will continue using data, research, and community feedback to assess progress, address gaps, and strengthen our work.

We look forward to continued collaboration with the council and all of our partners to ensure all New Yorkers have the support and opportunities they need to be safe and thrive.

Also, we support the intent of 414 to connect New Yorkers affected by gun violence with intervention and support. Establishing a new 3-digit emergency number of this kind would require federal authorization. Additionally, we believe that existing resources resources such as 988 and the New York City HOPE Hotline could be leveraged more quickly and efficiently to connect New Yorkers to needed services.

We welcome the opportunity to work with council, our city agency partners, and community-based organizations to expand access to those resources and ensure they meet the needs of people affected by gun violence, advancing the bill's goals. Finally, our goal is to establish a Department of Community Safety, and we are currently working collaboratively with the Council to amend 403 to align our shared goals and advance this effort.

Thank you for the opportunity to testify today. I welcome any questions you may have.

Thank you. Thank you so much for your testimony. Thank you for being here. Great to see you again. Also want to recognize Councilmembers Justin Sanchez and Chiose who have joined. This is obviously a new office, and this is the first hearing that we have on this matter, so we have many questions. I'll pass it first to Speaker Julie Menin for her questions.

Great. Thank you, Chair. Thank you so much for your testimony. I have a number of questions. OMB testified that your fiscal year 2027 budget was $271 million. What are those numbers? Is that an accurate— is that an accurate number? What are the numbers today, and how many staff members do you have? Yeah, that is accurate. Our budget is $271 million, not including our discretionary funding.

That represents an additional $67 million that this administration invested in the work of OCS and the component offices. And that breaks down as follows: $29 million for Office for Prevention of Hate Crimes; $157 million for the Office of Neighborhood Safety; $75 million for NGBV; $7 million for OCMH; And $2.9 million for OCS staffing needs. So how much represents in total new resources rather than existing programs that were transferred into your office?

$67 million are new resources since this administration started. Okay. And what is the division of responsibilities between the Deputy Mayor for Community Safety, the Commissioner of Community Safety, and how many employees report to each? My office is approximately 100 staff. The— my role as the Commissioner of the Office of Community Safety is to manage the office, to build out the office and the component offices that are part of it, to ensure that we have a strong strategy that knits together the existing work of these offices into a comprehensive approach for addressing violence and preventing harm, and also to support people in the aftermath of harm.

I report to the Deputy Mayor of Community Safety, as other commissioners report to deputy mayors across the city. Her role is to support the office, but also to build out work across New York City that expands, that advances community safety. As I noted in my testimony, the work of community safety is something that is both held by the Office of Community Safety, but held by all of our government partners, our community partners, and many others.

A couple of questions first on subway violence. So subway felony assaults are up 11%. So far this year, and subway murders have increased from 4 to 7 this year. Just this month, Darryl Rodriguez was fatally shot on an E train platform in Midtown. Is your office deploying personnel into the subways, and how are you working with the NYPD to prevent attacks?

Our office works very closely with NYPD on a number of initiatives. We are in a process right now of ensuring that across all of the work There are existing relationships with NYPD at the ground level and all the way up to senior leadership. And the work that we are doing is around making sure that the work we have around violence prevention, domestic and gender-based violence, mental health, and hate crimes is both informed by and in partnership with NYPD.

Those relationships exist and we continue to build on them in a But are you deploying— We are not currently— I'm sorry, I just want to make sure I understand. Are you— is your office deploying personnel into the subways? We do not currently have a program that deploys personnel into the subways as part of our work. Oh, okay.

And how often do you meet with the NYPD? We work pretty— we work at different levels across the entire office. As I said, there's 100 people around in within OCS, and so I don't have a literal number of exactly how often we're meeting, but we are in daily contact with OCS, NYPD, across our entire office. Okay. Would you— do you meet with them every week on a leadership basis?

We certainly meet with them every week on a leadership basis, and we're meeting with them on a daily basis throughout the office. Okay.

For mental health response, so the Independent Budget Office found that only 33% of eligible mental health calls calls received a Be Heard response in the 3rd quarter of 2025. What is the percentage today? Our most recent percentage, I'll turn to our Deputy Executive Director for Office of Community Mental Health. What I will say is that the goal of this administration and the goal of the Office of Community Safety is to strengthen and expand Be Heard.

We know that the necessity of providing a 911 mental health response to more New Yorkers is crucial to our work. And so we are in the moment of expanding the work that has existed for some time so that we can over time build it so we are responding to more and more calls. That work for some time had been stagnant, but now this administration is providing the support necessary and the office— the agencies we are working with FDNY, New York City Health and Hospitals, as well as NYPD and others, has continued to advance that work.

And we've made some significant advances in just the last few months on increasing staffing, improving how we are triaging calls, and we are in a moment of working towards expansion. Thank you, Commissioner. We'd have to do some math on the exact percentage, but there were about 11,000 calls that were eligible for a Be Heard response. last fiscal year, 2026, and of those, about 8,500 received a Be Heard response.

There are about 150,000 overall 911 mental health calls, and so we just have to do the math on how much that calculates to. But of those, over 8,000 received a Be Heard response. So I'm sorry, 8,000— you're saying 8,000 of Of what is the overall amount? So 8,000 calls received a— 8,500 calls received a Be Heard response.

There were about 10,945 calls that were eligible for a Be Heard response. Okay, okay. Given EMS staffing shortages and rising ambulance response times, how much does Be Heard rely on ambulances and Has the administration made any decision regarding EMS and its role in Be Heard? The administration has made the decision that FDNY is a core component of Be Heard.

We are working very closely with FDNY and EMS to operate Be Heard. Right now, the program is a partnership between FDNY and New York City Health and Hospitals, as managed by OCS. While we are working very closely with FDNY to ensure that we have the resources necessary, both staffing and vehicles, to make sure that this program operates and can expand.

In fact, I'll also turn it over to Ms. Grant to talk about some recent improvements we've been able to make with staffing. Yes, we just earlier this month completed the latest class of Be Heard teams, which included over about 27 personnel across EMS and H&H combined. They underwent a 4-week integrated training where the staff learned techniques such as motivational interviewing, suicide prevention.

They also, for the first time this year, were able to hear from other jurisdictions that are operating similar programs across the country. And also for the first time during this training class received a workshop on what peer support means and the principles of peer support, including a peer panel where they got to hear directly from peers who were— who have been impacted by the 911 mental health response system.

So EMS will— just from what you're saying, it sounds like you're saying EMS will remain involved? Yes. That's correct. Okay, understood. Also, I will say that that training was the first training that BHerd has had for integrated training since 2024. So we are in the process of filling staffing gaps and have been making significant progress on that.

We're on track to have additional trainings early in next year as well. And those will include both EMS and New York City Health and Hospitals social workers. Okay.

I'm very concerned about the decision to remove the commissioner for NGBV from that commissioner leadership position that was made in the spring. Why was that decision made? Commissioner Sloaney is still a significant and important member of the Office of Community Safety's leadership team. She remains with NGBV. The decision that was made was to combine these 5 offices into 1 office, and that was made in order to strengthen the work of all of the components. component offices.

And that was a reflection of the recognition that the necessity to prevent violence and harm requires all of the component offices working very closely together. And I'm really excited to continue that work in partnership with the Commissioner, with her team, as well as the rest of the team. I just think, and I said this at the Gender Equity Committee we had on this, I just think it sends the wrong message to victims of domestic violence survivors when there's not an independent office that's dedicated to this and there's not that commissioner level when they're basically made an executive director.

And we heard from Safe Horizon and Sanctuary for Families voicing concerns about that decision. How many vacancies are currently in that particular office? I'll turn to Deputy Commissioner Hill for the exact number. However, one thing that I will note is that since NGBV has become part of OCS, we have made— the administration has made the largest investment in programs under NGBV that was made since 2018, $15.7 million.

And in addition, we've been able to fill some longstanding vacancies, including vacancies such as the head of the Staten Island Family Justice Center, which is, Councilmember Brewer, one of the places that I believe you mentioned. where people, families, individuals who've experienced harm can receive services and walk in. So, Commissioner? So NGV currently has a headcount of 79.

There are currently 79— 59 staff members at the agency, and so the vacancy rate is 25.3%. Right, that's what our data is showing too. I mean, that is concerning why there is such a high vacancy rate for an entity that is obviously serving such a critical mission. And then I also want to say, I mean, reported rapes are up in the city, nearly 4%.

A woman was recently sexually assaulted in Central Park. So what is going to be done to really address the vacancy rate? We share your concern about the vacancy rate. Some of that vacancy rate— that vacancy rate is longstanding related to hiring freezes, and we are working right now to ensure that we are filling key positions because we know that the charge of the Office of Community Safety is to grow, to expand, and ensure that we have the people and the staff to do that.

And we cannot do that without a robust team. So we are working very hard right now with the leadership to ensure we are doing that work. And what specific efforts is the office doing to address the rising rape rate in the City of New York? I will turn it to Deputy Commissioner Hill to talk about some of the programs that we have.

However, the work of the Office of Community— of NGVV has existed in this city for 25 years, and the focus of that work is both on preventing harm and supporting individuals in the response— in the aftermath of harm. and addressing people who themselves have caused harms to interrupt that cycle. And the team has a robust set of resources from supporting the New York City HOPE Hotline, which is a 24-hour hotline to support survivors of domestic and gender-based violence as well as other crimes.

We have the Family Justice Centers that I mentioned. We have— we do provide mental health services within New York City shelters. There is a range of work that's happening within NGBV that addresses the needs of people people who have been sexually assaulted or who have experienced other victimization. And I'll turn to Deputy Commissioner. Yeah, I'll add on to what the commissioner noted, that we do in fact have family justice centers in each borough that provide services to victims of rape and other sexual violence.

And in addition to that, we have the CVAP program, which is in every precinct in New York City, and they have dedicated staff with the sexual assault centers that the district attorneys operate. And so that CVAP is integrated into that program to offer deeper support for victims of rape and sexual violence that are interacting with the criminal justice system.

Okay. Thank you.

On hate crimes, so hate crimes are up nearly 13% in the city. year to date, with more than half targeting Jewish New Yorkers. It was reported that the Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes had just 3 employees in June. Is that correct? That is correct. Well, I will turn to our executive director to double-check my numbers, but the Office for Prevention of Hate Crimes had an approximately $3 million budget before the budget was increased and adopted by— excuse me, in preliminary by $26 million.

So we are in the process right now of expanding that office both in terms of staff as well as in terms of the programs and initiatives that we work on to address hate, hate violence, and hate crime. I will say that we are working very closely with our partners in the mayor's office to combat anti-Semitism as well as our community-based partners to ensure that as we are expanding this office, we are paying attention to all communities who experience hate, violence, and bias.

And so we recognize that to do this work, we need good staff internally, we need good partnerships across the city, and we need good partnerships with our community-based partners. We recently are the— one of the first programs that we were able to increase is the PATH program. We doubled that budget so that we can meet more New Yorkers, and we also invested recently $1 million to support security initiatives for houses of worship, including synagogues and other culturally sensitive locations, in recognition of the urgency of this need.

And that is just the very first type of inter— investment that we are working on. And you will have seen that announced in the Mayor's Office to Combat Antisemitism's report, because we worked very closely with our colleagues in that office on designing and building that out. Can I turn to you to give us— Yeah, thank you. We recognize that hate crimes continue to be a concern, but also too, I think with that, we are grateful for the additional investment that was made to this office by this administration.

For the first time, by over 800%, our office finally has the resources to put meaningful work on the ground. And as the Commissioner mentioned, each of our anchor partners as part of the PATH Initiative program has received an additional 153% increase in funding to make sure that we are taking this work across the 5 boroughs, but across, you know, communities that historically have not been given the resources to make sure that they feel safe and they can live and thrive here in New York City.

And what I would add is that we're talking about a team that has been quite small that we are building, but now with OPHC being part of OCS, we can rely on each other for support as we are building out. So Executive Director Vijay has worked very closely with Laquisha and her team to think about how we build in mental health support to the work that OPHC is expanding.

And that is the kind of coordination and support we are seeing across our office. So while we're talking about teams being small, one of the things that I also want to escalate is that building this work together makes us stronger. So I guess with the 3 employees you have, since you So if you do have this significant new investment, then what are the plans in terms of— why are there still just 3 employees?

What are the plans there? We are actively in the process of crafting and posting job descriptions and intend to be hiring very shortly. And in the meantime, we are working with existing staff to support the office. Okay. Just 2 more questions and I'll pass it to the chair.

So the mayor had in the budget originally supported adding 580 police officers before reversing course at budget adoption. What is your view in terms of believing expanding community safety— do you believe it can replace the need for additional NYPD officers? I believe, as many of you testified, that we have relied on law enforcement for too long to respond to social service needs that that are really outside of the scope and expertise of law enforcement.

And the vision of the Office of Community Safety is to build out a set of responses that will be a core component of our public safety and public health system. And as we do that work, we will continue to be able to meet people in moments of crisis, in moments of distress, after they've experienced harm, with the kinds of responses that are both specific and flexible, whether that's a behavioral health response, whether that is connecting them to a victim's advocate, whether that is connecting them to a violence interrupter.

That is the work that the Office of Community Safety does, and that's the vision. So because you mentioned that the budget is around $271 million, so we're— the city then is investing hundreds of millions of dollars in the office, yet we have the, you know, increase in rapes and subway assaults and hate crimes. So what benchmarks and deadlines Should the office be held accountable for moving forward?

We are holding ourselves accountable, and we should be held accountable for the idea that we are going to have a comprehensive approach to violence. So we are in the midst right now of a strategic planning process, which is helping us to think even more sharply about how all of these office offices work together. For example, there is victim services support across every single one of the offices that you see represented here.

And so we're doing the work to think about how do we knit those together so that we have a single place where people can go to get victim services, that those services are responsive to the needs of people who've experienced assault, those responsive to the needs of people who experience gun violence, responsive to the needs of people who also have behavioral health needs or experience hate crime.

So So the work that we're being held accountable for is to knit all of those two together to be able to expand and to reach more and more New Yorkers over time. Okay. Thank you so much. And I'll pass it over to the chair.

Thank you. Thank you so much, Speaker, for the questions. So I just wanted to follow up on some of the questions that the Speaker asked. This is obviously the first hearing that we have in the office, so I'll start with general questions related to the staff structure and the budget. How is the leadership team structured? There's obviously a deputy mayor, a commissioner, and then offices under it.

Can you give us— can you elaborate on the general office structure? Absolutely. So the office includes myself, and the leadership team includes leaders across each of the 4 offices: Office of Neighborhood Safety, Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence, which includes our Office for Victims of Crime, the Office to of Community Mental Health and the Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes.

We are in the midst of both a strategic— of strategic planning process, as I noted, and that will inform our future structure, because what we want to do is make sure we are building a structure that is responsive to this work, but also responsive to the goal of becoming an independent department. And part of that work is also building out operations, because as you know, Mayors' offices, all of their operations are usually embedded within other agencies.

And so we are also building out the operational capacity to become our own department. So the structure of this team will shift over time, but the core work of this team will be maintained and continue to grow. Currently, who does the Deputy Mayor of Public Safety supervise versus you, the Commissioner of the Office of Community Safety? And what is the difference between the 2 positions?

So the Deputy Mayor of Community Safety supervises me, and we have a First Deputy Mayor who oversees a number of offices and departments across the city, including some of our other public safety departments. How large is the Deputy Mayor's team? I have to double-check my math, but the Deputy Mayor's team has 5 staff right now. Her role is to oversee the Office of Community Safety, but also to build out the work that is going to be outside of the Office of Community Safety to improve how New York City in general improves community safety.

Because it is not just the work of one office to do community safety work. The work of all of city government focuses on improving safety. So when we think about how lighting is— where we light New York City, where there are access to parks, all of that work affects community safety. And so the Deputy Mayor's role is is not just to support our office, which is crucial, but also to think about how this entire administration is focused on community safety.

Okay, and earlier you mentioned the total budget for the Office of Community Safety is approximately $271 million. How much of this is for staff versus for programs such as Cure Violence programs? I would have to get back to you, and we can get back on the exact split between Could you give us a rough ballpark? Would you say 50/50 or 70/30?

No, it can't be 50/50. There's about 100 staff total across OCS, which are paid for by the $271 million. Would you say it's like 70 to 80% being super— I will not be able to do that math on the fly, so I will definitely make sure that we get back to you with that, that split. Okay. This is, you know, again, obviously a new office.

Does the Does the Office of Community Safety currently have a permanent work location? Where is it headquartered? And also, what is the plan to have a stronger presence in the communities that are disproportionately affected by the issues that we're all working on, safety and mental health? Absolutely. The bulk of our team, the vast majority of our team sits within— across the street into 53 Broadway.

We also have staff members who sit within our family justice centers across the 5 boroughs. But the vast majority of our team are within our central office, which is 253 Broadway. Are there any plans to have a stronger presence in the communities that are affected by these issues? And if yes, can you elaborate on those plans? So what I will say is that this— the Office of Community Safety and the teams that work within it have a really strong connection to the communities that we serve.

We have our family justice centers, which are in all 5 boroughs. We have our— We have our CVAP program, our Crime Victims Assistance program, where our staff members are— our contracted providers are located within precincts. The goal of this office is to ensure that we are in very close contact with community. And so as we are building out our strategic planning process, one thing that we are contemplating is where we need to be located across the city so that we can make sure that we are doing the work of being embedded within community and we are able to reach the community members that we need to connect with.

However, even with the work as it is structured now, our team is frequently on a daily basis in the field across the city working with communities and with our community-based partners to do the work of improving safety. All right, thank you for that information. I'll certainly be interested in continuing that conversation offline. You know, when I see an office like this one whose role is, you know, improving safety in the state of New York, especially gun violence, And when I see numbers including, for example, approximately, you know, 40% of the shootings that occur in this city happen in communities in the Bronx, I don't see a reason why an office like this one wouldn't be headquartered out of a community that is disproportionately affected by these issues.

So I'll be interested in chatting offline about that. Absolutely. We would love to speak about that. And I will say that we have a significant amount of work that we do in the Bronx through the Office of Neighborhood Safety, which I can turn to Executive Director LaRochelle to talk about, but we are in agreement that the need to be in close communication and in close contact with the communities we support is essential.

And that's embedded in the way we work right now, and it will continue to be embedded in the work as we build out our office.

All right, so there's 5 offices under the Office of Community Safety. Would you say the Office of Community Safety so far has established any new functions, or at least at this point it was simply a reorganization and consolidation of programs that already existed? At least at this point. I know there's plans to expand and et cetera, but at least these past 7 months, have there been any new functions established?

So there's a few ways that I, I would like to tackle that question. The first is, I would characterize the combination of this work as essential to our, to our success. So, and I mean that on a micro level. For example, I— we, we have right now the Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence and our Office of Neighborhood Safety thinking very carefully about how we support support emergency housing transfers for people who are either victims of crime or at risk for retaliation.

And so while that isn't a new function, it is a new way of working together that makes those offices stronger because they are not having to think in silos or utilize only their own resources to address really crucial public safety needs. In addition to that, during this time since the office has been— has launched, we've expanded several of our initiatives, and I can turn to a couple of my team members.

I'll ask Ed to speak some about some of the expansions that NGBV has had to our culturally specific services, to some of our other services. So we are continuing to do that expansion as we work. So in recent— under the new budget, we're able to expand our mental health services at the Family Justice Center. And also at homeless shelters, so there's more additional funds for that to expand those services and give and get them out to more people so more people can be served.

There is also I apologize give me just one second. There's also been increased funding for our relationship abuse prevention program, which works with. middle, middle school and high school students, in addition to staff and their parents, to raise awareness about relationship abuse and what a healthy relationship should look like. And in addition, that program also offers group counseling and individual counseling to students who are identified through the program as already experiencing relationship abuse.

And that's just one example of the way we've been able to expand and deepen some of the work. I'd also like to turn to Executive Director La Rochelle to talk about some of the expansions we've seen in our neighborhood safety work over the last several months. Yeah, thank you so much, Commissioner. So we recently expanded CV and CMS services to Bushwick, Inwood, as well as Harlem.

So again, just expanding the footprint of the crisis management system throughout the city. Just some, you know, at a glance here, we're in 49 catchment areas across 33 NYPD precincts spanning 20 neighborhoods across all 5 boroughs. So we have a footprint in each of the 5 boroughs. And Chair Felice, you mentioned the Bronx. I just want to talk a little bit about you know, the assets that we have in the Bronx, which include street outreach teams, mobile trauma units, hospital-based violence intervention programs, and a host of therapeutics.

Okay, yes, thank you for all that information. You know, these are all obviously very important programs, programs that I think all of us here support, but I'm just wondering though, have there been any new functions though? Because these were things that were already there, they're being expanded, but they were already in the works. So I'm just wondering if there's been any new functions.

We've been working on making sure we are expanding and strengthening the work that exists because that will be the foundation for which we build out any new functions or any new initiatives as we expand and grow. All right, thank you for the information.

I'll move on to a few questions related to the Be Heard program, and then I'll pass it on to Jill Brewer and then colleagues. Thank everybody for being patient on this Friday afternoon. So the Be Heard program, obviously a very important program. We want to make sure that if New Yorkers are facing emergencies, we want to make sure that they receive the help that they need.

In this case, it's individuals facing mental health emergencies and something that obviously requires mental health professionals. You kind of touched on the— you kind of touched on it earlier today, but briefly, how large is the Be Heard team and what precincts are Be Heard eligible and how do you determine eligibility? So I will turn to Deputy Executive Director Grant to talk about some of the precincts that we're in as well as the size of the program.

But the way that Be Heard was developed and the way it's expanded is focusing— utilizing our 911 call system data to identify the precincts with the highest rates of 911 behavioral health crisis calls and prioritizing those for the initial launch and then subsequent expansion. expansions of BHEARD. And that's the kind of work that we'll continue to do as we expand the program, looking for where there's high needs, where we go next, and then continuing across the city.

Thank you, Commissioner. BHEARD currently operates in 31 precincts in the surrounding area. So it's fully operational in the Bronx, and then operational in parts of Manhattan, all of Upper Manhattan from Harlem up through Washington Heights, in Brooklyn— neighborhoods in Brooklyn, including East New York, Brownsville, parts of Queens as well. And as the commissioner mentioned, we identified those neighborhoods, those precincts, using 911 mental health call data.

And so the precincts where Be Heard operates have some of the highest rates of 911 mental health emergencies. Thank you. I want to recognize Councilmembers Dinowitz, Banks, and Kavan, who have joined. What are calls that are eligible for a Be Heard response, and what are calls that are not eligible? I know, for example, if there's violence or weapons, that, that wouldn't be eligible.

So if you could give us a summary on those calls. Sure. So Be Heard responds to what we call low-acuity mental health calls. So those are calls where there's an indication of a mental health need. There is no violence, there is no known violence, no known weapons, and no imminent risk of serious harm. So an example of that might be someone who is in the middle of the street in a very dangerous situation.

And so calls that would not be eligible are calls where the caller is indicating that the person in crisis has a weapon or is actively violent. And again, that's because we send EMTs and social workers to those calls without police, so we don't want them to be in situations where there's already, there's already an indication of, you know, safety concerns and danger.

If the caller does not know if whether or not the person in question, in crisis, is violent or has a weapon, we'll still send Be Heard to those calls. Those calls are still eligible for Be Heard while we try and determine, get more information about what's happening on the ground, and if the teams do need support from police, they have that available.

How many 911 calls do we receive every year, and what percent would you say are Be Heard eligible? Could you provide some data on the two, last 2 years? And also, how many calls are you able to respond to? So how many 911 calls, how many Be Heard eligible, and how many are you able to respond to out of those that are eligible?

So there are about 150,000 calls that are mental health calls per year. Of those, typically around— We had— and last year was 10,900— how many was it? Yeah, 10,945 calls were eligible for Be Heard, and then Be Heard responded to 8,524. Okay, and how many 911 calls do we usually receive per year? Do you have any data on that?

It's about 1.6 million. 1.6. At the end. All right, some final questions. What is the current Be Heard budget? Is the plan to get it up and running 24/7? My understanding is that it's not 24/7 currently. And how much would it take? What would be the cost for getting it 24/7 and also in the areas that you're planning based on the many needs that we have in the city related to mental health and Absolutely.

So our goal is to make sure that we are responding to as many behavioral health calls as possible, and we are doing that, and we're expanding across the city so that more and more New Yorkers can receive access to Be Heard. Right now the program operates 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 a.m., 365 days a year. And we— you asked, the question was, oh, how would— how much would it cost, or how would the— but what the budget is.

The budget is $35.3 million across both teams. As we are working on this expansion, we're in very close contact with both FDNY and H&H to determine when and if there are additional resources needed, and we'll work very closely with our OMB colleagues to make those— to request those resources. I don't have a specific estimate right now because we are in the process of doing that work of assessing exactly how many calls there are that we would need to be expanding to.

We're working on a joint data analysis as well as a staffing and expansion plan across all of those teams, and that will give us a more precise determination of the necessary resources, and we will work with all of those partners and OMB as we need. Final question. How large is the— talk to us about the response time for those that are eligible for BHerd response, and what exactly does a response include?

I know it includes FDNY or paramedics and mental health professionals, but what exactly would the response include? Yeah, absolutely. So the teams include 2 FDNY medical EMS professionals and 1 New York City Health and Hospitals social worker. They work together in pairs to respond to these calls. That's a necessary combination of staffing because we want to make sure that when we do show up to the call, we have the expertise to assess if someone's also in a medical crisis.

So you may— some may be aware that sometimes a panic attack may look like a heart attack or vice versa. So the EMS professionals are essential to be there to clear someone medically, and the social worker is there to support their behavioral health needs. The way I just described that makes it actually sound significantly more separate than it is, because those teams work really closely together to ensure that they are supporting the patient, helping to de-escalate the situation.

And the response on the ground includes a very robust clinical intervention. The social worker will assess what the person's needs are. They will connect with them about what their past history is. They will provide de-escalation and calming techniques. They will assess whether or not the person needs to go to the hospital or whether they can reconnect them to existing community-based services or other services.

So it is a flexible response, but it is a behavioral health response. All right. Thank you so much. I have many more questions, but I'll pause for now.

I'll pass it on to co-chair Gilbert. Thank you very much. I have been out with Be Heard a couple of times, and I would absolutely second the fact that they're excellent. This is the issue. What do you do with the person who has been serviced by Be Heard? My understanding is it's hard to find a place that that person gets quality services, What's really needed, and Dr.

Katz agrees, is 24-hour OT nurse and psychiatric. Only one place in East Harlem has such a location. So I'm just wondering, are you aware of that situation? Where do you say they go? And what are you doing? And I just want to say, this is a great hearing. You have the most important topic in the whole city.

What the hell are we going to do with people who need help? And so I'm just excited to hear this, but your shoulders have to be very big to carry all this. Go ahead. Be heard. Where are you going to put everybody? Because they need help. Yeah, myself and the team is acutely aware of both the importance of this work and the responsibility that has been placed on this office to build out the work in a way that is effective and responsive to what New Yorkers need.

And I will say that this is the work of our office, but it's the work of the entire city. So to your question about where else do you take people, this has been a challenge that we are continuing to work on, not just in BHerd, but with our partners at DOHMH and at New York City hospitals. Yeah, absolutely.

We were just yesterday connecting with DOHMH on their plans around improving access to serious mental illness services, because that's the kind of work that you need to have so that you can can reduce the likelihood that people go into crisis. So we right now are engaged in an interagency working group to think very clearly about what are the other, we call them disposition options, but what are the other places that we can connect people to when a BHerd team connects with them that is not the hospital and is not their home.

Now, one of the great things about BHerd is we have, we are able to bring such effective clinical care to people that we are often able to support them in their home, in school, in shelter, support them in that moment and let them stay there safely. But there are a group of people who need additional care, but it's not quite as acute as going to a hospital, and we are trying to work on that gap.

Sometimes we are able to take people to supporting connection centers. We are sometimes able to connect people to respite centers, but there is a gap in the system that we are working to fill, and that's exactly the kind of challenge we Um, are working towards and would love to continue discussing. Okay, I love— Dr. Katz says what we need is what I just listed.

Yes, absolutely. I go with Dr. Katz. Oh, always, always, always, always. Number 2, when I go to the, uh, family centers, there's not a lot of people there. So I'm just wondering, how are you going to utilize them? What is their plan for them? They're wonderful, they're beautiful, they're, you know, well laid out, etc. Children, families, everything's there. casework locations, so on.

But they don't seem to be extremely well utilized. So how are we— is that true, or is it just me going on the wrong day? And how do you look at it? The Family Justice Centers— I'll turn to Deputy Commissioner Hill for some numbers on utilization— but those centers are a core part of OCS's work. One of our goals is to make sure not only that they continue to remain strong, but that we are continuing to connect as many people as possible to them.

I will say, especially post-COVID, one of the things that has been a big shift in the behavioral health space and the social service space is the shift to many services remote. We find that that actually really is helpful for survivors. And so often when you're going to a physical location, you're not necessarily seeing the people that— They were telling me people are remote.

Yeah, yeah, we're— but we have been seeing really significant strong utilization. So I'd like to turn to Commissioner As the Commissioner noted, pre-COVID, all services at the FJC had to be done in person. We had no remote services at all. Of course, responding to COVID, that, that changed literally overnight— over a weekend, I should say. Last fiscal year, the FJCs served about 16,200 people, about 64,000 visits.

That's actually increased since 2024, and about, depending on the FJC, because it varies across the 5, but somewhere between 40% and 60% of visits are done remotely. Okay. I mean, as time goes on, I just, I guess real estate is always an issue because it's beautiful space, and I should be, but people are going remote. Even the caseworkers were remote.

Everybody was remote when I was there. So my question would be, what are you going to use it for if nobody's— fewer people are there? Not now, but I would like to hear that because the space is phenomenal. No, those spaces are beautiful. They're a real asset to the community. They're an asset to the city. And one of the conversations that we have been having, to Chair Felice's question, is how do we ensure that we're utilizing any physical resources that we have to ensure that we are having space for our contracted providers, for others to operate out of them, and serving more and more people.

Because we wanna make sure that we are both— we're meeting people where they are, if that's in their home, if that's remotely, if that's physically, but completely agree with you. And that is absolutely a space where we will be— So put that on your strategic list. Absolutely.

What does it mean to take a public health approach to violence? How can you explain that? 'Cause that is, I think, the core of your work. That is the core of our work, and I will also ask Executive Director La Rochelle to speak to this, but when I think of a public health response to violence, that to me talks about recognizing that the places that we live, the resources that we have access to, the people in our networks, those all affect our likelihood for experiencing violence, and that to address the— to address violence, prevent it, we need to make adjustments in all of that.

We need to think about the lived environment, we need to think about the social environment, and we need to connect people to resources that have been shown by evidence, as well as what we hear from our partners and from survivors, is necessary to reduce violence. No, thank you so much, Commissioner. And I think for us, the public health approach to violence means leveraging data.

We know that resources are limited, so we want to make sure that the data is helping to inform the populations and areas that we need to be in. It also means really understanding and recognizing the antecedents to violence, right, the root causes of violence, whether it's health, whether it's housing, employment, education, and that we're addressing those needs because we know when we address those needs, invariably violence goes down.

I mean, that was a good answer. It's hard to implement. Do you have specific metrics that you're using to determine whether you are helping make the community safer, either with the Violence Interrupter or any of these other programs? I think I know all your programs. You do know all our programs. Every one of them, and I've been to every one of them.

Go ahead. That's amazing. We really appreciate your partnership and support around this. I mean, and the way that we think about metrics across the team, there's a few— there's different kinds of metrics we use. Certainly we look at crime data from our NYPD partners. That's one kind of metric that we use. We also use metrics such as program data around how we're supporting people.

So you heard me quote numbers about how many mediations our crisis management service system providers have had, how many people we are serving. We also look at whether or not the people that we are serving are satisfied with with our work. So you heard me quote numbers from Be Heard about patient satisfaction. Similarly, we get numbers from our Family Justice Center around satisfaction.

And so we look across all of that type of data to understand what— whether we're having an impact. However, one of the things that I will say is that as OCS builds and develops, one of the things we want to do is take the work that we have right now around data and evaluation and expand and grow that, because we know that to be effective and stewards of this vision and of New York City's taxpayers' dollars, we need to be able to show both what we're doing and the impact that we're having.

And so building out that data and evaluation framework is something we're actively engaged in.

Okay. I used to be on the large cities board chair of the National League of Cities. And so Albuquerque, and I know my friend who's the mayor of Baltimore, he gets lots of great press. I don't know if he's doing a great job, But he thinks he's doing a great job, and the press does too. So my question to you is, what are you doing to look at other cities to see if what they're doing is helpful, if at all?

Oh, we're doing so much. Actually, we just set up a meeting with Baltimore leadership to make sure that we are connecting with them about what they're doing. We have— all of this team here has had calls with leadership from cities across the country. We have worked in— worked with various jurisdictions to learn from them. We've looked at places like Tucson that has a really strong mental health crisis system.

So part of the work of building out what happens in New York City, we are of course an extremely unique city, not just because of our size but our structure, but that is also about making sure that we are learning from other jurisdictions and we're doing that actively. You cannot do this work kind of with your blinders on.

You have to be able to hear what is happening in other jurisdictions as well as talk to the people who've been doing this work in New York for so long to learn from people there too. I'll give you the mayor's cell phone in Baltimore. My other question is, overtime for PD is always an issue, comes up every year.

Do you think the work you're doing might help to decrease overtime at PD, if that's one of your metrics? I will say that I'm really hopeful that the work that we do allows New York City to say that we have a really robust community-based response to lots of different types of safety and crisis issues, and that we have stopped relying only or solely on police in those situations.

And that is what I'm hoping that we will be able to see over time. Do you have ideas about other agencies coming under your umbrella, or is this it? I would say that we are really excited to partner with other agencies who do work that is essential for us. So we are in active partnership with— I hesitate to even try to name agencies because that means we will leave people out, but active relationship, as you've heard, Health and Hospitals, DOHMH, Department of Social Services, Parks, Sanitation.

Probation. Probation. Yeah. So the fact is that everything can't live under one umbrella, but we can do this work comprehensively, and we can do it in partnership. Okay, last question. Do you overlap in the work between you and MOCJAY? MOCJAY has a lot of contracts working also in trying to reduce challenges and keeping people out of the criminal justice system, etc.

How do you work together? We work together very, very closely. I was actually just on a call this morning with Justine Olderman, the criminal justice coordinator. We have joint meetings with MOCJAY. We work with their data team. Our— we recognize that for the work that MOCJAY is doing to be successful, our work has to be successful and vice versa.

And so we recognize ourselves to be part of an ongoing continuum and a project of building out safety together. All right, thank you.

Thank you so much, Co-Chair Brewer. Next, I'll pass it on to Public Advocate Williams, but before that, Just curious, so I'm actually impressed by the amount of Be Heard calls that you're able to respond to. I know you mentioned about 10,000 or 11,000 were Be Heard eligible, and you were able to respond to about 8,500. That's impressive based on the budget that you have.

Just curious though, do you have, do you keep track of what happens after you connect these individuals to other services? So what we do is we track where we take people. So if we are taking them to the hospital, whether we're connecting them to another type of community-based service, whether we left them, say, at their home, but with referrals and support, because that's really the goal of Be Heard, is to respond in that moment, and to take that moment of crisis, and change it into a moment where we are supporting people, and helping people heal.

We don't yet have a metric where we track exactly what happens to people afterwards. Sometimes we're taking people to private hospitals that are outside of the city's purview. However, One thing that we do have is New York City Health+ Hospitals has community health workers who will call patients to check in with them, conduct the patient survey, and see if there is any support that's necessary.

Anything you'd like to add to that? Yeah, just as part of that follow-up, they are also asking if they made it to the appointments that were set for them, or if they used the referrals that were provided. Thank you. Is there a plan to, I guess, keep information related to what happens after you assist someone? Because I'm just wondering whether— one thing is for us to be able to connect them to services and be able to have enough capacity to do that for everybody that needs to be connected to services.

But then after they're connected, nothing happens, and then we're back to square one, and we don't make any progress. Yeah, you're pointing to a really, a real challenge for the system and for crisis response in general. And I think the way that we are approaching it now is really around the way that we follow up with the patients to see if they have connected to their provider.

We do a lot of work on the ground to make sure that any disposition that we are giving really is helpful for people. But what we also wanna make sure that we are doing is What's the word? Sorry, I'm losing my train of thought, but what we do right now is that kind of follow-up, and we also are right now doing the work of merging agency, getting an MOU so that we can see more clearly what's happening from the point of call all the way through our response, which will help us get even more precise about how we're understanding the program, but the— what you are raising around making sure we're interrupting that cycle is a very real real challenge.

And I would just add, as the Commissioner mentioned earlier, we do have an interagency working group that's looking at kind of what are the options in the community for when we bring someone to— someone who had a visit from a Be Heard team, as we're referring them to different community-based options, kind of they have raised this question around, you you know, the need to understand what is happening after that.

And so that is something that we're actively thinking about with our partners in the Health Department, at H&H, and other healthcare agencies in the city. And I'm sorry, I just got 2 notes from people who are faster on their feet with numbers that I misstated a number. You asked previously, Chair, about how many people were on the Deputy Mayor's team, or it might have been someone else, You asked previously how many people were on the Deputy Mayor's staff.

It's actually 8 staff. And someone else was able to do the math on this for me as well, the question about how much of OCS's budget is for city staff versus programs and OTPS. 5% of approximately— approximately 5% of our budget is for city staff. All right, thank you for that information. And also going back to the earlier question, based on the New Yorkers that you've been able to help this past year, you know, you connect them to services depending on the needs that they have.

What would you say are programs that we absolutely have to think about expanding based on the needs that continue to— you continue to confront? That's a really good question. I would say that that's actually a hard choice. Because we help New Yorkers across every single one of our programs. And so to me, it's not about picking just one or two.

It's about recognizing that all of the work that we do is essential. You know, I think about the funding that we were able to provide for flexible grants for people who've experienced violence to make sure that if they say, for example, need money to buy new furniture for a new apartment, that that's a kind of need that we had not been able to serve in the way we needed, and so we were able to expand into that.

I think about the kind of work that we are doing with young people in schools to address bias, and the necessity of teaching young people how to interact with each other with respect, and the necessity of teaching young people how to go into their first relationships in a way that allows them to recognize what consent looks like and should look like, and what it should feel like to be in a loving relationship.

It's— all of that work is essential. And so I wouldn't want to pick just one thing or two things. Okay, thank you.

Next, we'll hear from Public Advocate Jumaane Williams. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I thank you, Commissioner, and the entire team for being here. I wanted to drill down a little bit because I am so appreciative of the office being here and appreciative of the work that's being done. But I have to say, from afar, when I've traveled to other cities that have been successful in this, the synergy is a lot better than what I see.

So I just want to go back to when I believe a speaker asked how many times you meet with PD. So my question is very specific. I'd like to know what the definition of leadership is. who's meeting with who? And when was the last time the commissioner or you or the deputy mayor has met with the commissioner of the police department or the department or the chief of— the chief of department?

So the commissioner— the deputy mayor and I met with the police commissioner early on in our tenure. We've continued to have conversations and meetings at the leadership level. That includes with the First Deputy Commissioner, a variety of deputy commissioners. I meet regularly with deputy commissioners across NYPD. The way we're doing this work is that for any particular program, we're working with the, with the leadership who's most closely related to that work.

And that also includes the leadership here who's working with their counterparts across NYPD. I appreciate that. And I don't want to put anyone in difficult situations, but I'm going to, I'm going to keep pressing because I appreciate what you said, but it sounds like the last time the Deputy Mayor or you, the Commissioner, met with the Police Commissioner or the Chief of Department was roughly 8, 9 months ago.

I came on board in late May. The last time that I met with the Police Commissioner herself was sometime after that. I'd have to get the exact date, but since then I have been in regular, weekly, sometimes more than weekly contact with her leadership team. Okay, it's important to me because I want to differentiate you meeting with civilian leaders in the police department and operational police leaders in the police department.

Absolutely, yeah. And so it doesn't seem like the latter is happening in any regularity, so I just want to make sure that's on the record. I think that's a part of the problem. And I will say also, and I'll turn to Executive Director La Rochelle to talk about some of the ways that we are working very closely with senior members of NYPD's uniformed service across Office of Neighborhood Safety?

As you know, I know you're very familiar with that work, so. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, Public Advocate Williams. So we've been working very, very closely with NYPD around data. So we get police alerts, for instance, on a daily basis, which helps to inform how we operationalize Cure Violence and and our CMS groups. We work with them on special activations like Labor Day and Juv Day, for instance.

So we work very, very closely with them. And I think the important thing to understand is that the roles are distinct but different. Our role obviously is to, you know, make sure that we are advocating and supporting civilian-led and community-based approaches to violence prevention, and their job is law enforcement. Yeah. But it's very important to make sure, because We operate in the same neighborhoods, the same communities, and we interface with the same populations that we're working together.

We also make sure that we are talking to their leadership on an almost weekly basis around data that they can offer to us, again, so we could trickle it down to our folks on the ground who are doing this work and help out with their operations. Is OCS invited to CompStat meetings and crime briefings? We were invited to the ComStat that was prior to Juve.

We were really happy to be able to participate in that, just as we had had— remind me the inspector's name— we had an— yes, so we worked really closely with NYPD leadership, both uniform and civilian, around the Juve deployment, and so we were part of— we were invited to the CompStat before that, and then they were participating in our JUVAY preparation, which we were doing at that point on a, I want to say, weekly basis, and the Deputy Mayor's team was managing that.

Wait, it sounds like there's not CompStat meetings regularly that you're invited to. We are not currently attending CompStat meetings regularly. And CrimeStat briefings? I'm not currently attending CrimeStat briefings regularly. Yeah. OK. And the reason I'm bringing this up, because we are— I think you said $275 million is the budget. The police department in the city, without the federal funding, is roughly maybe $60, $65 billion.

And so I think we're at a point now where people actually understand more than they did 15, 16 years ago why we need alternatives. And so we've reached that point, which is a success. Now we're at a point where we have to stand up a structure that can be compatible with what the police department is doing at $60 billion and is 24 hours a day.

And in order to do that, we really have to push the envelope and make sure that when people think of the Office of Community Safety, they think of the way they think of other safety measures. And so when you mentioned NYPD, you mentioned FDNY, those things conjure something in people's minds I don't think is where we want to be right now for the alternatives.

And so we need the funding and we need the structure. The funding is going to come, hopefully soon, sooner than later. We'll build, we'll build. I don't know when we'll get to $60 billion. Imagine if this office had $1 billion, what it can do. But we can build out an infrastructure that respects the work of OCS, and I haven't seen that yet.

And that's part of the questions that we have here. No, and I appreciate, I appreciate the concern, and I would say that this is part of that process of building. You know, nothing that we do that's strong, that works well, is built overnight. And the fact is that the Office of Neighborhood Safety, OCMA, all of these do work with NYPD at different leadership levels, both uniform and non-uniform, and we are continuing to build that relationship, and we will continue to strengthen that.

Thank you. I don't want to overstay my welcome because the chair— no, the chair allowed me to squeeze in so there's more questions. I just want to make it clear that I want to not be confused. You have a different function than the police department, but they are— wherever they are, they're going to be, lack of a better word, gorilla in the room.

That's what everybody looks at. So we want to make sure that coordination is happening, not just with them, but so many others. We want to stand up CMS workers, some of whom have lost their lives in doing this work. And we lift up Antoine, who released the loss of life. There's not job upward mobility. There's not the pensions.

There's not the things that people think about. And we have to stand that up. And this administration has been very good at standing up things very quickly, and I want to push them to really— the envelope on this as well. So thank you so much, uh, for, for being here, and I'll continue to push, uh, some very difficult questions as efficiently and effectively as I can.

Thank you for your support and your push. Appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Uh, next we'll hear from Councilmember Sandy Naras. Thank you, Chairs. Um, thank you for all your testimony here today. Um, I have a few questions, but based on your— some of the conversations that happened, I'm glad to hear the expansion of, I think you said 27 new staff for the Be Heard project. That's really, really great. Would love at some point, maybe in the follow-up, to get where those folks are at.

Is it in calls? Is it out on the ground? What that would be. You don't have to detail all of that here just for the sake of time. But the only other thing I wanted to mention on that is over the last couple years, a lot of the community groups and advocacy groups have really called for the deployment of peers in, in with these teams in the vehicles.

And so wondering if you've had any conversations about exploring that. Absolutely. And I will say, just to answer your question quickly because it's an easy answer, those 27 staff are the staff that will be responding to calls. That's the training that we were doing. Those are not— that's not necessarily administrative folks. So that's what those staff are.

We have had not just conversations, but we're making strides towards how do we incorporate peers into Be Heard. New York City Health and Hospitals did hire a person who is their associate director who is on Be Heard, who's focused on how do we build in peers to that program. And that work is currently underway right now. And we're looking forward to working with our partners and to the advocates who've really pushed this work as we structure that role.

Great. I'd really love to hear that. And my other question was really about, could you list out some of the specific opportunities or intervention points where youth and impacted communities are going to be informing or are currently informing the overall strategy of where this office is going? Yeah, no, thank you so much for asking that. That's such an important question.

And so, from the beginning of this office, that has— well, since before the creation of this office, because all of these offices work so very closely with impacted communities and as with youth. But we started off the work, the Deputy Mayor began her tenure with her and myself, a listening tour. And that listening tour began with young people.

It was across New York City's schools. That's right. schools. We had 14— more than 1,400 young people talking to the Deputy Mayor about what they understand and see as their major safety concerns and what they need to be safe. And we are expanding that work as we are going to our partners who support people with behavioral health needs, people— organizations that support people with— who have experienced domestic and gender-based violence.

And that's part of how we are informing that work. We're also in the midst of launching our strategic planning process, and as part of that, we are both going to be hearing from, of course, our staff, council, other government agency partners, but we will be also soliciting feedback and thoughts from impacted communities, both youth and otherwise. Okay, I think you've answered all my other questions.

The one thing I will comment on is that while, you know, we applaud the expansion of funding into like the organization like the WIC over in North Brooklyn, you know, the Bushwick community does not feel that that is serving Bushwick specifically. So, you know, that was a lot of feedback I'm getting, that that is Williamsburg, the area is that.

So I just want to flag that for you all, as that caused a little bit of— it ruffled some feathers. No, I appreciate that, and I appreciate the correction. I should have said, you know, focus on Bushwick houses. We also know that that is a concern and a criticism that has been raised, and we'd like to continue to work with our partners, with the WIC and otherwise, to make sure that we are meeting the needs of all the communities that we're looking to serve.

Absolutely. Thank you, Chair. Thank you so much.

Next, we'll hear from Councilmember Marano. I know it's Friday afternoon and before Halloween and Election Day. I'm sure you're eager to get the weekend started. I want to start by saying that, you know, I'm certainly not opposed to non-police approaches to public safety. I think if we can prevent a shooting or get somebody mental health treatment before a situation becomes dangerous, I think that's a great thing.

I am concerned about creating additional layers of bureaucracy. bureaucracy. We've seen something similar in the past with Thrive NYC, where the city assembled numerous programs under one umbrella, spent a lot of taxpayer dollars, and struggled with accountability. Your testimony describes the accomplishments of 5 existing offices, most of which were operating long before your office was established in March.

Can you identify one measurable public safety improvement that's occurred specifically because the Office of Community Safety was created rather than because of programs that already existed? That's a great question. What I will say is that because the Office of Community Safety was created, we have been able to advance programs that have been either stuck or or that needed additional support.

So, for example, you heard that this year was the first year that we were able to hold a Be Heard integrated staff training since 2024. That is in part because our office was created to advance the goals of Be Heard, and that's a public safety outcome, whether or not we are able to staff an initiative that responds to 911 calls at the rate that it should.

You also heard that we were able to expand CMS into 3 additional neighborhoods. So part of— bless you— part of what we are doing is that work of expanding and building out additional programs. So we are not doing this from a place where we hover above the work. We are doing the work of implementing these programs. And the fact is that some of these programs have existed for a long time because they are effective, and that we don't want to jettison that, and we want to invest more deeply.

Your testimony says that in fiscal year 2026, Your crisis management system providers conducted 14,232 mediations and de-escalations, and I think that's a really impressive number. But I have a question about what that number actually means. How many of those 14,232 interventions involved a credible threat of imminent violence, and how many were routine disputes that might never have escalated?

And as you answer that, how does the city independently verify that these interventions actually occurred? Yeah, absolutely. I'll turn to my colleague for more details, but what I will say is that we think it is important to intervene at any level of dispute that we are seeing, whether it's a dispute that might be relatively minor or a dispute that is significant while we are seeing it, because we know that something that's minor can over time become more significant.

So we do not want to constrain ourselves to saying that there's only certain types of disputes that we should be intervening in. However, what I will also say is that the staff of the crisis management system, these are people who have both deep expertise in their communities and who have been trained as credible messengers and as people who can de-escalate.

They are trained to identify When there is a challenge, that can be significant. They are working in jurisdictions where you are seeing— where we have selected them because they have high rates of gun violence, and we are working therefore at the deep end of that need. And so we both collect information from the providers directly. We also conduct site visits to make sure we are getting our independent review of what is also happening.

But are we relying on the organizations receiving taxpayer funding to report their own accomplishments? Well, you know, just like any program that we operate, we do rely on our provider to report what they are doing. However, we ourselves conduct site visits. We also have a technical assistance partner who conducts training and otherwise, so we have other kinds of information.

We also talk to our partners who are working with our crisis management system partners and get feedback. So we make sure that we are hearing from a variety of people around what our, our contractor providers are doing? Yeah, absolutely. And Councilmember, to the commissioner's point, we do frequent site visits. We also have frequent touchpoints in various ways with our providers on the ground.

They are trained in conflict mediation and de-escalation. And these are folks who obviously understand the dynamics in their communities. And when we talk about de-escalation, and conflict mediations, there's a very specific definition. And these are either incidents that could become a little bit more serious and might lead to community violence. And so when that happens, our folks are able to track every single conflict mediation or de-escalation between either individuals or groups, and then they report that back to us.

May I continue briefly, Chair? Thank you. Is there an independent auditing mechanism to verify these numbers, or are we essentially accepting what the contractors tell us? Well, I think the site visits is one way where we do independent auditing. The other thing that we also do is we have over at various points in time, and we will start to do this again, is we have conducted third-party evaluations of our work as well, because that's also a way that we ensure that the work that we are doing is effective.

So then— Commissioner, I read the fiscal impact statement for Intro 403. It says the cost of establishing a Department of Community Safety is $0. Yet the legislation calls for offices in every borough operating 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with personnel conducting field operations. Meanwhile, your testimony references additional investments of $14.8 million in neighborhood safety programs, $15.7 million in domestic violence services, and $26 million in hate crime prevention.

How can we tell taxpayers that creating this department costs nothing when we're simultaneously talking about expanding these programs and potentially adding a whole new level of I'll have to check on that fiscal impact statement. I'm not familiar with that. We certainly would not anticipate that expansion of initiatives would cost no dollars. We're really supportive of Intro 403 and the intention to create a Department of Community Safety that is independent and have already spoken with Councilmember Ressler about working closely with any potential amendments.

Thank you. One final question, and I appreciate the Chair's patience. Your testimony cites the Be Heard program, which you again just referenced, which responded to 8,524 calls last fiscal year. You report that 42% of individuals served received care in the community instead of being transported to a hospital, and I think that raises an important question, which is, How many of those people required another emergency response within 24 hours, 7 days, or 30 days?

Because avoiding a hospital trip isn't necessarily a success if the person ends up in another crisis the next day. Are we tracking repeat emergency calls, subsequent violent incidents, or whether people actually receive ongoing treatment? That's a great question. Ability to support someone in their home in that moment, I would characterize as a success. We wanna make sure that if someone is in a crisis and we are able to support them right then and there and help them connect to services and stay at home, that's a success.

When necessary, we take someone to the hospital. One of the things that we are doing as part of the build of the Office of Community Safety and ongoing support, but now even more robust support that OCMH is providing that program, is building out our capacity to look at data across agencies and answer some of the longer-term questions that we have not been able to answer to date.

But do we know how many are repeat calls? That is not a metric that I have data on. But going forward, would you support publicly reporting those outcomes rather than simply reporting how many calls the program answers? I think that's a really interesting and important question. I would love to think about that and connect with you about that.

I appreciate it. Thank you very much. Thank you, Chair. Thank you.

Thank you so much, uh, Councilmember Murano. Um, a quick point. So as we know, we are in a well-documented public health crisis and mental health crisis. We see it in our subways, we see it in our streets, we see it in our homes. And the big question is, what are steps that we have to take to truly, but truly resolve the issue?

Are we simply not reaching enough people, or is it that we're reaching people, but after we reach them, we connect them, but then things fall through the cracks given that the services that we have are not enough to resolve that. So I'm wondering, and I don't know if this is a very similar question that Councilmember Murano asked, but you mentioned that you responded to about 8,500 calls.

Do we know how many individuals were served or were reached through those 8,500 calls that you responded to? I'm just wondering the repeat client number. Yeah, that's a great question. I don't have the the— that number disaggregated by individual clients. However, what we do is New York City Health+ Hospitals does have a part of their work where they look at people who we have seen more frequently and connects internal to that team, because that is the health side of the team, and we want to make sure that we're protecting patients' health information.

And they see, is there something that we can provide to that person outside of the space of a 911 call? to reduce the likelihood that they call back. So we are attuned to the fact that some people we are having repeat contact with, and we are focusing on those folks and providing additional support. I just don't off the top have that specific number of like the individual patient contact versus the overall number, but that is a really— that is something we are both attuned to and working on.

So that's a great question. Yeah, and that's a very important piece of data just so that we could really think about what is the root of the problem. Is it that we're not reaching people? I mean, obviously we could always expand those programs, but whether after we reach them, the things that we connect them to are not enough, and therefore we're back to square one.

So— And I will say that Be Heard is an important initiative, an important part of New York City's behavioral health and mental health system, but it's not the only piece of work that needs to happen. In order to build out comprehensive crisis system. I utilize the SAMHSA framework. You need someone, somewhere to call, someone to come to you, and somewhere to go.

And so, for example, we have 988 in the city, which is an amazing resource, operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It's available by phone, by text, by chat. Some of the work that the Office of Community Mental Health is doing right now with DOHMH is trying to ensure that more and more New Yorkers know about 988.

Because it exists. It's a 3-digit number. It's 24 hours a day. It's— there are trained counselors that staff that center. We want to make sure that more people are actually utilizing that. That's just one gap in the system that we are also working in close partnership to address. But what your question speaks to is the ways in which we want to shore up our entire system.

So complete agreement around that. All right. Thank you so much.

So next is going to be Councilmember Wong, and then Wilson, and then Ressler. Thank you, Chairs. I have read, actually read the committee report regarding the 5 offices. This is Victim Services, Neighborhood Safety and Prevention of Gun Violence, Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence, Office of the Prevention of Hate Crimes, and Office of Community Mental Health.

They have all existed for a while. So like you mentioned, the Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence has been around for a decade, 2 decades, 25 years. 25. Yeah. So what I'm— you mentioned Be Heard many, many times, but it is my understanding that Health and Hospitals and FDNY retains operation control of Be Heard. Is that right?

Be Heard is operated as a partnership between FDNY and Health and Hospitals. They staff it, they are deployed together. However, OCMH manages— OCS manages programmatic control. So we convene the agencies on a weekly and more than weekly basis to ensure that the program is operating effectively. We also engage our other partners, whether it's NYPD, OTS, involved in the 911 system to make sure that this initiative functions.

When you have a cross-agency initiative like this, it's important to have a single point of responsibility for that work, and that is our team. Yeah, okay. I'm just confused. They already existed. These offices that I mentioned already existed, and so was FDNY and health hospitals, and the services they offer, existed before your office, so why can't the existing agencies continue delivering these services?

Why do we need OCS? The existing agencies are continuing to deliver these services. The goal of combining all of them within OCS was that so we can have a more comprehensive approach to violence, because— and this I mentioned in my testimony— what we know is that people don't experience violence and harm in silos. People who have experienced domestic violence have significant behavioral health needs.

Neighborhoods with higher rates of gun violence also have higher rates of domestic violence. Combining these offices together allows us to have the resources and the expertise across all of these offices supporting New Yorkers as one. Okay. Your budget of $270 million, there's funding that's transferred from these existing programs. You're— we're not adding This budget is not adding in addition to these offices.

So I don't see how you're enhancing these offices. You're like taking funding away from them. But what— I mean, explain. Can you explain that to me? Because then they have less budget to work with. No. All of the offices have their budget to work with. The staff within the offices exist. They are doing the work. Their programs and contracts exist.

This administration invested an additional $67 million in the offices. We are now just under one home and one roof. And so these teams are continuing to do the work with the resources. Our goal as an administration, my commitment as a commissioner, is to ensure that we are continuing to ensure that we have the resource available. So we are not taking away from these offices.

We have only added to the offices. Yeah, but isn't it true that the $260 million was taken— it was taking away from the existing funding from these 5 offices? The offices— it hasn't taken away because those offices still have their funding. They are just now part of OCS. So that funding, the $157 million of ONS funding, is ONS's money and supports their programs, and it's now just part part of OCS.

Yeah, okay. Again, it seemed to me that what you're asking for, we're paying for another layer of management to get existing officers to do their jobs. And I don't see that as any beneficial to what we already have. So unless you can convince me otherwise, you know, this is— I see it as an extra layer of red tape.

You know, it's like This reminds me of Thrive NYC from a couple years ago. I appreciate that concern. I'd like to actually turn it to some of my team members to talk about how they have worked across the office to support some of the work that they're doing. I might start with the Office for Prevention of Hate Crimes, which you heard was quite small and is now working very closely with some of the offices to enhance the work that they are doing.

Yeah, thank you, Commissioner, and, you know, thank you for your concern. But I'll say that now that we are part of this larger network of providers and people, We are able to do wraparound services when it comes to hate crimes and occurrences of biases in communities. Additionally, being in office with 3 staff, now we have an additional 97 staff members, I would say, to collectively help us to do our work as well and to reach New Yorkers previously where we wasn't able to do so.

Thank you, Chair. I'll— I've saved my next set of questions for round 2. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much.

So next is Councilmember Wilson, but briefly, what are the different ways that we can get a Be Heard response? Obviously, the most obvious one is calling 911. I'm wondering if the NYPD, for example, relays different data and incidents and other different agencies as well. Yeah, the primary— as you mentioned, the primary way to get a Be Heard response is through 911.

However, if police on the ground respond to an incident that they find to be a mental health-related incident and they think Be Heard would be beneficial, they do have a mechanism to be able to request Be Heard from the ground. There are some calls that might come into 988, for instance, and if the call— if the 988 crisis counselor determines that a 911 response is needed, the 988 counselors know how to escalate a call to the 911 system, and then those calls could potentially also get a Be Heard response.

Thank you. Uh, next, Councilmember Wilson, and then Ressler. Thank you, Chair. I also have a couple questions about Be Heard. Um, so the city has a lot— spends a lot of money on contracted outreach teams that aren't necessarily contracted for serious mental health episodes, but oftentimes that does overlap. And it's, you know, there's also nonprofits and CBOs that also do this kind of outreach work.

How does Be Heard coordinate with those folks so that, you know, if one of them has a personal relationship to people, that we're not duplicating work? So one of the really strong aspects of the way the program is operating and designed is that it is built into our public hospital system. So because it's co-managed by New York City Health+ Hospitals and FDNY, it means that our health and hospital providers are able to, for example, if someone's already a health and hospital patient, look in their charts, see if they have other providers that they're in contact with.

They are also able to connect with our DOHMH colleagues to if someone has already been, say, part of an ACT team or otherwise. So the social workers in that program are highly trained to ensure that they are gathering information about the kinds of resources and programs that people are already connected to and making sure to reconnect them.

What about like DSS? Like, are you coordinating with like Breaking Ground and Urban Pathways and all these groups that are out there doing that work? Absolutely. Absolutely. And we coordinate with those organizations in a variety of ways, both in terms of ensuring that as we're building out programs or policies, we're in the room with them to make sure that we are talking about what we're seeing, what they're seeing.

I can also turn to Ms. Grant to talk some about some of the interagency work that she manages across that, because we are acutely aware that we are part of a system, we are not the system. We must make sure that we are coordinating with our partners and we're doing that frequently. Yeah, thank you, Commissioner. And as it relates to Be Heard, one of the referral options that Be Heard teams make is very often to the Joint Command Center that's operated by DHS.

So if they do encounter someone who needs housing support, they facilitate that connection directly with the JCCs. Outside of Be Heard, as you know, Our office does a lot of work with the other social service agencies such as the Health Department, H&H, DHS around quality of life concerns in specific neighborhoods, especially those neighborhoods that have, you know, a high presence of people who appear to need behavioral health support or housing support.

And so we will continue to do that work. We'll continue to grow that work under OCS. If Be Heard responds and it's deter— and the person that's experiencing the crisis refuses service or is not well enough to understand that they are in need of service, how do you deal with that? And what is— what's the next step in that engagement?

And who— what happens to that person who refuses service? It depends. If the— if it rises to the level of, you know, an involuntary transport to the hospital, then the Be Heard team— there's a social worker there to make that assessment and that determination that a person actually does need to go to the hospital imminently for an additional psychiatric evaluation, and we'll make arrangements for that to happen.

They'll also call ahead to the hospital to do a warm handoff. handoff. So it's particularly if it is an H&H hospital, so that the hospital knows that this individual just met with the Be Heard team and the Be Heard team is recommending additional evaluation. And so we try to ensure that that process happens as smoothly and the best way for the patient as possible.

Do you have data on how many Be Heard responses have resulted an involuntary removal? We can get that data, but I do know that it does not happen frequently. The social workers are so skilled at being able to de-escalate and support individuals during a mental health crisis, and so the need for an involuntary transport is quite minimal.

If someone doesn't meet the threshold for involuntary removal and refuses service, is there like a caseload that they get added to? Is there follow-up with that person after this particular engagement has concluded? The Be Heard team will attempt to give that individual a referral to ongoing care, to an additional service, if they do not want— wish to be served by a Be Heard team.

Every person that a Be Heard team comes in contact with gets a little palm card with information about available services in their community and also an attempt from the team to make a referral to services. I have one more question, Chair, if I may.

And you touched on this a second ago with, with your response, but, you know, I happen to believe that there is a pretty direct link between mental health, the mental health crisis and our housing crisis. And I am wondering if OCS shares that view, and if so, what are some of the tools or data sharing or advocacy that you're doing to help build more supportive and affordable housing?

We recognize that there is a significant overlap between people with mental health needs and people who are experiencing homelessness or who are unstably housed. That is absolutely true. That is something that we understand and that we support. So we work closely with DSS and our partners across the city to identify ways in which we can be supportive of the efforts that the city is making, whether that means as we do sitting on the committees where we're— the city is thinking through how to expand access to housing, whether that means funding services like our rapid rehousing work, whether that means ensuring that we are supporting providers who are also connecting people with behavioral health services with housing.

We know that this is absolutely an intersect that we can and should address. Yeah, and I would just add that Being a part of OCS, having all of these different offices under this one umbrella also means that not only are we thinking about it from a mental health perspective, we're thinking about it in terms of how does this— how does housing help to prevent violence?

How does housing help to make— ensuring that, you know, supportive housing options support people who may be victims of gender-based violence. And so it's— this just gives another opportunity to elevate more of those voices and concerns as we think about housing for people who have mental health needs. And then just a comment, and I'm, I'm done. But I— when you're contemplating the expansion, we would really like it in low— in Lower Manhattan, Midtown and Lower Manhattan.

I think one of the biggest calls I get to my office are people concerned about folks that appear to be experiencing mental health crises or appear to be unhoused, very resistant to services. And we, you know, around big transit hubs like the Port Authority bus terminal and Penn Station, where we see a lot of this. So please come, please come down to Manhattan.

Yeah, no, we appreciate that. That is, you know, Lower Manhattan is an area that we have also received very similar. So thank you for that ask, and we look forward to working with you on them. Thank you, Chair. Thank you so much.

Next, Councilmember Althea Stevens. Um, good afternoon. Um, I will try— well, I don't know if I'll be brief, but if we can just— I have a lot of questions, so if you could be succinct as possible. Um, I, I want to just start with— I, I know Councilmember Riley, um, spoke about Jarvis, who was on his way to school, and he's a young person from my district and in a school that's in my district.

This is actually the second shooting involved. Your microphone— sorry, your microphone may be off. No, it's on. Oh, it's very far. You can't hear? Is it better? Sorry. Yes, perfect. Thank you. I've never been accused of being not loud, so that's a first. That's true. So this is the second shooting. And, you know, this is a school that's outside of a catchment area, which is one of the things that I've been yelling about, like the catchment areas of like, what does that really look like in the expansion?

But just also just thinking about how's the office ensuring that coordination to across prevention, education interventions, and support for young people and communities? How is this being done within the school communities as well? Like, what does that look like? I know we have some like Safe Passengers program. There's some programs. But again, like in a tragedy where a young person is gunned down and there was a shooting outside the school, and then they're telling me that they're, you know, they did get positive payment money, now they're not on a list.

And like— What does that look like other than like the interventions being poured in for one day? What is the long-term solutions for these people? Yeah, no, I mean, there's just such— had so many tragic incidents in the last few days, and I just really want to send condolences to the families and friends of everyone who's been affected because it has been a really— these have been really awful.

And our team has been on the ground. Obviously, want to respect the privacy of the people affected. So we won't talk about like the literal specifics, but we can talk about the ways in which we tend— we support young people and their families in the aftermath of incidents like this. We work very closely with schools as well as with other agency partners to do the work of responding in the moment, but also the long-term work of supporting people in the aftermath of these kinds of incidents, whether that means— well, I'll turn to— Yeah, no, thank you so much, Commissioner.

And hello. Hi, how you doing? I haven't seen you in a while. Yeah. Hi, Councilmember. Um, so I was just on a call with New York City Public Schools yesterday— last night, actually— um, to figure out how we can extend resources to, um, to the young man and his family. And we're looking at various things that might be cost-neutral.

Like you mentioned, even if we're not in that school, this is information that we're receiving from New York City Public Schools. And so what we're going to, you know, be doing in the days and weeks ahead is to be working very closely with our sites in the Bronx on the ground, and not only in the Bronx but the other 5 boroughs, to figure out, okay, operationally, where do we need to be canvassing?

Who do we need to be engaging, right? Even if this is not a YES school, a Youth Enrichment Services school. You know, how do we engage with these young people, making sure that, you know, when young people are going to school in the mornings and, you know, they're let go in the afternoons, that CMS and our folks on the ground have a presence, right?

So this is something that we're working very closely with New York City Public Schools right now to accomplish. And is there already a plan that's in place that already exists, or is this something that you guys are still in the process Yeah, so the plan in place and the interventions that we have right now are YES, which is funded, but that— How many schools is that in?

I'm sorry? How many schools is that in? 50. It's in 50 schools? Yeah. Could you send— you probably don't have it now, but if you can send over a list to the committee so that we can look at the schools. Absolutely. And how were those schools picked? They're picked through New York City Public Schools. They provide us a list of level 4 and level 5 cases. that are cases that involve suspensions, young people who might bring weapons to school and whatnot, and we go ahead and operationalize from there.

Interesting. I have some thoughts, so I'll call you because I have more questions.

The next question I have is, I've been a one-woman band around juvenile justice, and I have been raising the alarm because one of the things especially with talking to the judges and folks, is just around programming. I know that you guys have a set of programming. You guys do program in these CMS groups and things like that.

And I'm trying to get a better understanding of, like, why we're not using some of these programs for these young people and how is that connection happening. And I know there's an expansion with, like, ADT and ADI programs, but I know that you guys have specific programs that have funding attached to it with stipends and things like that.

And my big concern is that no one is talking to anyone, and we have all these programs and they're working in silos. So DYCD has this other program. I know you guys used to be under DYCD, so things used to be a little bit more coherent around programming and integrating into them. So I'm trying to understand what is the connection and through line of these programs and young people having access?

Because again, I've been meeting with judges and they're like, there's no programs. And I'm like, what are you talking about? There are programs. Yeah, we have certainly, and I'll I'll, of course, turn to Cliff to describe more, but we absolutely do have programs that work with youth who are in the juvenile system, both youth who are in detention as well as youth— No, I know you guys have programs, but what I am saying is how is this all being connected?

Because when I am talking to judges, they're saying there's no programs. I know, and I know for a fact because I've been doing this for 20 years, and I'm here, and I see all of these things, which is why I have ACS and DYCD. How are these things being connected? How are people knowing to refer people to these programs?

And like, I'm trying to understand how are you guys all working together? Because again, it seems very disconjointed. I know DYCD has programs, you guys have programs, ACS has programs, everybody got programs, but every time I turn around, everybody's like, there's no programs for these kids. I think one of the challenges of working in a place like New York City is that it is so large, and that it is really hard to know everything that is going on.

But one of the goals that we have is to make sure that we are being— we are in very close coordination. So, for example, we're at Office of Neighborhood Safety, as well as the rest of the Office of Community Safety, as part of the Youth Justice Task Force that is being run right now to ensure that we're— this administration is making improvements to the youth justice system.

And we are in very close contact with our partners at DYCD and ACS and otherwise as we continue to— Not to cut you off, because I have another question. The issue isn't you guys talking. Everyone else needs to know. And so that's the issue. You guys having a meeting, and I'm a part of the Justice Working Group, don't get me started.

But if people who are supposed to refer the kids are not knowing about these programs, nobody cares. And so I need us to figure out a way. I mean, I have legislation around it. But this is a real problem when I am in these spaces and judges are saying these kids are being detained because there's no programs.

And so if you have not heard that, I don't know how people are not hearing that because I'm hearing that. That is something we need to work on as a city because that is really important. And so I just have another question. One of the— my last question, I'm so sorry, Chair, and I will be done, is just around— you guys have mentioned that you were in support of Councilmember Riley's hotline bill, the hotline bill.

Do you have a plan on how you'll be protecting Carla's information on the hotline from like NYPD and things like that? And is there a plan in place that you guys are thinking about to make sure the information that's being shared on this hotline is protected? So we are in support of the intent of the hotline bill.

We are suggesting that there are resources already within New York City, like 988 and the New York City HOPE Hotline, that could be utilized more effectively and more quickly and more efficiently to meet the goals of the bill. And we would really welcome conversations with the councilmember to discuss that. And to your point about making sure that the judges and others are aware, we would really welcome, you know, as some— like working with you and working with others to make sure we are getting the word out, because we want to make sure that when there are gaps in people understanding what exists, that we are filling those gaps.

Trust me, I've been yelling about it. I will continue to yell about it. And I've also been promoting these programs because I'm telling you, people are pretending like they don't know what it is. And so I know for a fact because I know the work, but there are a lot of people who do not know that you guys have these programs.

And listen, as you're seeing gaps, I know the team is aware of those. I know we We would love to just continue working on that. That is part of the work, is making sure that the people who make decisions are aware and utilize these programs. Thank you so much.

Next, Councilmember Ressler. Thank you so much, Chair Felice. And I really just want to thank you again for your flexibility in accommodating this bill and the hearing today. I really appreciate it and the opportunity for Intro 403 to be heard. And Commissioner, I just have to say, I think that you Your testimony today has been clear and compelling.

You've demonstrated a really impressive command of the range of issues that OCS confronts, and I think it's been really helpful for the council to hear the benefits of consolidating these offices and, you know, the opportunities that the new investment that the Mondani administration is making and how that can help us. address the surge in hate crimes that we're experiencing and other challenges.

I'd love to just touch on a few general areas. Maybe I'll start with Be Heard just because it's gotten so much attention today, and I know this is something that— an area where you have a lot of expertise. And the mayor has rightly said that Be Heard is a top priority. The MMR, you know, as you've noted today, I think, and the deputy executive director noted, there were just 8,500 calls.

That's right. that were responded to on Be Heard last year. That's down, I think, 40-odd percent from 2 years ago. I was disturbed by the police and fire departments' kind of competing and somewhat inconsistent testimony at our budget hearings earlier this year, and it felt to me it was indicative of a program that had been orphaned. And I was hoping you could elaborate further on kind of How you're— as you're looking to ramp Be Heard back up, are there new goals in terms of people that we're hoping to serve and calls that we're kind of hoping to divert from the NYPD that EMTs and social workers can respond to?

You know, recognizing that we have a major staffing crisis with EMTs that I'm sure is making that challenging. You know, we'd love to kind of understand as you look ahead, kind of— universe of people that we're hoping to serve with this program? Yeah, absolutely. We, you know, as you noted, there was a decrease, you know, the calls— we're proud of every single call that we respond to.

We think that's important. But we also know we're not responding to as many calls as we need or want to. And that is really the goal, to make sure we are increasing day over day, week over week, so that we are responding to more and more calls and that we are doing that effectively. So one of the things that had been a challenge and that we have addressed with the agencies is the, like, ensuring that we have a clear point of leadership within the city across this program.

Because any program that's managed by 2 different agencies, there still needs to be a clear point of leadership, and that point of leadership is OCS. And so we are able and do convene the agencies on at minimum a weekly basis, but quite frankly nearly a daily basis in this moment, to make sure that we are expanding. That means identifying locations.

From which we can send our teams out of as we are going across the city. That means increasing staffing. As you heard, we've ran the first training that we had run in over a year for staff, so to fill staffing gaps and to ensure we have enough staffing to do this. We are currently right now building out our data sharing agreement so that we can see with more specificity what the calls are, how we're responding to those.

All of that work is happening right now and is going quickly. And we will continue to build on this program, making it more and more coherent, making it more and more effective over time. I wish Councilmember Stevens was still here for this, but I— you know, we've seen this deeply troubling increase during the Adams administration of youth in detention.

You know, well over twice as many kids are incarcerated today as at the beginning of Eric Adams' term. And just wondering what kind of initiatives you all are prioritizing now to address the rise in gun violence that is impacting our teens and helping us to drive down the population that we're experiencing in Horizons and Crossroads. Yeah, absolutely.

So I will turn to my colleague for more details. But not only are we sitting on the Youth Justice Task Force, which is focused on, you know, improving how the justice system works, including the real crisis of— in the detention centers and making sure that we are bringing to bear any resources we can to support. We also have our CMS providers in the detention centers to address and support violence, because we know that for the youth who are there, that is essential.

And we all have work where we are also providing support to young people who have been justice-involved, including summer youth employment Because we know that employment is one of the key preventative factors for being engaged in the justice system. And what would you like to add? Yeah, no, thank you so much, Commissioner. And so we work very, very closely still with the YCD.

And so we work very closely to be activating public spaces like our Cornerstones and Beacons. We have employment programs, to the Commissioner's point, AGVP, which is our Anti-Gun Violence Employment Program, as well as SYEP, Summer Youth Employment. Working very, very closely to add additional slots there to extend to young people. You'll find us, again, in New York City public schools, as I mentioned earlier, as well as our ACS facilities.

And our Mayor's Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety also has a youth leadership component where we are engaging young people, again, just to— And I'm sorry, extend resources, make referrals to them, and make sure that we're invariably reducing their risk of being involved in community violence. Okay. I'm going to try to just— I want to try and get through a few more topics if I can.

I appreciate those responses and hope this is an area— I'll just say, hope this is an area where OCS, in partnership with other agencies, can really rebuild the landscape of programs that were obliterated during the Adams administration that are serving this young adult population and our effective preventative tools that we really need. Thanks. I think the Department of Probation in particular needs a lot of help.

Metrics and success. As you're thinking about kind of measuring the success of this office, are there short-term goals and targets that you might want to highlight or data points or metrics that you're prioritizing for success kind of for this fiscal year that you might want to highlight for us? All of our programs include, or I would say that our programs include a set of programmatic metrics.

So usually when I think about those, what I talk about is like the number of people we're serving, what kind of support we're able to provide, what their satisfaction is. All of those are essential. But also as we're building that out, we are also continuing to build out our ability to look and say at things like for neighborhoods where we are operating, what are— are we seeing reductions in violence?

Are we seeing being increasing access to care among the people we're serving. So that's the kind of metrics and building out that we will continue to do. Great. And I thought this section in the MMR this year was helpful, and hopefully that's something where more metrics can be added and elaborated on. I fully appreciate that setting up a new office in government is far from easy.

It's, I would probably say, often painful. Especially when contracting is involved. Could you share with the council today a little bit more about what you've undertaken to make sure that the office is kind of set up and structured to be successful and just elaborate a little bit on kind of that internal work that might not be super sexy but is really important?

No, thank you so much, because people, you know, often don't ask about the behind-the-scenes work of ensuring that this office functions and then is ready to be a department, and that is, I say, equally as essential as the programming that we do. So right now, we are a mayoral office, so our staff lines, as well as our contracts, are embedded within other agencies.

The backend, things like administration, HR, payroll, contracting, is all managed by other entities. The process of building that out, the process of becoming— going from office to an Agency has happened in New York City before. We're thinking about NYSEM, if you're thinking about the Department of Veterans Services. That often takes years, and our goal as we're doing this is to ensure that when we're making that transition, we're doing so in a way that allows us to make sure there are no gaps in our ability to pay the people who are contracted providers, to pay our own staff, that we continue to be able to manage the data that we have in a way that is in line with all data protection and security protocols.

And to do that, we have already launched the work with an interagency task force to help us plan out. And that task force includes not only the agencies here, but the agencies that serve as our backend. So DSS for NGBV, DYCD for ONS, and so forth. But it also includes the agencies across the city that manage some of the operational functions of the city, like DCAS, Mayor's Office of Contracts, OTI, others, to help us make sure that we have the staff staffing, the infrastructure, and the technology resources necessary to do that work.

And we are already doing it because we know that it will take time, but we want to do it as quickly and as effectively as possible. That's great. As you look ahead a little bit more to a longer-term vision, I know you mentioned that you're kind of undertaking a strategic planning process. Interested in kind of how you see the agency.

I recognize you've got a variety of existing programs that are kind of under your umbrella, but how do you look at kind of the agency as a direct service provider versus, and kind of providing its own standalone response versus serving as a coordinating force between existing programs? Is it all of the above? Yeah, we will need to do all of that in order to be an effective community safety. department.

We will need to be able to directly serve people. We will need to coordinate. We will need to be able to speak to policy and research. And that work exists, but we will need to make sure that we're doing that even more so. And I'm interested in just your assessment on kind of existing gaps that we see today.

I will say I often encounter situations in my district where there are individuals who are struggling with mental illness on our streets. in our subways, and they don't appear to be getting the help they need. And I can say that's me being generous. They are not getting the help they need by the existing programs that the city offers.

And I'm interested, you know, we often get inadequate responses from non-police agencies. The police get called in, and their involvement doesn't address the problem. or the challenge or the condition that somebody's facing. Folks often are cycling through Rikers, hospitals, shelters, one versus the other to the next. And I'm just interested in generally how you think the Department of Community Safety can help to address this particular challenge.

Yeah, that's a great question. That challenge of people who are cycling, the fact that when people are cycling, we're seeing them often in the street, not without— with— and we're— we have not yet been able to connect with that person in a way where we have provided what they need, whether that is housing, whether that's serious support for serious mental illness.

The thing that I am most— one of the things I'm most hopeful about is having this kind of combined expertise within the office and a charge to address those really thorny problems will help us move the needle on closing some of those gaps. Because you can't— if we are able to really address gun violence and the access to mental health services at the same time, we're closing a gap.

If we're able to do so in a way that addresses victim services and domestic violence, we're closing a gap. So part of what we are going to be doing and continue to do is think about how do we get into those really sticky problems where people are falling through the gaps and either ourselves provide services or work with our community partners to do that work.

And so one of the great things about having— well, I'll pause there because I know you have other questions. Yeah, no, look, I want to be mindful. The chairs were gracious to give me some extra time. I just— I thought 2 things I just want to repeat that you've said earlier that I thought were helpful, of kind of your role in overseeing the operations day to day and making the work of the Office of Community Safety successful, and the Deputy Mayor's role in kind of serving as a coordinator across city government to help bring in other partners and make sure that they're collaborating and supporting with that work as effectively as possible, I thought was really clear and beneficial to understand.

And the second thing that you, you talked about, like, how each of these 5 offices provide victim services in one form or another, and how do we better integrate those efforts? Because oftentimes, as a victim of violence in one form or another, it might cut across multiple offices, and yet siloing these things out doesn't necessarily help the people who need it.

And so I think it just provided some really helpful color in why things are being structured the way that they are. And so appreciate your testimony today and very much look forward to working with you and your team on this effort. Likewise. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much, Councilmember Ressler.

So quick question, and then we'll hear from Councilmember Banks, and then we'll do a second round. So as someone who represents the Bronx, I'm always talking about public safety. I don't see how anybody who, you know, represent a neighborhood like the one that I represent where about 40% of the shootings and shooting incidents in the city happen in the Bronx.

You know, very difficult to talk about anything else when that is such a big problem in the borough. And not too long ago, I was visiting Brooklyn, and I was speaking with a Brooklyn elected official. We were talking about the history of the neighborhood. They basically said that back in the '90s, that specific neighborhood would get crushed by issues related to violence, including gun violence.

They created new programs, and they were able to bring a new building with basically everything related to issues related to violence, including a building with a one-stop shop, services for victims, counselors, programs for children, teen dating violence, hate crimes, and so much more. And one thing that they said was that, that by having it directly in the community, that was disproportionately affected.

That basically completely transformed that community permanently. Basically, practically, you know, crime is almost nonexistent. It also brought jobs to families that needed them the most. Obviously, we know the correlation between high unemployment rates and lack of opportunity and crime and violence and mental health issues. I think this says a lot about the difference that we can make when we have programs like the ones that we're talking about today directly embedded in the communities that need them.

So I'm just wondering, what would it take to have an office like the Office of Community Safety headquartered out of a neighborhood like the ones that need it the most, such as a disadvantaged community in Brooklyn or the Bronx, et cetera? I mean, you know, obviously, as we know, the real work gets done in the communities facing these issues.

So I'm just wondering, what would that take? Yeah, I mean, you could not have— I could not have said it better. The real— the work gets done when you are in the community. So we absolutely are in agreement that in order to do this work, we have to work in the communities with the highest needs, that we have to work closely with partners that are already embedded in that community.

And as we grow, we will look at where we need to be positioned within the community, whether that's physically or otherwise in terms of being— supporting community-based partners that are already doing that work. So completely agree on the statement. Okay, sounds good. Yeah, I'll definitely be interested in having conversations about how we could support the partners already there.

But also, given that this office is going to be working on these issues, you know, having the office in the communities that are disproportionately affected by these issues. Absolutely. We love City Hall and the region, but, you know, we're talking about safety. Why not have them have these services directly in the communities affected? And I would say, you know, we've started— or not just started, we've for a long time and continue to fund services in the Bronx because we know that that The Bronx is a place with significant rates of violence, and so our team is doing work all the time in the Bronx.

My guess is that there are several team members currently right now in the Bronx doing work with our providers. On any given day, that is the case, and I can certainly turn to Executive Director La Rochelle to talk about some of the resources we already have in the Bronx that we would be building on. Yeah, Chair Felisa, so I just want to, you know, at a glance, let you know exactly what type of assets we have in the Bronx.

First of all, we serve 11 catchment areas across 8 precincts, and our crisis management system investment is roughly $22 million. And that includes street outreach work, that includes work directly with our hospital-based violence intervention programs, ACS, our mobile trauma units, and we even have investments throughout Mayor's Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety. So look at Paterson, for instance, with that, you know, unfortunate incident that happened a few days ago.

We were fully mobilized there. So I just want you to rest assured knowing that we do have assets in the Bronx, and obviously there are ways for us to, you know, hopefully increase our presence and footprint there. But we are working very closely with our community-based partners and the civilian in the Bronx to make sure that we're lowering rates of community violence.

Thank you, thank you so much. But I guess the overall point is— and yes, we absolutely appreciate the expansion of the programs in the Bronx— but I guess the overall point is, if this is where most of the issues are at, why not be headquartered out of there? Yeah, yeah, we definitely appreciate the point. Thank you. Thank you.

Next, uh, Councilmember Banks, and then we'll go for a second round. Thank you, Chair. Um, when it comes to the CMS contracts, When can we expect the transfer of responsibility from DYCD to OCS? So in terms of the CMS contracts, as well as all of the other contracts within ONS, we are— myself, Cliff, all of us are in programmatic control of those contracts.

In terms of literally moving the contracts, we are in the process right now of working really closely with DYCD, with others, to ensure sure that we can build out a contracting team. So we need staff, we need equipment, we need all of our technology, all of that to make sure that we are actually able to manage the contracts and that we do so in a way that we are not— there's no gaps in our ability to provide funding, because that's also something that we want to be very careful about.

Okay. And so we are working right now to work towards that transfer, but in terms of programmatic operations, we are doing that, and then we are in very, very close contact with DYCD on a I would say probably daily basis around making sure that the contracts are continuing to move and operate. So we are making sure that even in this kind of transitional space, we are managing that work.

Thank you for that. How will OCS ensure that the CMS providers and other community-based violence prevention organizations have adequate and reliable funding to retain experienced workers, mediate conflicts, and prevent shootings? and retaliation? Yeah, well, one of the things that we are doing, of course, is making sure that we are continuing to ensure that the contract is, is managed and that when, as we're doing this transition, we are able to continue to fund our partners.

Another thing that we have that is happening is that as the current contract is set to expire, we are working right now on releasing a new RFP. The focus of that RFP will be ensure that we are making continued investments in the CMS work, but also making adjustments to bring— to modernize the work which has existed in New York City for a great deal of time and is really strong.

And we want to make sure that we are reflecting the changes that have happened in the system. So, I mean, no surprise to you, but of course, when COVID happened, it changed a lot about how people operate. And we want to make sure that we are also reflecting that in our new work and that that work is invested in the CMS providers and that they can And when it comes to the delayed payments and the gaps in the contract funding, how are we addressing that?

So— especially on the delayed payment side. Yeah, so we work really closely, and I'll let Cliff speak to this. We work really closely with DYC to identify when there are issues with delayed payments or any other issues in the contract to make sure we are addressing those. As we are building out OCS, one of the principles that we are building out our contract shop with is to be as effective as possible.

We know that making sure that we are providing— that providing consistent funding to our— and on-time funding to our contracted providers is essential for us to do our work. Yeah, no, absolutely. And to the Commissioner's point, one thing that we're doing is working very closely to identify the organizations and providers that needed additional assistance. Okay. One thing that is happening, one thing that recently happened is that the providers are now receiving a 50% advance at the top of the fiscal year.

And again, that's directly related to their feedback to us around what they needed to, you know, be fully operational at the top of the year. But we also understand and we want to be very equitable and making sure that we are applying resources to our providers who need them the most. Thank you for that. How will the OCS coordinate with DYCD, DOE, and other city agencies to connect young folks most impacted by violence to employment, mentorship, mental health services, and Safe after-school spaces.

Yeah, yeah. So we're working very, very closely with DYCD to make sure that summer youth employment slots, or SYEP slots, are being allocated directly to our population of young people. We also, as I mentioned earlier, have our anti-gun violence violence employment program that we're extending to folks as well, to young people particularly. And we're working very closely to make sure that public spaces like cornerstones and beacons, Saturday night lights, remain open and available to serve as secure and safe spaces for young people to congregate and to interface.

Thank you. And what outcomes will the OCS track to evaluate whether its investments are improving youth safety, including conflicts Mediated retaliation prevention and just what's being done to— Yeah, so right now we're tracking— our CMS partners track conflict mediations, de-escalations, referrals that are made. We really want to be able to tell a comprehensive story about the work that's happening, and we want to effectively be able to keep score.

So, we're working very closely with the other offices within OCS right now to see how we can collaborate and coordinate a lot better. And my last question. We know this administration and the council have been vocal about the dehumanizing conditions at the youth detention centers, and I think Althea touched on this a little earlier, the lack of citywide support for our children.

Can you please describe the role that you believe your office will play in protecting our youth from the criminal legal systems? Yeah, I think there's a few different roles, and we share the concern and we recognize the urgency of the issue, absolutely. So thank you so much for raising that. One thing that we do is by preventing violence and working with young people who are at risk is we're preventing them from coming into contact with the the system.

And then in addition, for young people who are in the system, our CMS providers, especially in the detention facilities, we have CMS providers in the detention facilities to reduce— to address conflict and reduce violence there. And then you also heard from Executive Director LaRochelle about all of the work that we do to connect young people to jobs, to other supports that reduce the likelihood that they cycle back in.

And we do focus on connecting with young people who have either had contact with the juvenile system or young adults who have had contact with the criminal justice system and people who are at high risk so that we are doing our part to make sure that we are both being preventative and addressing the needs of people who have come into contact with the system.

Thank you, Commissioner, for your responses and your team. Thank you, Chair. Thank you so much, Councilmember Banks.

Back to Chair Brewer. 2 quick things. One is, again, back to the gender-based in the centers and so on and so forth. There's a lot of interest. I co-chair the council's women's caucus. I speak at a lot of women's events, and this comes up constantly. So I guess what I'm saying is, I think if, as time goes on, you could make it clear what you are doing in that domain, because there's a feeling that it's not being covered.

Whether it is or isn't, that's how it feels. Mm-hmm. And because the individual who was head of that is not part of your leadership team, you have— I think you're doing a great job. Everybody up here is saying, oh, she's really good. But that issue is still hanging out there. Yeah, I will say Commissioner Simonyi is still part of my leadership team.

She testified with me at the last hearing. She just happens not to be available today. But the work of NGBV is so essential to the work of the office. And it is important for us to tell the story of that, so I appreciate that feedback. We will continue to, to work on that. Okay. And then just secondly, the great— I mean, Councilmember Ressler talked about it, councilmember, uh, across the board, the mental illness in our districts is huge.

And so I know you can only be Be Heard in certain districts. We'd all love to have Be Heard. I assume it'll— is hopefully something like it, or it will move to other districts. But again, it's sort of on you because the street homeless outreach can't handle them in many cases. People don't want to move. I often say to them, these are encampments or something like— I got 2-year, 10-year encampments.

That's what we got. They're not going anywhere unless something miraculous happens. And DSS is trying. Mm-hmm. So, but the issue would be try to come up as soon as possible with what the city's responses to this mental illness? Because it is, I think, the number one issue on our streets. Yeah, I will say I'm working really closely with DSS too, as they are doing the work of figuring out how to address street outreach and homeless encampments, recognizing that our part is to support them to make sure that we are thinking about how do we support any work they're doing around expanding access to behavioral healthcare and helping to knit in a focus on community safety within network, and we've been really excited to be able to work with that team to do that because we agree that is a really essential issue.

It's hard. They're not easy to— I always say to them, did you grow up in Central Park West? What the hell's with you? Because they are so intractable. And so I don't know the answer, but I can say everybody's looking to you and DSS for help. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much, co-chair.

We're going to go back to Councilmember Wong for a second round of questions. Okay. Thank you, Chair. My next round of questions regarding who's going to pay and what gets cut. I read today's Political Playbook, which reports that this bill on creating this office does not specify the department's funding, and that the city faces budget deficits, big deficits, heading into the next budget process.

So my question regarding to how any expansion would get financed, like what— here's my question. What pays for any expansion beyond the existing programs? Are we going to get higher taxes or cuts to other services or savings you expect to achieve? Please answer that. Yeah. So this administration has made a commitment to the Office of Community Safety and to the expansion of the Office of Community Safety.

And as we do that expansion, we'll be working very closely with Office of Management and Budget and with City Hall to identify any necessary resources that would be needed to support that expansion. To date, the administration has invested an additional $67 million in this work. Okay, yeah. Now, I also— okay, granted. I also heard from you that you work with NYPD, and are you actually saving police office hours by working with them, or like how many net police office hours have actually been saved after accounting for backup and repeat responses?

Can you talk about that? I don't have data on exactly how many hours might be saved, but what I will say is that the work that we are doing is meant to build out a response that is effective for people with needs when what we know In New York City, you'll hear this also from across the country, including law enforcement themselves, that we have been asking law enforcement to do— to take on functions that they are not part of their purview, that they're not best positioned to do.

So bringing in behavioral health providers, community violence interrupters, victims' advocates to that work is essential for providing an effective response to the people in need. Okay. Okay. Do I have time for— yeah, one final question. You mentioned the structure of the OCS, that there's a— you report to the Deputy Mayor and supervising 5 existing offices. But what is the administrative cost that will be involved?

I'm talking about other than the programs and the frontline employees that already existed. What is the annual cost of this additional management structure of the OCS? Across— I may not be hearing your question correctly, but across OCS's budget, about 5% of OCS's budget goes to staffing. But what about the management structure that you mentioned, that you report to the deputy mayor and you have staff?

So the deputy mayor is not on my budget. All the deputy mayors are part of City Hall, so deputy mayor of community safety, like the first deputy Deputy Mayor of Health and Human Services. Those are all City Hall staff. And I report to her as other commissioners report to their deputy mayors. Okay, no, but by creating the OSC, your new management structure, how much— is that 5% of your total budget, or we're talking about something else?

Office of Community Safety, the folks who were not part of the others, that's about $2.9 million out of the entire $271 million. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Thank you so much.

Does anyone else have any other questions? Well, I have many more pages of questions, but I think we've covered enough for today. We have about 60 people signed up to testify, which we obviously want to hear from. So I think we are going to conclude this panel. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for all the work that you've been doing on these issues, and I look forward to continuing.

Rustler, do you have a second round, or are you— okay. Thank you so much. We look forward to continued conversations. Thank you so much. Good job, guys. Good job. Thank you so much, everyone. I now open the hearing for public testimony. I remind members of the public that this is a government proceeding and that the quorum I remind members of the public that this is a government proceeding and that the quorum shall be observed at all times.

As such, members of the public shall remain silent at all times. Quiet down, please. Please quiet down as you exit the room. The witness table is reserved for people who wish to testify. We're going to be— we're going to begin the public testimony. Everyone, if you want to have a conversation, please do it in the rotunda. The witness table is reserved for people who wish to testify.

No video recording or photography is allowed from the witness table. Further, members of the public may not present audio or video recordings as testimony but may submit transcripts of such recordings to the sergeant-at-arms for inclusion in the hearing record. For in-person panelists, please come to the table once your name has been called. Now I'll call our first panel.

Rama Issa-Ibrahim from the Center for Anti-Violence Education and Matt Abrams-Gerber. You may, uh, Come to the front. All right, so the first panel is going to be Rama Isa, Matt Abrams Gerber, and also Divine. Prior, who is via Zoom. We'll start with Rama. And also, we have approximately 60 people signed up to testify, so we're going to have to limit testimony to 2 minutes.

I'm going to have to strictly enforce that rule. If we go over 2 minutes, obviously we'll be here till tomorrow, and some members might not have the opportunity to testify. So we're just going to have to strictly enforce the 2-minute rule just to make sure that every— all the 60 members who have signed up— Thank you. Get the opportunity to testify.

So you may begin when you're ready.

I didn't think I would go first. Okay, hi everyone, I'm Rama Issa Ibrahim. I'm the executive director of the Center for Anti-Violence Education, and I'm here today to testify alongside my peers and colleagues of the New York City Against Hate Coalition. CAE was founded 52 years ago by a visionary collective of queer women. They work tirelessly to equip women and femmes, the LGBT+ community, and survivors of violence with tools for self-defense and self-empowerment.

Today, we employ a comprehensive strategy that includes self-defense workshops, community safety education, and youth leadership development. Before the pandemic, alongside AVP, A&Y, AF, JFRED, Make the Road, Brooklyn Movement Center, and others, we advocated for City Council funding to expand our hate violence prevention work as a coalition. A few years later, the coalition helped establish the Office of Prevention for Hate Crimes.

Our collective organizing is proof of what we can bring to New Yorkers. I share all of this to say that organizations sitting up here with me today have hundreds of years of experience combined in addressing safety in New York City. Because we see community safety as a framework for healthy and thriving communities, A framework that centers connection, care, and deep investments for those most impacted by unjust systems.

A framework that pushes us to rely less on policing and law enforcement and lean on community, each other, and our neighbors for safety structures and networks of care. As a collective, we have taught and supported the design and implementation of countless alternatives to punitive and carceral systems. CAE has designed and implemented some of the largest efforts on de-escalation and safety trainings and bystander intervention trainings in the city.

These trainings have strengthened the capacity of everyday New Yorkers to show up for each other safely and prepare for the unique and ever-changing situations that we come across in the city. It builds a network of care and skills simultaneously, and that's why we ask that the city invest more dollars in this education. Ultimately, building community safety is about connection, love, care, tending to each other and our neighbors.

It's about doing a little bit more every day so that eventually becomes something that we all embody. Thank you. Over the course of this mayoral administration, we have a real opportunity to co-create a community-based safety infrastructure in New York City that is rooted in prevention, care, and connection. Everyone in New York City deserves to be safe. Government and community can coordinate holistic approaches that support the health and well-being of all our people.

Absolutely. I urge the City Council to work hand in hand with the current administration and make intentional efforts to include community-based organizations and grassroots organizations like all of us here today in the design and implementation of the Department of Community Safety. Thank you. The Office of Community Safety— Please conclude. Sorry, we're over time. It's just one sentence.

The Office of Community Safety is a first step to improving the way we address and prevent violence across the city. Much more must be done to ensure that coordination between government and community is deliberate and consistent. Thank you. Community buy-in is a vital part of design and implementation. Thank you so much. Sorry, we're gonna have to— Thank you so much.

Thank you.

All right, you may begin when you're ready. Good afternoon. Thank you, Chairs Feliz and Brewer, and committee members. My name is Matt Abrams Gerber. I'm the Vice President of the Center for Shared Society at the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, the primary community relations organization of the New York Jewish community. Year after year, antisemitism accounts for the largest share of reported hate crimes in New York City.

For too many Jewish New Yorkers, fear is part of daily life. That is unacceptable. And we are not alone. Muslim, Sikh, Arab, Asian, Black, Hispanic, and LGBTQIA+ New Yorkers feel it too. Our safety is bound together, and hate against one of us is hate against all of us. That is why JCRC is proud to have been an original anchor of Partners Against the Hate.

Thank you to City Council for creating PATH. And to the mayor for doubling its funding for the Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes. Because JCRC does not accept city funding, we are grateful to receive this grant through the 67th Precinct Clergy Council. With it, we support community, community-based organizations who tend to victims of antisemitic attacks in Brooklyn, Queens, and across the city, provide educational and arts initiatives for young people and adults, and build partnerships between the Jewish community, the NYPD, and neighbors of every background.

Our trademark program, the Fellowships Against Hate, demonstrates what this investment makes possible. It began in Brooklyn 5 years ago and is now in all 5 boroughs. Leaders from different communities build real relationships across cultures. They learn how bias and hate operate, and they gain skills in conflict resolution and coalition building to address it. With hundreds of fellows and alumni, we have an ever-expanding force for peace.

Thank you for investing in JCRC and all of the PATH anchors to address the immediate needs of responding to hate in our communities, as well as the long-term preventative work of building sustainable relationships that will enable us to eradicate hate once and for all, for that is the only path forward. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Next, we'll hear from Divine Pryor, who's joining us via Zoom. You may begin when you're ready. Yes, good afternoon. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Good afternoon, members of the Committee on Public Safety and Governmental Operations. Thank you for providing this opportunity for me to speak. My name is Dr. Devine Pryor. I am the president and chief executive officer of the People's Police Academy.

The People's Police Academy is located within the City University of New York at the historic Medgar Evers College in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Who are we? We are a platform. We are an institution. We're an organization, but we're a problem-solving enterprise. For the past 10 years, we've developed a very strong, close working relationship with the law enforcement community and now act as a bridge between the community and law enforcement.

We pride ourselves in our 3-day information exchange experience where we bring people who will otherwise never share the same space and never be in the same room together to problem solve, where they can dialogue, where they can interact with each other, they can get to know each other in a different way. And our testimony, by the way, has been submitted in writing.

So what I'm saying to you is a deviation from the testimony because you already have that. But what we wanted you to know that we have built Over the last 5 years out of the 10 years we've been in operation, a Public Safety Council, which consists of members of law enforcement on all 3 levels, the federal, state, and city level, as well as nonprofit organizations that actually provide these services to individuals who've been justice impacted.

And our testimony today was simply to introduce to the Office of Community Safety and to members of the City Council who are not aware of us that we are here. And much of what the new office wants to do, We've begun a lot of that work and we'd like to be supportive and helpful in any way that we can.

So this was really an introductory testimony to anyone who needs to understand that there is such a platform in existence and that we're not only known citywide, but we're also known statewide and nationally. We've been called on by folks as far away as Birmingham, Alabama to come out and use our 3-day intervention to show them how to problem solve.

We have assembled a team of experts around the City of New York who have skills. Please conclude. So we want to thank you for this opportunity. We are again the People's Police Academy, and we're at the City University of New York at Meg Evans College. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much. All right, thank you all.

Thank you all for testifying. We're going to call the next panel. So we have 5 chairs, so I'll call the first 5. Aaliyah Tejada. Juan Ramos, Zara Nazir, Hussein Yatabari, and Lena Allen. It seems like one person might have left, so I'll call the next one. Delilah Seligman. Passed. All right. So we could— we'll start from left to right.

You may begin when you're ready. And again, we're going to have to strictly enforce the 2-minute rule given that we have a lot of people signed up. Thank you so much. You may begin when you're ready. Oh, thank you. Uh, good afternoon, Chair Brewer, Chair Feliz, and members of the GovOps and Safety Committee. My name is Zahra Nasser.

I'm the executive director of the People's Plan, which is a coalition of more than 100 grassroots organizations and unions that fight for a just city budget every year. Community safety runs through every issue we organize on. Our members see it in schools where police are still the default responders to children in emotional crisis, on the street where sweeps move people around and criminalize them instead of housing them, in homes where people and families hesitate to call 911 for a loved one in crisis, and in neighborhoods facing gun and hate violence where community-based prevention reaches people that policing cannot and does not.

We believe safety comes from shifting resources and power away from criminalization and into housing, schools, and care. That is why funding the Office of Community Safety and holding the NYPD funding flat were top priorities in our FY27 People's Budget campaign. OCS finally gives that work a home in city government, but today it only exists by executive order.

We do want this department to be permanent with its own budget and staff. The city should make non-police response the default for mental health crisis calls citywide and 24/7, with infrastructure built up for voluntary care and housing so people have somewhere to go and stay besides the ER. The city should also extend that approach to young people, schools, gun and hate violence, and pay its workers and providers fairly and on time.

We also support the goal of Intro 403 and thank Councilmember Ressler for bringing this forward, but recommend amendments, which is to keep the bill focused on establishing the department in law and removing provisions on specific prescriptions around borough offices, safety patrols, etc., and how, if at all, the department works on law enforcement. Those decisions should come out of a planning process with community partners, and we really look forward to working with all of you to fund this office, scale it, and make it permanent.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, Chairs Police and Brewer and members of the committee. This morning I actually sat with the father of Javits Frimpong in the South Bronx, the 15-year-old Councilmember Riley and Stevens named today. Javits is a recent immigrant from Ghana, should have been in class today at Dream Yard Prep. Unfortunately, his father is planning his funeral and asking how this could have been prevented.

My name is Hussein Yatabari. I'm the executive director of Muslim Community Network, serving about 8,000 New Yorkers a year for 23 years. I grew up in the South Bronx. As a Black New Yorker, I know families do not live in crime statistics. They live with the loss. As a Muslim New Yorker, I watch Islamophobia become normalized, at times even from those in power.

In January, at the city's own Muslim Heritage Month celebration, I had to use my own body to shield community members from agitators. Putting MCN's de-escalation training into practice. Prevention is safety, and it only works in partnership with community. MCN partners with OPHT. We've trained city agencies and community members on Islamophobia. We're launching a Bronx Family Violence Prevention Program with NGBV next year, but none of it works without language access.

When people cannot be understood, they are not counted. And we see that happen oftentimes across different spaces in New York City. Language access must be built into every layer of the cake and delivered by organizations our neighbors already trust. Gun violence, hate, gender-based violence, and mental health crises reach the same families. Safety must live in one place.

MCN supports a Department of Community Safety and the intro, but the bill needs stronger community input and clarity on which functions move from the NYPD, um, into this new Department of Community Safety. We also want to make sure it's written into law so no future administration can undo it. Police arrive after the harm is done, and our communities carry a history of police brutality and surveillance.

No community should face a hierarchy of harm. Black, brown, Asian, immigrant, and Muslim New Yorkers each deserve a city that names them in its plan and does not leave them out of it. speaks their language, and brings them into the buildings— into building this work. Thank you.

Good afternoon, Chairs Feliz and Brewer, and members of the committee. My name is Aaliyah Tejeda. I'm the Senior Program Manager of Community Initiatives at the RISE Project, an initiative at the Center for Justice Innovation, and I'm a native Queens girl. The center strongly supports the Office of Community Safety and its vision for a more comprehensive community-centered approach to public safety.

We have been particularly encouraged by the leadership of Commissioner Delaney Brumsey and Deputy Mayor Francois. The creation of OCS presents an opportunity to bring together traditionally siloed areas of violence prevention, and this reflects our work at the RISE Project. RISE works at the intersection of community violence and DV and GBV, developing culturally responsive approaches to preventing harm.

Through initiatives such as Barbershop Talks, Men Rising, Youth on the Rise, we engage community members in conversations about healthy relationships, accountability, and conflict resolution. Our partnership with the Mayor's Office to End Domestic Violence— Domestic and Gender-Based Violence developed Respect First and Respect and Responsibility, 2 community interventions uplifting a different form of violence prevention through transformative and restorative practice.

We applaud the administration's new investment in NGBV, particularly in its support for culturally specific organizations, and encourage continued investment in its capacity to support our communities and partners. Finally, we support the goal of making OCS a permanent Department of Community Safety and appreciate Councilmember Rustler's leadership on Intro 403. This will help ensure that the department builds upon existing successes, preserves effective programming, and develops a shared definition of safety with clear outcomes and accountability.

Thank you for the opportunity to testify today. Good afternoon. Thank you, chairs and members of the committee, for the opportunity to testify. My name is Lena Allen. I'm Policy and Advocacy Manager at Fountain House, and I'm here to speak about the transformative potential of placing community at the center of our continuum of care. Fountain House pioneered the clubhouse model nearly 80 years ago right here in New York City.

It's grounded in the belief that community itself is therapy, and the model brings members and staff together to work side by side in daily operations. It works to address often overlooked challenges of serious mental illness, including loneliness, social isolation, and diminished self-esteem. Through the work-ordered day, members build confidence, agency, and purpose, empowering them to reconnect with the broader community.

Our approach creates a stickiness to jobs, to school, to housing, and it keeps people out of institutional revolving doors and out of crisis. One key indicator of this impact is a 21% reduction in Medicaid costs among Fountain House members compared to the highest-need population of people with SMI. The clubhouse model complements and enhances other services and should be accessible to all.

But beyond going— the ongoing expansion of clubhouses, the practice of building intentional community should be embedded across municipal care systems and programs to promote safety and health for all. We're hopeful that the city's new Office of Community Safety will advance a coordinated whole-of-community approach that brings government together with providers, advocates, and those most impacted. Even with stronger community interventions, crises do happen.

We must respond to them more effectively and prioritize non-police approaches. Our members have intimate experiences with this system, and over 100 of them shared their insights in a published report a few years ago. The recommendations include needing better intra-agency coordination, a strong and dignified workforce, greater public awareness of services and data to support improvements. Reform has to go beyond acute crisis and connect people to services, benefits, and community supports in the long term.

We strongly support the Commissioner and Council's commitment to transparent reporting and find peers indispensable in this program, and I'll submit written testimony with the rest. Thank you.

All righty. All right. Good afternoon, committee members. My name is Delilah Seligman, and I am the manager of training and outreach for the New York City Anti-Violence Project. AVP is proud to serve LGBTQ+ New Yorkers through our crisis hotline program, a trauma-informed, anti-oppressive, and culturally responsive community safety service that offers on-call crisis counseling from trained professionals and volunteers, and connects survivors of hate violence to vital mental health and legal counseling services.

Recently, due to challenges in the funding landscape, AVP has had to switch to solely operating during business hours, But with the historic $26 million increase in OPHC funding, AVP is committed to restoring our hotline services back to scale in the coming months. In FY26, AVP was able to serve more than 3,000 clients through our crisis hotline, and we were able to train over 500 professionals and community members through our training and technical assistance program, which offers customized trainings to LGBT New Yorkers and those who serve them.

Through this vital funding provided by OCS and OPHC, we will be able to make continue making that level of impact. Services like AVP's crisis hotline and training program are more vital than ever. The Williams Institute of UCLA reports an increase of 184 to 527 anti-transgender hate crimes between 2018 and 2024. Whether it's being attacked on the street, unjustly fired from a job, or navigating a domestic violence emergency, LGBT New Yorkers have been resilient through a tremendous amount of and uncertainty and deserve culturally responsive services that meet their needs.

As a survivor and a queer transgender woman myself, I can speak to the truth behind these statistics. When I was 18 and beginning my gender transition in the early 2010s, I know that I would have been safer had I had access to resources like AVP's crisis hotline. LGBT New Yorkers deserve to have access to resources that allow them to live in safety as their authentic selves.

AVP thanks OPHC, OCS, and Mayor Mamdani for this historic increase in funding, and we urge committee members to continue expanding funding opportunities for essential hate crime prevention across the city. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much, everyone, for your testimony.

Also, earlier I called Juan Ramos. Is Juan Ramos with us? No? Okay, so we'll call Juan later before we conclude. The next panel is going to be Andrea Ortiz, Raul Soto, Rafid, and Keziah. Hi. All right. You may begin when you're ready. We'll start from my left to my right. No worries. Good afternoon, chairs. My name is Raul Soto.

I'm the co-executive director of the YAYA Network, which is a youth organizing hub on issues impacting young people across the entire city. I'm proud to represent young people, public high school students from across the city that say today that youth can't wait for safe and supportive schools. And we deeply believe that that includes a robust Department of Community Safety that can help coordinate that and move police away— police away from schools.

For years, our youth have advocated for a vision of safety not reliant on policing of communities, especially our Black and brown students. students with disabilities, and immigrant communities. When our youth organizers conduct workshops and listening sessions in their schools, they hear time and time again wishing for an agency, a city-coordinated response to youth mental health and to meet their needs before things get dire.

I think of a time working in East Harlem before I joined the IA Network as an educator and community organizer, helping to coordinate rapid response for our young— for our young students. as part of the program that we were in, where we would help ensure that there was mental health counseling inside of their school buildings and community centers, and coordinating our efforts to curb youth violence with other organizations in the community.

We know that a community-coordinated strategy can work and will work. School safety needs to be included in the vision for a new department. Framing safety as how we can continue to police kids, protect students from each other, from the inevitable violence that they will commit on each other, has already failed as policy. Nothing tells us more than the data showing that Black students represent 52% of all police interventions in DOE public schools and 56% of the students who were handcuffed this— in the first half of this year.

Our youth have shared experiences where school administrators have used the NYPD as a policy of school discipline. So today, let me just reiterate, we want to see a Department of Community Safety that includes school safety, to coordinate youth safety responses in communities, to pass Intro 460 to eliminate the gang database and to pass the CURB Act and to prevent the NYPD from conflicting with the future vision for truly safe communities.

Good afternoon. My name is Keziah Mickel. I'm a student at Fordham University, an organizer at the Yaya Network, and a supporter of the Dignity in Schools campaign. Today I come to you as a former public school student and a firsthand witness to the injustice faced by students in underprivileged communities. I'm here today because we want Momdani's administration and City Council to expand the Office of Community Safety scope to include school safety and mental health.

This office must take action to put strategies in place to ensure safety, academic, and social success of youth. Without your help, New York City youth, especially those from marginalized communities, will continue to fall vulnerable to mental health crises and criminalization. Black girls represent roughly 15% of female public school students nationally, but make up around half of exclusionary punishments.

For girls who look like me, being perceived as innocent is a luxury. We're threats to be disarmed rather than children capable of making mistakes. When I was a freshman in high school, during lunch, a physical altercation between 2 black girls broke out. While it's completely reasonable for the adults in the room to try to break up the fight, Extreme measures were taken in the process.

Soon my classmates and I watched as a security agent body slammed a 15-year-old girl to the ground and placed her in handcuffs. I never saw that girl again, and I doubt she ever got the mental health resources or counseling that she deserved. She was one of many Black girls who the system simply disappears. Now that I am in a place to advocate for myself and other marginalized kids, I ask that the city and the Office of Community Safety invest in restorative justice and mental health services in public schools, and for a commitment to work collaboratively to transition schools away from policing and surveillance.

Punitive punishments reinforce the adultification of marginalized youth and halt them from growing past their mistakes. If this negligence continues, Black and brown children will continue to fall out of the public school system. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon. All right, good afternoon, members of the City Council. My name is Rafid Alarig, and I'm a current high school student at Stuyvesant and a previous middle school student at MS 180 in Co-op City and a resident of the Bronx.

I'm here as a youth organizer with Yaya Network and Dignity in Schools Campaign New York. I'm here today to urge the Committee of Public Safety to expand the Office of Community Safety to include school safety and invest in youth mental health Resources. School should be a place where young people feel safe, supported, and cared for. Unfortunately, during my time in middle school, that wasn't the case.

When I was in middle school, a friend and myself started to struggle and our grades suffered. Our assistant director then gave us a talk about our risk of failure, and instead of getting the support we needed, we saw how the teachers devoted their time to those whose grades were deemed salvageable. I was lucky enough to have a mother who was able to support and push me towards my potential.

Regrettably, my friend did not have the same support without the school providing any proactive counseling or any space to process what's going on. He tried to cope in unsafe behavior and toxic relationships. He tried to find other resources to seek comfort that failed him, and if it— and it escalated into him making a bad choice to bring a weapon to school, being met with police pulling out a pulling him out of the school, metal detectors installed the next day without anybody asking, hey, what's going on, or what do you need?

When I think about the potential of Department of Community Safety, I think about the city that could have coordinated structures to catch my friend before he fell through the cracks. Metal detectors and police officers do not solve why students feel unsafe or why they act out. They just create an atmosphere of fear and criminalization. We want the city to fully fund, fully fund protection, protections for young people that offer support for students before they make unsafe choices, like restorative justice and mental health.

We cannot forget that many students are also feeling unsafe because our families are under attack. All school staff should receive regular explicit instructions on what to do if immigration officers were to come. What we need is an Office of Community Safety that includes school safety Pass Intro 460 to eliminate— Please conclude. NYPD's gang database and permanently delete its data to protect young people from being criminalized.

Thank you.

Hello, I'm Andrea with the Dignity in Schools Campaign of New York. Young people in public schools should feel safe to learn, build community, and develop leadership skills. Unfortunately, New York City youth are increasingly struggling with depression, anxiety, and isolation violent immigrant enforcement, and NYPD criminalization. Yet our elected and educational leaders continue to invest in police and surveillance instead of supportive staff, restorative justice, immigrant protections, and mental health access.

Black, immigrant, trans, and gender-nonconforming youth and students with disabilities are disproportionately affected by policing and surveillance. During the first half of the 2025-2026 school year, Black students represented 52% of all police interventions and 56% of all students forced into metal handcuffs despite making up less than 20% of the student population. The youngest students targeted were Black children as young as 4 years old, targeted by the NYPD for child-in-crisis incidences.

During this time period, metal handcuffs were used on children as young as 10 years old for child-in-crisis incidences. We call on the city— we call on the Office of Community Safety to coordinate with the DOE on school safety and mental health, and other anti-violence and anti-criminalization interventions for young people. That is why we support the Office of Community Safety and the effort to make it a permanent department.

Yet we want Intro 403 to be focused on establishing the department in law, and its structure and programs should be designed in consultation with community partners, providers, labor unions, workers, and the administration and council. We do not endorse the current bill, which is too prescriptive in its language. We are calling on the New York City Council to ensure that DCS can work collaboratively with community and the DOE to design a process for schools interested in transitioning school safety and culture away from policing and surveillance into supportive staff and services, collaboratively plan for a 3 to 5 year districtwide police and ICE-free schools transition, and begin hiring community-based civilian school staff to welcome students as they enter schools and de-escalate move money away from policing and surveillance, including ceasing all NYPD recruitment and hiring and training of school police, and expand school-based restorative justice and mental health access, including investing $80 million in hiring school climate coordinators in 500 schools.

Thank you. Thank you so much. Love that last sentence. Thank you. Thank you so much, everyone, for your testimony. Thank you for coming to City Hall. Next, we're going to hear from Sarah Robinson— I don't know if that's an E— Eamon Gad, Eva Gray, and Jenna Sherma. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much. You may begin when you're ready.

Please turn your microphone on. My name is Sarah Robinson. I've been a city resident for the past 17 years, and I'm an engaged community member of Brooklyn and parent. I've also worked with Riseborough Community Partnership for the past decade and currently serve as director of the Brooklyn Way, a community coalition working with youth and young adults. We're members of the Brownsville Safety Alliance and supporters of Dignity in Schools and the Gangs Coalition.

I'm here today to urge the administration and OCS to work with us in community to expand their scope and mission to include school safety policies and anti-criminalization interventions. From our local surveying carried out last year, we found that youth and young adults were 3 times more likely to drink alcohol and 4 times more likely to use cannabis if they were impacted by criminalisation.

Pair this with reported statistics from NYPD's 4th quarter of last year that shows in top 5 precincts in Brooklyn with most stops, officers engaged with 2,072 youth— that's the equivalent of 9th, 10th, and half of 11th grade of students currently enrolled at Stuyvesant— with 12% of those under the age of 13. That's about 249 kids, or 22.5 11-a-side soccer teams. in 3 months.

In their own words, our youth also describe substance use as a way of coping with the stress and trauma tied to systems contact. I'm in strong support of a permanent department as designated by law and are encouraged to know that those in the office have extensive experience with and have seen the transformative impact of restorative practice approaches to relationship building, community engagement, and safety.

It truly takes a village, and our youth deserve safety policies that not only include them but value and see them as experts of their own experiences. I call on the administration to divest from the policing and surveillance, like quality of life enforcement and the gangs database, that continues to disproportionately impact Black, Indigenous, and youth of the global majority, and demand that the office reinvest that money in expanding access to affirming and culturally relevant mental health supports, restorative and transformative school and community practices, and higher pay for non-clinical staff.

I thank you all for your time, engagement, and care of our city. and urge you to ensure that community safety is a policy priority for New Yorkers of all ages. Good afternoon, Chair Feliz, Chair Brewer, and members of the committees. My name is Iman, and I'm the policy and advocacy manager at Girls for Gender Equity. We're an organization that works intergenerally— intergenerationally through a Black feminist lens to center the leadership of Black girls and gender-expansive youth of color through advocacy, programming, and narrative shift.

I'm testifying today on behalf of GGE and the Dignity in Schools Coalition to urge the Office of Community Safety to expand their scope and mission to address youth safety and the youth mental health crisis by prioritizing healing-centered community safety initiatives, and to underline the need for gender-based violence to be a priority under the Office of Community Safety.

Currently, the policing and surveillance infrastructure that students are subjected to in their schools stands at a costly $400 million. This is a system that disproportionately targets BIPOC and immigrant, trans, and gender nonconforming youth, and students with disabilities. Data collected through the School Safety Act from 2016 to 2023 and analyzed by the New York City Council's data team found that relative to the percentage that Black students make up of the population in New York City schools, they are disproportionately more likely to receive any kind of disciplinary intervention, as well as disproportionately more likely to be arrested and restrained in general.

This pattern was unfortunately stronger among students who were 10 and under. Alongside the data, youth in our programs often speak about the lack of safety they feel in their schools and the distrust they have in the current safety infrastructures to keep them safe. In order to make communities and schools safe for all young people, we call on the city to approach safety through healing-centered approaches.

This looks like fully funding and expanding restorative justice practices to all schools and hiring school climate coordinators, expanding mental health access, protecting immigrant students, and expanding the network of supportive staff in schools. Youth also need seats at the table to weigh in on the policies that impact them. Providing young people with the resources they need and allowing them to grow in communities and schools they trust is the foundation of community safety, and a crucial step in ending the criminalization and pushout of marginalized youth from our schools.

We'll submit the rest of the testimony in written, and I'll pass it on.

Oh no, okay. Good afternoon. I'm a special education teacher in Flatbush who sees firsthand that youth safety needs to be prioritized by the city in a coordinated way. We agree that we need a Department of Community Safety and ask that the city expand this mission to include youth and school safety. Students spend the vast majority of time in schools, and this is where we need to begin with their social-emotional development, and this is where we can best meet their needs.

Schools need social workers, counselors, more teachers, more caring staff, and supports—not police and surveillance. I've seen in my own students with disabilities get into altercations with school safety officers in our building. For example, I'm a case manager for a student who has a learning disability and receives. Counseling services for emotional support and arguably has emotional and academic needs beyond the scope of my school.

Last week, an incident at the metal detector escalated, causing him to lash out in a defensive way. Now he's in— he's suspended from school and will face a suspension hearing, and his education is disrupted when he's a senior and reads at a first-grade level. This student is not violent or dangerous in any way but has emotional needs that can't be met by the school and needs to be met by trained professionals who understand his background instead of assuming he's a criminal and with dangerous intentions.

So I stand in solidarity with Dignity in Schools campaigning in New York and MORE at U of T calling for restorative justice, mental health access, and police-free schools. Thank you. Hi, thank you for having me. My name is Jenna Sharma. I'm the co-founder of LearnMoBo, which is a sex education organization based in in New York City and a supporter of Dignity in Schools campaign.

I'm here because we want the Mamdani administration and City Council to expand the Office of Community Safety's mission to include youth and school safety, including sexual and gender-based violence prevention. My team works with youth organizations and schools across the city, including physical education and health teachers who teach sex ed in New York City public schools. They tell us about students in their hallways engaging in unhealthy behaviors, often exacerbated by what their hyper- generation has come to normalize.

Students track each other's every move, they share passwords, and they give each other unrestricted access to their phones. This past summer, our intern conducted research with other young people and found that they often understand consent as a way to protect themselves— what if someone does this to me?— but they rarely ask, what if I'm the one causing harm?

The research highlighted just how little young people have been equipped to understand their own role in perpetrating harm. What we are living through right now is a crisis, a crisis of empathy, of bodily autonomy, of boundaries. Our kids turn to the internet to fill in the gaps of their own bodies and relationships, risking exposure to narratives driven by people who profit from their insecurity and confusion, building entire cultures around the act of hating one another.

Even with some requirements to teach the basics of consent, teachers have told us that their own capacity and the materials available to them limit their ability to cover these topics thoroughly. We work with young people, and they know they need support. We work with teachers, and they know they need support. Overpolicing schools is reactive, not preventative. Criminalizing young people doesn't stop the cycle of harm, but better education can help prevent it before it starts.

We're calling on the City Council to expand the Office of Community Safety mission to include youth sexual and gender-based violence prevention, fund community-based consent, empathy, and healthy relationships education in schools, schools and youth programs taught by trained civilian educators, not police, and move money from school policing and surveillance into restorative justice. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for your testimony.

Next, we'll hear from, uh, Young from the Parent Action Committee, Josiah Gilbert, Stephanie Frias, Marnie Ponce, and Esperanza Vasquez. Councilmember Felice, if it's okay with you, I'll have Esperanza— is going to testify in Spanish, and I can read her testimony in English. Yeah, that's fine. Yeah. Also, sorry, I'm having trouble reading one. Chauncey? Right here. Okay. So we're missing one person I called.

Do we have Josiah Gilbert? Stephanie Frias? Marnie Ponce? All right. So, and then Esperanza. Okay. So Marnie isn't with us. All right, uh, yeah, you may begin when you're ready. We'll start from left to right, as always, as we've been.

Good afternoon, and thank you, Chair Felice, and everyone else on the committee. My name is Stephanie Frias. I'm here as a representative from the Grassroots Association for Neighborhood Groups and Solutions, also known as the GANGS Coalition. We are a coalition supported by more than 60 New York City community-based organizations advocates, legal professionals, and directly impacted New Yorkers calling for an end to police surveillance of Black and Latino communities and the racially discriminatory nature of gang policing.

The Gangs Coalition calls on the City Council and the Mamdani administration to abolish the NYPD criminal group database, end racially discriminatory gang surveillance, strengthen and sustain investments in community-led violence prevention, and develop a concrete transition towards police-free schools. We must stop investing in systems that stigmatize and criminalize our communities and start investing in people and resources that make our communities safer.

Labeling, surveilling, and harassing young people of color, many of whom have never been convicted of a crime, is at direct odds with the Office of Community Safety's mission of creating safer communities and addressing the root causes of violence. The racial disparities are undeniable. The Department of Investigation's Office of the Inspector General found that Black and Hispanic New Yorkers accounted for 99% of individuals in the criminal group database.

These numbers reflect a longstanding approach to public safety that treats Black and brown communities as threats to be monitored and controlled, rather than communities deserving of investment and care. Our young people should not have to live under constant surveillance or fear that their relationships, neighborhoods, clothing, or socioeconomic circumstances will be used to label them as criminals. Intro 460 is supported by a majority of this council and should immediately be held for a hearing.

We reject the idea that expanding surveillance and criminalization is the only way to keep our communities safe. New York City must invest in the conditions that allow our communities to thrive, including sustainable housing, quality education, and employment opportunities. Public safety must mean that people have the resources, relationships, and opportunities they need to live dignified lives. We cannot claim to prioritize community safety while continuing to surveil young people in their neighborhoods criminalize them in their schools, and underfund the very programs that help them thrive.

Thank you. Good afternoon, chairs and members of the committee. My name is Josiah Gilbert. I serve as a client and community engagement manager for the Legal Aid Society's Juvenile Rights Practice. Through my work, I engage with young people from across our communities, including those impacted by the child welfare and juvenile justice systems. I appreciate the council's consideration of Introduction 403.

But I want to emphasize that creating another department alone will not make our community safer. What matters is whether we're willing to invest in the people and programs already doing the work. Our city's CMS sites are a prime example. Every day, credible messengers and community-based organizations are doing the frontline elbow grease work of building trust, mediating conflicts, and intervening before violence occurs.

I saw the impact of this work firsthand when CASES partnered with our team on a young man's case, providing support to his entire family. His younger brother, although not formally enrolled in the program, developed a bond with a staff member who became a trusted mentor. At the time, he was beginning to follow his older brother's path toward gang involvement, but through the authentic, relatable mentorship, he began focusing on school and pursuing other positive opportunities.

This is the power of community-based intervention. Its impact reaches far beyond those officially enrolled in a program. These organizations are doing the difficult work of keeping our communities safe, yet too often face funding challenges and inadequate support from the very systems that depend on their work. We cannot claim to prioritize community safety while failing to adequately support those on the front lines.

We must also ensure young people, particularly those with lived experience, have a meaningful role in developing and overseeing this department. Young people cannot continue to be the subject of conversations about community safety without having a meaningful seat at the table. Ultimately, if we're serious about preventing violence, we must move beyond responding to crisis and invest in the relationships, opportunities, and community-based programs programs that prevent them in the first place.

Thank you. Good afternoon, Chair Felice. Turn your mic on, please. Sorry, just used to this. Sorry, really don't need a mic, but it's okay. Good afternoon, Chair Felice, Chair Brewer, and members of the committee. My name is Chauncey Young. I'm a parent and Highbridge resident in the borough of the Bronx for over 2 decades. and the director of the New Settlement Parent Action Committee.

At PAC, we organize parents and community members to fight for educational equity, supportive schools, and safety and the well-being of our children. I'm here today because true community safety starts with investing in our families, in our schools, and our youth. For too long, safety in our neighborhoods have been treated as something brought in after harm occurs. But for parents in the Bronx, real safety means prevention, care, and opportunity.

Along with Hussein and African community leaders today, I too was in the home of Thomas Frimpong, in his home while he was mourning the murder of his 15-year-old son who was just killed yesterday as he was walking to school. Only a few months ago, we stood with Jacob Kai Freydes' family after he was killed with a stray bullet only one block from our organization's office.

And we just held a community safety town hall with Councilmember Stevens just 2 weeks ago. We're looking for true change and true community safety, and that looks like, for us, holistic school safety, expanding restorative justice programs, mental health counselors, school social workers in public schools, rather than relying on measures that criminalize children. We're looking for safe passage programs and community programs funding local community-led safety passage initiatives so children can travel to and from schools without fear.

Investment in youth and families, sustainable funding for community-based organizations which provide after-school care, youth development and housing support, and parent leadership programs. We urge the Office of School Safety to prioritize non-carceral community-based solutions and to work with the community in The development of this office, which is so essential for all. Thank you so much. Buenas tardes, miembros del Consejo Municipal.

Mi nombre es Esperanza Vázquez. Soy madre de dos hijos y líder del Comité Padres en Acción del Bronx del 2001. Aunque yo nací en México, mis dos hijos nacieron en el Bronx y fueron a la escuela del Distrito Nueve. PAC es una organización dirigida por padres. Ha estado trabajando con padres de la escuela. En el Bronx desde el 96.

Para más de 10 años, PAAD ha invocado a grupos de trabajo de justicia escolar en el Bronx. Luego se unió a la coalición de escuelas centradas en sanación. El PAAD forma parte de diversas coaliciones, entre ellas la campaña para escuelas centradas en sanación, la coalición de la ciudad de Nueva York Justicia Educativa y la coalición de dignidad de las escuelas. y de la coalición de escuelas de neoyorquinos y las escuelas públicas raciales juntas.

Es una organización compuesta por familias inmigrantes negras y latinas. Respaldamos firmemente la necesidad de crear, de crear una oficina de seguridad comunitaria. Pedimos al consejo municipal de la ciudad involucre miembros de la comunidad y defensores en la creación. Como madre migrante que sé de la ciudad, debe hacer más por nuestras escuelas y familias, invertir más en la sanación y apoyo a nuestros estudiantes, en lugar de castigar y suspender y criminalizar injustamente a personas que atraviesan una crisis.

Necesitamos contratar más consejeros escolares y trabajadores sociales. Gracias. para apoyar la salud socioemocional a los estudiantes. Debemos de desplegar— debemos de dejar de desplegar policías en las escuelas y utilizar— dejar de utilizar los detectores de metales. Necesitamos implementar técnicas de justicia restaurativas y dejar de tratar a nuestros niños y familias como si fueran criminales. Necesitamos— necesitamos soluciones, no suspensiones.

La ciudad de Nueva York debe invertir más en sanación y no en daños en nuestros estudiantes. Gracias. Good afternoon. My name is Esperanza Vasquez, and I'm a mother of two children, and I have been a parent leader with the New Settlement Parent Action Committee since 2001. Although I was born in Mexico, both of my children were born in the Bronx and went to school in District Nine.

New Settlement Parent Action Committee is a parent-led organization that has been working with parents and schools in the Bronx since 1996. Over 10 years, PACS has convened the Bronx School Justice Working Group, which later joined the Healing Centered Schools Coalition. PACS is a member organization of many coalitions, including the Healing Centered Schools Campaign, the New York City Coalition for Educational Justice, the Dignity in Schools Coalition, and the New Yorkers for Racially Just Public Schools.

As an organization of immigrant, Black, and Latinx families, we strongly support the need for the Office of Community Safety, and we urge City Council and the city to involve community members and advocates to be involved in its creation. As a mother, an immigrant mother from the Bronx, I know that New York City needs to do more for our schools and our families and to invest in healing and supporting our students, not unjustly punishing, suspending, and criminalizing people in crisis.

We need to employ more school counselors and social workers to support students' social-emotional health. We need to stop deploying police in our schools and stop using metal detectors. We need to use restorative justice techniques and stop treating our children and families like criminals. We need solutions, not suspensions. New York City should invest in healing and divest from harm.

All right. Thank you so much. Thank you, everyone, for testifying today, and thank you for that translation.

Next, we're going to call Laura Areso, Roslyn Morrison, Jackie Ghazdijian, Ruth Lowenkron, and Christina Sparak. Thank you so much, everyone, for joining today. You may begin when you're ready. We'll start with Yeah. Thank you. My name is Laura Aroso. I'm a staff attorney with the Legal Aid Society's Queens trial practice. I, along with my colleague Shanaz Chowdhury, represent Jabez Chakraborty, a young man from Southeast Queens.

As public defenders, we often meet our clients on some of the worst days of their lives. We often see how one moment can change the course of someone's life, particularly when police react and respond in extremely aggressive and combative ways. For Jabez, this life-changing moment happened on January 26th of this year, when in the midst of a mental health crisis, he was shot multiple times by NYPD in his own home within 16 seconds of police entering his home.

We first met Jabez in the ICU at Jamaica Hospital. We saw the devastation and pain in the faces of his family who had spent days worrying if their son would make it out of multiple surgeries alive, only to find out that he was being criminally prosecuted and might be held at Rikers Island. When we entered the ICU room to meet Jabez, we had to pass a uniformed NYPD officer guarding his doorway.

Although Jabez was critically injured at that time, with his stomach open and tubes and drains keeping him alive, he was shackled to his hospital bed. To see someone shackled in that fragile condition was a level of cruelty that I don't think I've ever experienced. For days— 4 days after he was shot, while Jabez was still in the surgical ICU fighting for his life, the Queens District Attorney's Office filed charges against him by way of secret indictment, charging him with a violent felony offense that carries mandatory state prison time.

The officer who shot and almost killed Jabez was never charged. On the day of the arraignment on the criminal charges, Jabez appeared virtually from his hospital bed, still in the ICU. The Queens District Attorney's Office asked a judge to remand him, meaning hold him at Rikers Island without bail. Jabez could be seen on the screen crying from his hospital bed while the prosecutor said that we should not forget that the officer who shot Jabez was the real victim.

Thank you. Jabbar has been dehumanized at every— we did submit our written testimony. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Good afternoon. My name is Jackie Guzdigian, and I am Senior Supervising Policy Counsel with Brooklyn Defender Services. I want to thank the council, Chair Felice, Chair Brewer, for holding this critical hearing. New Yorkers of all ages want to feel safe, And while some have called for increased policing to address the perception of safety in the city, the people we represent often report that the constant presence of NYPD in their neighborhoods has contributed to why they feel unsafe.

Their movements and relationships in the community and on social media are surveilled. They are stopped and frisked outside their homes, required to walk through metal detectors in their schools, and are confronted by armed NYPD officers who distrust them simply because they are Black or Latinx and live in low-income communities. The launch of the Office of Community Safety marked an important first step toward ensuring that communities are met with care, not criminalization, and that strategies to interrupt and prevent violence meet the needs of communities.

The council has the opportunity to strengthen the programs and services that work to keep New Yorkers safe. Policing poverty stands in the way of making New York more affordable because it acts as a force of economic destabilization for low-income communities and siphons resources away from them. The city should also consider shifting resources away from policing alleged gang or crew members and toward providing the support that individuals, families, and communities need to thrive.

Specifically, we advocate for an increase in funding for community centers, high-quality and engaging programming, and organizations using the Cure Violence model. NYPD has spent more than $1 billion in military-grade surveillance resources. This mass collection of data from low-income communities of color is used to justify increased police presence in these neighborhoods and represents NYPD's technical justification for broken windows policing.

NYPD's criminal group database is a striking example of how law enforcement data collection leads to harm by systematically wrapping up more youth in the criminal legal system and separating them from from their families. This is why we support Intro 460 and are calling for the complete abolition of the criminal group database. We hope to see the Office of Community Safety contribute to a shift in resources and approaches, and we thank the council.

I appreciate the opportunity— I appreciate the opportunity to testify here today.

I am Rosalyn Morrison, senior attorney in the Community Justice Unit of the Legal Aid society. CJU was established in 2011 as part of New York City's Task Force to Combat Gun Violence to serve as a primary legal provider for the city's community violence intervention programs. I've had the honor of being a public defender for over 20 years.

While it is important to deal with the current realities, we must also build programs that form the infrastructure to future greatness. Schools provide a great opportunity to engage our youth, help them see that they have something to live for, and provide them with the tools they need to not only survive but thrive. We must also look to engage young people who have aged out of school or no longer go to school because they also need stability and support.

CJU partners with the city's CMS, system, which is a citywide network of community-based organizations to create healthier and safer communities. CMS organizations are vital to community safety and embody the wisdom that those closest to the issues will have solutions. For example, Life Camp, a CMS organization that developed a Tree of Life approach, are a— they work to prevent harm before it escalates by understanding and addressing the reasons behind behind a young person's actions.

In their Safe Corridor Program, violence interrupters accompany youth concerned for their safety to and from school. They also provide mediation and other interventions to address conflict and connect young people with support. 100 Suits and King of Kings Foundations are other CMS organizations that provide ground support to youth throughout Queens. What can the City Council do to make communities safer?

More investment in CMS organizations so that they're able to expand their work throughout the boroughs and also increase their work in schools. Just one more sentence. Schools must also receive additional investments. We must also bridge the gap to include youth who are not going to school through programs such as summer youth anti- Summer youth programs and anti-gun violence employment program.

Ultimately, the solution to community violence is in the description. Oh, thank you. We must lean into creating community, and, and a substantial part of the city's budget can fund and invest in vision and imagination to create and implement these community building programs. I'm going to be submitting a complete written submission. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Can you hear me? Oh, thank you. Dear Chair Feliz and members, City Council members, my name is Christina Sparrowick. I'm a mental health advocate and an alternative crisis response researcher at the Disability Justice Program at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest. Due to affordable housing, unaffordable housing, rising healthcare premiums, Medicaid cuts, unlivable wages, increased gun violence, worsening of climate change, and fear of global war, mental health crisis will worsen in New York City.

We are all vulnerable and seconds away of a crisis. Mental health crisis response reform is necessary to help decriminalize people with mental health conditions, reduce city liabilities, save taxpayer dollars, and more importantly, save lives. I speak from lived experience. I— the stigma that I face every day is influenced by the systems that I go through, and police officers whose training primarily focuses on crime should not be mental health crisis responders at all.

When I'm in a crisis, I'm always afraid of police, always afraid of sirens, always afraid of everything involving police. During my wellness check in 2020, police pounded on my door, unannounced, to my apartment door. I believed it was a violent intruder because I didn't know who it was. So what I immediately did was grabbed a knife in my kitchen because I was afraid of someone barging into my door.

It's COVID, people were dying, people were getting killed. I was in my home. If my door was unlocked, I would have been dead like Eleanor Bumper, Deborah Danner, Win Rosario, Kawaski Trowick, I would have been dead in my own home. This is why we don't need police responding to our homes. We need crisis response workers like EMT workers and peers with lived experience responding to wellness checks.

I could have died. Anyone could have died. What would you have done if someone was pounding on your door? As New York City and other states and municipalities throughout the country are changing crisis response to compassionate and culturally responsive care, it's important that we understand language matters. I am the one that changed the terminology from emotionally disturbed person to person experiencing an emotional crisis.

Language matters when we describe people with mental health concerns. In addition to that, I ask that we— okay, thank you. I ask that we fully fund a Department of Community Safety and also follow the outline and proposals that CCIT NYC has of using 988, not police, EMTs, and peers, culturally responsive community-based care, and have oversight committee with peers, 51% peers.

Thank you. Good afternoon. My name is Ruth Lowenkron, also with the Disability Justice Program at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest. Our office has worked on mental health justice for over 50 years, And has worked in the area of what we call transforming mental health crisis response for the last 10 years. It's a major priority for us.

We're staunch members of Correct Crisis Intervention Today and the Daniels Law Coalition. My primary testimony is devoted to INT 403, which we think is a good step in the right direction, but we have a number of qualms about it and hope to speak with Councilmember Ressler about it further. Before I say anything, though, I think it's really important to note there has been a lot of use of the word safety, a lot of use— the whole topic of the hearing is called reducing violence.

And I want to make it absolutely clear that may be appropriate for a lot of the things that were discussed today, but it is wholly inappropriate when we're talking about issues of mental health crisis and individuals with mental health diagnoses. The statistics are such that people with mental health diagnoses are no more likely to be violent than people who don't have such a diagnosis.

You would think absolutely otherwise from everything you hear, and this august body should not be perpetrating that concept that we need to be saved from people with mental disabilities. I want to point out that the way to transform mental health It can be found in Daniel's Law, S3670, A4617, and it is crucial. As some of my fellow panelists have said, we have had people dying and near death at the hands of the police and in their own homes.

Since 2015 alone, and in New York City alone, we have had 24 individuals, primarily people of color, killed at the hands of police. So we want to look towards that. It's being supported by council members. If I can have just one more minute— no, not one more minute. Quickly. Councilmember Epstein, Mayor Mamdani have supported Daniel's Law. Public Advocate is directly aligned with us.

And really critically, we don't have that piece of removing police except in the rarest circumstances in INT 403. In fact, there says there's no limitation on NYPD. There is a coordination with law enforcement. That's not the way to do it. The way to do it is to utilize peers, those with lived mental health experience. INT 403 has a much more vague sense of just having individuals who possess the requisite training and experience.

That's insufficient, inappropriate. Thank you so much. Limit police, and that's the way to go. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Thank everyone for testifying today. Next, we'll hear from Leo Ferguson, Donovan Taveras, Daphne Tamasila, Meta Rahman, and Michael Sositsky. You may begin when you're ready. We'll start from left to right. Thank you. Good afternoon, chairs and council members. My name is Leo Ferguson, and I am the scholar in residence at Jews for Racial and Economic Justice. I am testifying on behalf of our organization and our partners in the NYC Against Hate Violence Coalition in support of creating a Department of Community Safety.

JFridge wants a Department of Community Safety because we need to change how New York thinks about safety, away from policing and towards the kind of evidence-based, public health-driven solutions that are so much more effective in preventing violence and keeping New Yorkers safe. In the area that we focus on, hate violence prevention, the inability of police to address this crisis is reflected in the terrible statistics.

Hate violence has climbed even as overall crime has declined. Anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish hate crimes are up, with hate crime up 12.9% overall. The existing carceral approach inherited from prior administrations is an abject failure. This is what led JFridge and a coalition of community-based organizations representing a diverse array of New Yorkers to fight in 2019 for the creation of the Office to Prevent Hate Crimes for the Hate Violence Prevention Initiative, which funded community-based prevention for the first time, and now for the creation of a durable Department of Community Safety.

We need a partner in government to invest in and scale data-driven, evidence-based approaches to hate violence prevention, and we need the city to finally demonstrate the vision and competence to implement a single, coherent strategy for reducing violence that sets clear metrics for success and remains accountable to those metrics. The best available research shows that cooperation between groups reduces hostility and violence.

To be successful, the city's strategy should resource intergroup collaborative projects that bring neighbors together around mutual shared interests. We need to equip ordinary New Yorkers with the tools to keep themselves and their neighbors safe. De-escalation and bystander training should be scaled up and integrated into a targeted, data-driven citywide strategy. We need to give New Yorkers greater diversity of reporting channels, better coordination between agencies and community organizations, and robust access to victim services and restorative justice.

And finally, we need to replace inherently flawed NYPD reporting with statistically accurate neighborhood surveys. We are committed to partnering with OPHC and hopefully soon DCS on a new strategy for community safety that recognizes that hate violence can't be policed or punished away. Creating real safety for New Yorkers will require rigor, vision, and long-term investment. Thank you, Chairs, for the opportunity to testify.

Thank you so much. Good afternoon, Chair Felice, Chair Brewers, and members of the Public Safety and Gov Ops Committees. My name is Donovan Tavares, and I'm a community organizer at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. And on behalf of LDF, we want to thank you for the opportunity to testify on matters as important as our public safety. For decades, LDF has challenged law enforcement violence and racial discrimination against Black communities.

And through this work, we have seen that expanding policing, surveillance, and enforcement does not make our communities safer. And too often, these approaches deepen the very harms they claim to address. New York City has an opportunity to choose a different path here through the creation of the Office of Community Safety. But the Office of Community Safety cannot simply be another office on an organizational chart.

If it is going to fulfill its promise, it must be adequately resourced, and empowered to invest in the people, relationships, and institutions that communities have been telling us they had— they have needed for generations. That means sustained investment in credible messengers, violence prevention workers, community-based organizations, youth programming, and restorative justice. It means recognizing credible messengers as essential public safety professionals, providing them with living wages and meaningful workplace protections.

LDF's Thurgood Marshall Institute has found that even with enhanced compensation for community responders, the cities could save $126 million annually. It also means expanding OCS's role in school and youth safety, investing in restorative justice and mental health supports, and working toward a transition away from policing and surveillance in our schools. For too long, Black and brown communities have experienced overpolicing alongside generations of disinvestment.

We cannot continue to criminalize our communities while neglecting the resources they need to thrive. New York City should not measure public safety by how much policing it can deploy, but by whether people have what they need to learn, live, heal, and thrive. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Chair Felice and Chair Brewer, for providing the opportunity to testify. My name is Daphne Tomasila. I'm the Associate Director of Programs from the Asian American Federation. I'm testifying today as part of the NYC Against Hate Violence Coalition. For our communities, safety goes beyond policing. AAF launched the Hope Against Hate campaign in 2021 and joined the PATH initiative to expand our community safety efforts to respond to anti-Asian violence.

Through PATH, we work with organizations whose trained volunteers provide safety accompaniment maintain a protective presence in neighborhoods, and connect residents to support. In 2026 alone, through funding from OPHC, our partners distributed nearly 9,000 safety resources, trained 479 community members, hosted over 100 outreach events, and provided over 1,000 protective services. We're encouraged by the city's recent commitment to increasing OPHC funding by $26 million and doubling PATH funding to $6.4 million.

Bringing OPHC under the Office of Community Safety recognizes that hate violence prevention is part of a broader coordinated approach to keeping New Yorkers safe. Although we support establishing a new Department of Community Safety, um, before establishing, establishing, we urge the council to meaningfully engage organizations and advocates before pursuing structural changes, ensuring that the experiences and needs of communities most impacted by violence are reflected in decision-making.

Recognize and build upon the work already underway through OCS, including its coordination of violence prevention programs and increased investment in community-based safety initiatives. Sustain and expand direct funding for culturally and linguistically competent organizations that are already providing trusted non-police approaches to violence prevention, and, and ensure that increased investments reach frontline organizations, including nonprofits that have historically faced barriers to accessing city funding.

As the city considers the future of its community safety infrastructure, we must ensure that existing partnerships, investments, and progress are not overlooked. Our priority should remain on strengthening the trusted community programs New Yorkers already rely on. Thank you for your leadership and opportunity to testify. Good afternoon. My name is Mayda Rahman, and I'm testifying. testifying on behalf of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

For far too long, New York City has relied on policing and criminalization as a solution to community safety issues. This approach fails to address the underlying causes of violence and disproportionately targets Black and brown New Yorkers, entangling them with the criminal legal system. The creation of the Office of Community Safety is an important step towards a vision of public safety that prioritizes prevention and support.

Thank you. Rather than policing and penalization. The city must continue to invest in the relationships, resources, and conditions that actually keep communities safe. Credible messengers, violence interrupters, and violence prevention programs play a critical role in addressing violence and preventing crimes before they happen. These programs help build trusted community relationships that address violence, resolve conflicts, and support young people.

Unlike police, community-based interventions aim to address the underlying causes of violence, reducing the potential for future harm. Understanding that violence is not one-dimensional and can often be connected to various factors such as poverty, trauma, substance abuse, mental health crisis, and inequality, these programs can offer targeted solutions and connect community members with the resources that best meet their needs.

Research has already shown positive results from these programs, including significant reductions in gun violence. Can we have— However, the success of these programs depends on broader policy alignment across the city. Any attempts to further community safety through OCS will only be effective if coupled with efforts to curb aggressive and racist policing tactics and policies. This requires, at the least, an end to broken windows policing, passage of the CURB Act, and abolition of the NYPD criminal group database.

These tactics, which allow the NYPD to surveil, harass, and criminalize everyday New Yorkers, do nothing to enhance community safety and in fact make communities less safe. The NYCLU thanks the committee for the opportunity to provide testimony and for recognizing the need for non-police solutions to violence and community safety issues. Thank you.

Good afternoon. I'm Michael Sositsky with the NYCLU. I'll focus my comments more specifically on Intro 403. While we share the goals of both the administration and the sponsor in establishing non-carceral approaches to meeting the needs of New Yorkers, we urge the council to take the time necessary to get the structure and the powers of this new department right as it considers the legislation.

For a DCS to succeed, it must not merely replicate past failed outreach efforts that have primarily functioned only to remove already vulnerable and marginalized populations from public view without providing them with the supports that they need. To that end, we have substantial reservations about any legislative proposal that would establish new patrol units with than a proposed DCS, which regardless of how well-intended, run the risk of being transformed into a new enforcement arm for so-called quality of life issues.

A DCS that is seen as perpetuating broken window style tactics, just with different enforcers, will quickly lose credibility. And along those lines, it's essential that the statutory authority of a new DCS very clearly articulate where DCS is assuming primary responsibility when intersecting with other city agencies including and especially the NYPD. In her testimony before the council's executive budget hearing earlier this year, Commissioner Tisch indicated that the NYPD had had no discussions about, and apparently no intention of, transferring any responsibilities from the NYPD to OCS.

The success or failure of the current OCS and any future DCS will depend on whether either can actually effectuate the removal of crisis response from the NYPD. Thank you. An agency that was never designed for, and as it has demonstrated time and time again, will never be appropriate for such a role. Without a clear and explicit transfer of specific responsibilities away from the NYPD, which is something that is currently missing from Intro 403, DCS will be unable to fulfill its goal of actually providing a real and better alternative to our current approach.

Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you all for testifying today. Next, we're going to call Rabbi Jason Kliyan via Zoom. Also Ray Switlick, Mariama Bach, Bayadir Muhammad Osman, and Nahian from the Muslim Community Network. Excuse me, did a lot of these people pre-register? Because I was They pre-registered. Get my testimony finished. My name's Crystal Glover. Yeah, everyone I'm seeing testifying, they just came in all late and everything.

I have to get out of here. Yeah, everyone who's testifying, they registered. Um, so if you haven't already, you need to speak with them. Crystal G is what's on the paper. All right, so you should be on the list. Yeah, but a lot of these people testified, they just walked in all late and was getting here. I've been here since 1.

I've been here since 1 too. My other is peeing. She's cupping. She had to pup, but she's literally here. Okay, so you could start and then she could testify when they get here. Okay. Hi everyone, my name is Nahyan and I'm a— You're good. Yeah, yeah.

I'm a program manager at Muslim Community Network and today we are here in support of the Department of Community Safety and making sure that we sustain its culturally specific work. At MCN, we focus on culturally specific community education. Domestic violence is an extremely taboo topic in Muslim communities, yet MCN has reached over 500 women over 23 workshops last fiscal year through our healthy relationships workshops.

So what does that tell us? Culturally competent care works. It's not that our communities don't need this information, they just don't know how to access it or have spaces to help. In many of our workshops, women finally feel comfortable to share their stories for the first time, and that sharing is the first step in getting help. When we empower women with the skills to recognize unhealthy relationships, understand their rights, and support one another, That's how we combat gender-based violence.

One woman said, the problem is that we do not know our rights. If we know our rights and are educated, most of us will not remain in unhealthy situations. By creating this department, we're finally acknowledging what communities have been saying: prevention is safety. When we rely primarily on police to respond to domestic violence, we're responding after harm has already occurred rather than trying to prevent that harm in the first place.

And for Black and brown communities that have historically experienced harm at the hands of police, calling the police is always not a safe or accessible option. That's why this office must prioritize prevention, invest in community-based services, and ensure that culturally specific care is accessible to all of New York's diverse communities. We also need to recognize that gender-based violence doesn't live in a silo.

It's a gun violence issue, a mental health issue, and a community safety issue. They're all connected, which is why bringing all of these offices together keeps our community safer. And if I had more time, I would tell you so many stories of gender-based violence cases that are tied to mental health and gun violence and all of these.

I want to leave you with just one final quote from one of the women in our program. We are passionate about this work because a woman died in our community from physical abuse. She complained for so long and she was told to be patient. She had so many health issues and ended up dying. That really woke my community up to speak about DV.

We need a part two to this workshop. Thank you. Hello, council members. I appreciate your focus and attention as we begin our Friday evening together. My name is Ray Switlick, and I am here to speak from my role as program manager of empowerment self-defense at the Center for Anti-Violence Education. As a self-defense instructor, a harrowing part of my job is listening to firsthand.

Accounts from survivors in order for them to regain a sense of agency. Some of these conversations require safety planning for folks who come to CAE after already pursuing orders of protection and other legal recourse and still seeking some sense of safety. This is common in cases of domestic violence, intimate partner violence, stalking, sexual assault, rape, and other gender-based violence.

When it comes to gender-based and sexual violence, the solution cannot be through law enforcement alone. That process exposes survivors to risk of further harm without sufficient resolution or protection for them moving forward. There must also be comprehensive community-based initiatives providing easily accessible support and education specific to the various needs of communities across the city. Through our work partnered with other community-based organizations, CAE provides these resources.

I have personally facilitated trainings on gender-based violence education to various cultural and religious groups, LGBTQIA+ communities, folks with developmental and physical disabilities, human trafficking survivors, at-risk youth, healthcare workers, employees of critical aid organizations, and many other New Yorkers. In the wake of renewed public concern about sexual assault, I've been working with our team to bring expansive consent and sexual violence response programming to high school and university students.

From the feedback I've been receiving, these resources are widely and urgently needed, yet insufficiently funded. New Yorkers deserve access to trainings, rapid response, and ongoing care within their own communities that is attuned to their unique needs. We need continued funding and city support to make that happen. OCS has been a great step in the right direction. When I teach about gender-based violence, an often overlooked aspect is isolation.

We're all safer when we come together, and I urge you to support funding of NGBV to continue to make this happen. Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity. My name is Bayat Mohammed Ismail, and I'm here representing the Muslim Community Network. Mental health is the center of the issues being discussed today, from violence to hate to gender-based violence, trauma, recovery, and healing.

We cannot address these challenges without addressing mental well-being. I want to share a personal experience with you. A young member of my family began hurting herself and those around her. We could have taken what would seem the easiest route and called the police. Instead, our family chose compassion. We connected her with counseling, social services, and medication. Today, she is doing well and healthy.

Only later did we learn that she had been sexually abused and experienced gender-based violence. What we initially saw as troubling behavior was connected to a trauma she had experienced. I want to emphasize that this burden should never fall entirely on families. We had to navigate a complicated and fragmented system to help find what she needed. A comprehensive department could have helped identify these needs earlier, coordinated the services instead of having immigrant families do that, ensuring that the families don't have to figure it all out on their own.

At Muslim Community Network, we know that trusted, culturally responsive community organizations are the first place people turn to help. They need to be recognized, supported, and adequately funded. I urge the city to protect this department because families should not have to navigate a broken system to save someone they love. The support should have been there before the crisis even happened.

Thank you.

Thank you so much. And also we have Rabbi Jason Klien via Zoom. You may begin when you're ready. Thank you. Good afternoon, chairs, council members. My name is Rabbi Jason Klein. I live on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I'm a member of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, JFREJ. I'm testifying on behalf of us and our partners in New York City Against Hate Violence Coalition in support of creating this Department of Community Safety.

Tomorrow, synagogues around the world read the Torah portion called Vayehra, a text whose through line is hospitality and the gravity of sins against hospitality. The Parsha opens with a divine imperative to welcome guests and continues with the story of a mother and her son who are experiencing homelessness in the scorching desert. The mother can barely look at her son, who is at immediate risk of dehydration, bursts into tears.

The text tells us that God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water and the boy drank. The story reassures us that even in the direst times, the resources to give life and well-being are already there. We need to only look for them. The awful news is that in New York City, the incidence of hate crimes against Jewish, Muslim, Black, trans New Yorkers has continued to rise.

Yet the good news for our city is that this is one of those dire times when the answers are right here in front of us. We have heard already today about the details of the social psychology research that has been done, the evidence here, Evidence is already here, and we are thankful for the mayor for allocating $29 million for hate crime prevention in all forms.

The well of nourishing water is available and abundant. We need a Department of Community Safety to proactively center public health for every resident and guest of the city. We know that investing in prevention is more effective than more policing. As an alumnus of Columbia University who has been somewhat ashamed of his alma mater's lack of hospitality to its own scholars, In recent years, I cannot help but imagine an alternative history in which demonstrations with the encampments led the University to call a well-staffed, thoughtful, and permanent department of— Your time has expired.

To provide campus with different kinds of opportunities for de-escalation, dialogue, resources in response to those moments rather than military display. Thank you for the opportunity to testify today. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Thank you everyone for testifying. Uh, the next panel: Preston Davis, Rana Abdel-Hanid, Dina Hadhoud, Rashe Harvey, Charlotte Manwood. Rana left. Rana left. Okay. All right. Thank you for joining us. You may begin when you're ready. Good afternoon. My name is Dina Hadhood, and I'm the director of programs at an anti-violence and wellness nonprofit called Malika. In my role, I've had the privilege of connecting with at least 100 community organizations, public schools, and places of worship across New York City to hear about their safety concerns and offer de-escalatory self-defense and bystander intervention skills to support thousands of New Yorkers in feeling more confident to move around New York City.

We've seen firsthand how different communities across the 5 boroughs have different needs. It's also clear that our most vulnerable community members, especially those who are domestic violence survivors, immigrants, and Black and brown community members, often don't feel comfortable going to the police. In 2021, the National Domestic Violence Hotline served survivors who called the police for help. 55% believed they were discriminated against by the police. 25% were threatened with arrest, and 12% were arrested despite having identified as the victim in the situation.

With this, it's no wonder that 92% of survivors who didn't call the police because they were— was because they were afraid or concerned about how the police would react. Survivors come to organizations like ours after they experience gender and hate-based violence when they don't feel comfortable involving the police or formally reporting. Due to these gaps, the city data is deeply inaccurate, but the stories and need for survivor resources are so, so real.

Our organizations on the ground are often best equipped to provide trusted care that truly meets people where they're at. That's why we're so grateful to work with OPHC under the Community Safety Office. We support increased investment and urge that the creation of a Department of Community Safety seeks deeper stakeholder input in ideation and implementation. Thank you for your time.

Good afternoon, Co-Chairs Brewer and Feliz, and members of the committee. My name is Charlotte, and I'm a working musician and constituent of Councilmember De La Rosa in Upper Manhattan. Thank you for the opportunity for members of the community to give testimony regarding safety in this city that we love. My neighborhood is Washington Heights, and if you're familiar with the area around New York Presbyterian Hospital, you'll know that there is an unusually high population of street drug users and chronically homeless folks.

Some of my homeless neighbors have been hanging out and breaking down in the 168th Street subway stop for as long as I've lived in the neighborhood, which began in early 2021. Study after study finds that poverty and untreated mental illness are the primary underlying contributors to street drug use and homelessness. Despite this research, New York's first line of, quote unquote, treatment for these issues is a police response.

The police have a disastrous and sometimes deadly track record with regard to escalating situations that involve mental health and addiction. Yet officers are still dispatched to respond first and sometimes is the only response to 911 calls involving mental health. Earlier this year, in the case of Jabbar Chakrabarti, police response to a 911 call requesting medical assistance culminated in Jabbar being shot 4 times in the chest while he was experiencing a mental health crisis.

The New York City of the 21st century has no place for police violence toward New Yorkers, which is why I'm speaking in support of establishing and fully funding a Department of Community Safety without a police co-response. My neighbors and I deserve to be able to call for medical help without fearing misunderstanding or potentially deadly escalation of the situation by responding officers.

With the creation of a Department of Community Safety, New York City has the opportunity to separate the threat of police violence from its care response. Thank you.

Good afternoon, Chairs Feliz and Brewer. My name is Rashea Harvey. I'm a resident of Forest Hills, Queens. Today I'm here in coalition with fellow New Yorkers to build community safety through prevention, not policing. Community safety is a public good. We do not make our communities safer by adding more police. We build communities— we build safety together by investing in the conditions, institutions, and relationships that prevent harm, meets people's needs, and allow our communities to thrive.

For decades, New York City has relied on policing to respond to social issues such as poverty, homelessness, and mental health crises. But these problems cannot be solved through arrests and incarceration. We need public investments that address their underlying causes. I think about the generational trauma Black New Yorkers have endured, especially Black men, at the hands of our current system not fit for humane public safety.

For example, the rapid rise in NYPD excessive force complaints costs our city real dollars. We're talking about over $100 million in settlements in 2025 alone. That real money— it's real money— should be invested in the material needs of our people, not city-funded police violence. Building safer communities requires us to rethink what public safety means and who is responsible for providing it.

By shifting resources towards prevention, care, and community-led outcomes, we can, we can create approaches to safety that meets people's needs without exposing them to further harm. As a proud New York City resident, I support the creation of a permanent and fully funded Department of Community Safety. Thank you for taking the time to listen, and I appreciate the council and administration's work on this bill.

Good afternoon, Chair Brewer and Felice. My name is Preston Davis, and I'm here speaking for a permanent Department of Community Safety. Trauma unaddressed Trauma unaddressed is a dangerous thing. For those of us who suffer from it, we recreate it in our other relationships, poisoning them, and thus continuing a vicious cycle. Our city's relationship with the police is no different.

Millions of our neighbors cannot afford to live in our city, which makes them more likely to be targeted by police policies. and have interactions with officers trained for command and force that have often ended with deadly force. Then police leadership refuses to take responsibility for the harm said violence has caused, leaving victims without justice or support, and are then forced to continue to struggle in a city they cannot afford And thus, the cycle continues.

The only way to break this cycle is to do something different. An alternative to the carceral system that claims so many lives. For our city, that alternative— that alternative is a permanent Department of Community Safety. A department that gives— that is given the authority to bring together the experts on mental health, violence prevention, and non-police crisis response.

A department given the resources to plan the city's responses to these things with community peers and organizations. A department given the mandate to lead this city's crisis response to mental health. Only then— only then will we have the chance to heal, to break these vicious cycles, and to live. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for your testimony.

Next, we'll call Brandon Lode, Sarita Daftari, Aseten Haidara, James Innes. Also, we'll call Loris Weintraub, Christine Noel, Alba Laureano. We have one more seat left. Maryam Shuai. Actually, we have one more seat left. So Julio Cesar Herrera? Not here. Lloyd Cambridge? Nicholas Pearson? There's Nick. All right, we have a full panel. Thank you so much. You could begin when you're ready.

We'll start again from left to right.

Good afternoon, Chairs Felice and Brewer and members of the committee. My name is Aisha Suhaidara. I am the senior program manager of community initiatives at Bronx Community Justice Center, an initiative of the Center for Justice Innovation. So our neighborhood safety initiatives support NeighborhoodStat, a resident-driven initiative across 30 NYCHA developments that empowers residents to identify identify safety concerns and work alongside government and community partners to develop solutions.

Whether through improvements to public spaces, youth programming, or expanded opportunities for community engagement, this work recognizes that residents themselves are essential partners in creating safer neighborhoods. Save Our Streets complements this approach through direct gun violence intervention using a public health model. SOS employs credible messengers with deep community ties to mediate conflicts, interrupt cycles of retaliation, and connect young people with support services and opportunities.

Both programs demonstrate that effective violence prevention depends on trust, sustained relationships, and the expertise of the people closest to the challenges. But these relationships cannot be built overnight, and they cannot be sustained through short-term funding alone. For too long, community-based organizations have been expected to address deeply entrenched challenges while navigating unstable funding, delayed payments, and limited resources.

So we encourage the city to treat community organizers, credible messengers, outreach workers, and other community-based practitioners as essential public safety workforce with fair compensation, professional development, and opportunities for advancement. We also urge OCS to strengthen contracting and payment processes so that providers can focus on developing services— delivering services, sorry, rather than managing financial uncertainty. We applaud the administration's initial investments and encourage the City Council to advocate for increased, sustained, and flexible funding that represents the scale of OCS's mission.

And if we believe that community-based approaches are essential to public safety, then we must fund them as essential public safety infrastructure. Thank you for the opportunity. Thank you. opportunity to testify.

Good afternoon, and thank you for the opportunity to share. My name is Christine Noel, and I represent the 67th Precinct Clergy Council, known as the God Squad, serving as an anchor organization for Partners Against Hate in partnership with the New York Office for Prevention of Hate Crimes, now under the Office of Community Safety. PAC's success is rooted in one simple truth: prevention begins with connection.

Bringing OPHC into the Office of Community Safety recognizes that hate prevention must be a broader coordinated strategy to prevent violence and protect New Yorkers. Through this initiative, we currently support 8 community-based subvendors and have seed grants to cover 10 organizations and counting representing Black and brown communities across New York City. Together in FY26, we transform funding into meaningful action and partnerships through over 370 hyperlocal events consisting of educational programs impacting over 5,000 youth and teens, community dialogue, safety know-your-rights training, cultural experiences, and community of over 5— and collected over 500 hate crime surveys.

Each sub-vendor brought their own unique expertise and cultural lens to the work, which creates a safe and trusted space for our residents. An example of programming is our Another Way Initiative, dedicated to reducing tension, addressing bias, and promoting unity in ethnically and religiously diverse neighborhoods. It seeks to foster dignity, reconciliation, and long-term peace in communities that have experienced historical and ongoing divides.

We are not simply responding to hate after harm occurs. We are proactively educating communities, creating safe spaces for dialogue, building relationships across differences, and helping all understand how to recognize and address hate and bias. PATH is more than a calendar of programs. It really is a movement of partnerships rooted in empathy and the belief that every community deserves to feel safe, seen, and respected.

Doubling PATH funding to $6.4 million is a greater investment in our capacity and will allow God Squad and other community partners doing the work— already doing the work to strengthen prevention response efforts and expand survivor support. One last thing. As we look ahead, we ask that you continue and expand investing in community-led prevention, because when we invest in communities, we really invest in a safer and more connected New York City.

Thank you. Good morning, community members and chairs. Is it on? Yeah. Good morning— good afternoon. Education is our city's first defense against hate. I testify on behalf of the Wagner College Holocaust Center. Our mission is to empower a new generation with courage, empathy, and ethical leadership to combat antisemitism, racism, and prejudice in all forms. This work relies on critical school and district attorney partnerships, vital funding from the Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes, and foundational support from our City Councilperson Majority Whip Camila Hanks.

My name is Laurie Weintraub, and as executive director, I can tell you that this investment drives community safety. We have reached over 35,000 youth of all faiths in 12 years, connecting them with survivors of the Holocaust and of the genocide in Rwanda. Students in our Youth Stand Up to Hate programs analyze how hate escalates and how interfaith alliances enable resilience and hope using peer dialogue, theater, and testimony.

We link past to present by asking, how were the survivors of the Holocaust received as New York City refugees then, and how do we treat refugees and immigrants today? We empower our youth to be upstanders, not bystanders, in the face of rising antisemitism and bigotry online and in schools. We deepen this connection by teaching students how to identify, prevent, and report contemporary hate crimes.

We bring OPHC and Commission on Human Rights representatives into our programs. We are proud that our model combining Holocaust education with cultural competency and interfaith anti-bias work was praised in President Biden's National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism. and Mayor Mondani's municipal strategy. We are eager to expand this model to all 5 boroughs. More resources mean more young minds equipped to stand up to prejudice.

Let me close with a message from Wagner College's president back in 1938 after Kristallnacht. He decried both antisemitism and racism on this night of broken glass and challenged Americans to strengthen our democracy, quote, by showing our deep feeling of sympathy for our fellow man. Our center is here for that reason, to train ethical leaders. Thank you for your partnership as we build Bridges Against Hate with support of OCS towards a safer, more empathetic New York.

Thank you.

My name is Maryam Shoaib, and I am the coalition organizer at the Arab American Association of New York. I want to thank the City Council for giving us the opportunity to share our hate crime prevention work in light of the recent investment in the Office of Community Safety. The $26 million investment in the Office of Community Safety has expanded funding for the Office of the Prevention of Hate Crimes and the Partners Against the Hate Forward initiative.

As a PATH anchor organization, the Arab American Association of New York received approximately $1 million to support our work and redistribute funding into 9 organizations. Investing directly in community-led efforts to address hate violence across New York City. We are thankful to the Office of Community Safety and the Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes for our partnership and for continuing to prioritize our community safety across New York City.

Together, we are working to address the lack of visibility of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hate crimes in NYPD statistics. The city recognizes that the only right preventative measure to growing hate in our city is to decentralize law enforcement by putting community-based organizations at the center of prevention work. This investment is going right back to community members where it belongs.

During fiscal year 2026, AAA NY and its sub-anchors engaged in almost 5,000 community members across New York City through community safety initiatives, youth education to combat Islamophobia, women's self-defense training, political education, hate and bias prevention, and language accessible advocacy. Through programming centered on combating hate violence, centering community safety, our organization's efforts strengthened community engagement, expanded access to culturally and linguistically responsible resources, and empowered diverse communities to prevent hate and discrimination and build safer, more inclusive neighborhoods across all 5 boroughs.

AAA NY continues to offer direct services to survivors of anti-Muslim hate crimes, such as one that occurred in February. when a woman in Staten— from Staten Island assaulted 3 Muslim women, among them a 12-year-old minor on her way home from school. As hate crimes against our communities continue to rise, it is community-based organizations that initiate solutions that other agencies ignore.

When community organizations lead this type of work, we know exactly what is needed to make critical information available and accessible to those who need it most. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. We are hopeful that you will continue to support the importance of community-oriented solutions to hate crimes in the city we all call home. Thank you.

My name is Nicholas Pearson. I am a working-class New Yorker from the Bronx. I am not here as a policy expert. I am here as a brother. Let me say clearly, this bill has good intentions, the Community Safety Bill, great intentions even. The idea that a city this large should have specialized responders for mental health crises, for conflict mediation, for outreach to vulnerable people, that is a good idea.

I support that idea. I want that idea to exist for my brother. I have an older brother who is schizophrenic. As I stand here speaking to you, speaking to this committee, he is wandering the streets with no guidance, no help, no help from my mother, not even from most of my family. I have gone looking for him.

I have found him in Washington Square Park, Canal Street, West Village, in the Financial District where my brother lives now, on your sidewalks. I live with one fear above most others. That one day my brother encounters the NYPD in the wrong moment with the wrong object in his hand, and he does not come home. That fear is why I am here.

That fear is why I actually read this bill. That fear is why I care whether we get this right or we get this catastrophically wrong. But I am here to draw a line. I'm going to draw it plain. Do not use this department to replace the NYPD. Do not send therapists and bureaucrats alone into the line of fire.

Do not send unarmed city workers to negotiate by themselves with a person who has lost touch with reality and who may have a weapon. That is not compassion. That is a funeral waiting to happen for the responder and for the person in crisis. I know because I have fought with my brother. I know what can make him snap in half a second.

In plain language, This bill makes it so that community safety responders operate with law enforcement coordination on any call involving a weapon. I came here today for my brother. I want you to make it so that it can save him, because I don't want it to be the reason that it kills a therapist or a professional. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you so much for your testimony. Thank you.

Thank you for joining us and for offering your perspective. Hi. Thank you so much. Next, we'll hear from Crystal G., Conrad Blackburn, and Oren Chichester. Sorry if I mispronounced the last name. And also, if anyone is here in person and would like to testify, see the sergeant table in the back. We're going to move to the Zoom testimonies after this final panel.

So we'll start with Crystal Jean. Thank you, Crystal, for joining us. You may begin when you're ready. Hello. Good evening, Chair Feliz. Sister Gail. I don't know, I'm not familiar with this brother here. Committee counsel. Are you a councilman? He's the counsel of the committee. Oh, okay, 'cause I'm not used to seeing, I haven't seen him. I was here at the AI where the, I'm sorry, it was for technology, the hearing where you had all 51 council people here.

It was, the setting was so warm. And that's what we gotta get back to. We gotta get back to that. But it's amazing because my phone is broken, broken in 1,000 pieces. My name's Crystal Glover, incidentally. I am a Black woman. The term Black woman is a term that Mamdani, Hochul, and none of them can say out they lips.

But I'm saying it right now. I'm representing the 330,000 New York City Housing Authority residents who don't know nothing about the fact that they got the power. And you got all these committees and organizations, and they talk about how we they constituents. And Gail know what I'm talking about. They know, oh, my constituents, this and that and that.

Meanwhile, in my development, but I only have 2 minutes. I found out from Ressler, is his name Lincoln Ressler? Councilman Lincoln Ressler. I just happened to be on Facebook last night and I saw his commercial, and this is getting ready to run up, but can you let me finish? His commercial mentioned this hearing. You could take another minute.

That's how I found out about this hearing, from Facebook wrestler's commercial. And I'm going to do my work because I'm a great person. I was a TA president for Washington Houses, and it's because of me that Bloomberg's infill was canceled because we used the urban justice and we used $4,000 of our tenant participation activity funds that HUD gives us, and we got a lawyer, and her name is Afisa Mensahm, who is a commissioner for the mayor's office.

And we talking 2012. Now, when I hear words like disenfranchised, marginally, um, socially economically deprived, Only one person up here today said low income instead of calling us marginalized and socially economically deprived. She said low income is what's going on. And I'm going to do my work because I forgot to mention, Rustler said in his commercial, oh, because we got to stop calling the police for everything that we need.

Newsflash, we don't call the cops for everything. If people knew in their developments and in these streets, because I'm a New Yorker born and bred, if we knew all these lanes we can go in, like the public advocate who I contacted to help me, if we knew all the lanes we have— Please continue your testimony. Because politicians, city council people, and cops and everybody stay in their lane.

So if I'm trying to get help for this, ain't nobody gonna help me because I gotta know what lane I need to go to. I'm going to help my black people. Everybody sat up here and talked about all the black people and the gays and the lesbians and this and that. Uh, please conclude your testimony. Okay, I'm tired of them putting us in them categories.

Black people, we, we made this country and we invented damn near everything you can think of, and we deserve respect. And when the mayor and Hochul and all them can't even say out they mouth— I don't care how many black babies they kiss, Thank you so much. They can't even say the word Black people. And on that note, thank you very much.

I have a lot more than I can say. Thank you. Because once Black people realize— and you need to let me say this— you see the audience out here? You didn't see a lot of Black folks out here. You didn't see a lot of Black folks out here. Thank you. Thank you so much for your testimony. We gave you double the amount of time, by the way.

Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much for your testimony. We don't need more cops in my neighborhood, okay? We don't need more cops. Thank you. And thank you for joining us today. All they do is clean up the stains. All they do is clean up the stains. Thank you. Thank you so much for your testimony.

Thank you. That's all they do. Thank you.

All right, we're going to go with Conrad Blackburn next. And good evening, chairs. I know we're getting to a late hour. I'm Conrad Blackburn. I'm policy counsel for the Bronx Defenders in the criminal defense practice. And I want to thank you for the opportunity to testify here today. So we support the Office of Community Safety and efforts to make it a permanent department that would outlast this mayoral administration.

As a public defender, I stand shoulder to shoulder with clients, defending them from a system that works to strip them of their dignity. I'm reminded every day that our current system, a system that relies on the police as a default response to our neighbors in crisis, fails us in so many respects. Our current police-first response system results in devastating consequences for my clients.

Consequences like clients who appear in arraignments bloodied and bruised after being beaten up by the police. police, clients being rendered homeless by an order of protection that their partner didn't want, and consequences like homeless clients decompensating or dying at Rikers Island instead of getting the mental health support and treatment that they want and need, right? I witnessed just how destructive to my clients and their communities our inability to provide non-police safety responses to crisis is, and that's exactly why I support an Office of Community Safety that would focus on community-based, non-police responses.

And I want to tell a story of my client, Ms. P. Ms. P is someone who lives with mental health complications. One night, she was experiencing a brief moment of crisis, and her sister called 911 because she wanted her sister to go to the hospital. Instead of professionals trained to deal with people in crisis, the police showed up, and the police immediately escalated the situation.

When Ms. P expressed that she no longer wanted to go to the hospital, The police tried to unlawfully arrest Ms. P and tried to force her to go to the hospital. They beat her up, they strapped her to the bed, and they tried to force her to take a shot of an unknown substance that she did not consent to.

And Ms. P, fearing for her life, bit one of the officers. She was arrested. ACS took her children away from her, and for 6 long months, we fought her case. That case was ultimately dismissed. And Ms. P had to fight to regain custody of her children. Please conclude. Yes. Cases like these are not, are not uncommon. They're more common than you think.

And that's the reality of this system where we rely on a police default response to people in crisis. We support the bill, but we urge the council to ensure that they are keeping the bill focused on establishing the department in law and taking out any prescriptive provisions any mention of law enforcement, so that decisions on the specifics of the department can be made through real process with the government and outside stakeholders.

Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much for testifying today. Have a good night, everyone. All right, you too.

Is there anyone else in the room who would like to testify in person? If not, we will move on to the virtual panelists. We'll now turn to virtual panelists. For virtual panelists, once your name is called, a member of our staff will unmute you, and the sergeant Sergeant at Arms will set a timer and give you the go-ahead to begin.

Please wait for the sergeant to announce that you may begin before delivering your testimony. I'll now call our first virtual panelists. So we have 4 signed up. We'll start with Christopher Leon Johnson.

You may begin. Hello? Hello? Can you hear me? Hello? Yes, we can hear you perfectly. Yeah. Hello. My name is Christopher Leon Johnson. I oppose this program. I oppose the Office of Community Safety. I oppose every bill on the ticker. I want to make this clear that, look, man, this is nonsense that is done by the City Council.

The councilman that introduced this bill, Lincoln Ressler, doesn't even know what he's talking about. All he's trying to do is line his pockets for his homegirl, Dana Ressler's nonprofit, which is ridiculous. I want to say this right now, that we need cops. We need police. We need cops to answer every call. These nonprofits, especially the Cure Violence nonprofits, does nothing for the city.

All they do is take our money away. And speaking of taking, one of their minions from Project Echo, which is under the God Squad, tried to take 2 of my phones outside City Hall Park. I want to make that clear. I want to say this right now that, look, this does nothing. Cure Violence accomplished nothing. What happens is the cops rig the scores for these Cure Violence nonprofits to act like they're doing their job.

I want to say right now that, like I said, I hope that the city council What we need to do is allocate more cops. That's what we need to start doing more. We need to back the police in the city council. These nonprofits is nothing but a grift. It's nothing but a vote harvesting campaign that is done with the help under the city to get these people elected, reelected.

So I oppose this 100%. I hope these bills die. It's just a joke that we go on this route in the city where certain neighborhoods, they need cops. We don't need violence disruptors. We need police. So I want to say this right now that I oppose this 100%, and I feel bad for the nonprofits that actually are respectful because this concept in that bill, I oppose it.

I'm not going to support something where the cure violence concepts in that bill, it's stupid. And I'm going to say this right now about mental health calls that, look, we need cops to respond to mental health calls. We don't need these nonprofits and they do nothing because They don't understand about how a person can really go and— Thank you.

Your time's expired. So thank you so much and enjoy your day. Thank you. I oppose all these bills. Thank you. Thank you so much for your testimony. Have a great day as well.

Next, we'll hear from Gada El Midawi. You may begin. Okay. Good afternoon, chairs and the members of committees. My name is Ghada, and I represent the Women Empowerment Coalition of NYC, a Brooklyn-based organization serving immigrant women, families, and underserved communities. Safe communities are built through access to resources, trusted support, and opportunities. Our schools must reflect these values.

Ensuring every student feels safe and respected regardless of race, immigration status, disability, or gender identity. We cannot call our school safe when students fear reporting bullying or discrimination because they may face retaliation or Retaliation on banishment instead of supported. Consider a 17-year-old girl in your youth program. She is the only English speaker in her household. She translated for her parents, helps her siblings with homework, and works part-time to support her family, which is struggling.

To pay rent at just 17. She carries the stress and anxiety of adult responsibilities while facing bullying at school because she wears hijab. When she struggles academically or reacts out of frustration, she's labeled disrespectful Rather than recognized as young person who needs support. This is why school need accessible mental health service. We urge the council. Thank you.

Your time's expired. Okay. And the mem. Okay. Thank you. We urge the council and the Mamdani administration to take three steps. First, expand the office. Please conclude. Okay. Community safety mission, uh, community safety mission to include school safety, youth mental health, uh, respects, uh, restores justice, and community-based violence prevention. Second, directed— redirect funding for school— Please conclude your testimony.

Okay. Okay, that's established. So we have 2 choices: invest in a system that monitors and punishes students, or invest in people who listen, understand, and support them. Every child deserves a school where they feel safe, welcomed, and valued. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for your testimony.

Next, we'll hear from Joanne Kim and then Estella Nima. You may begin. Good afternoon. Well, good evening, chairs and members of the City Council. My name is Joanne Kim, and I am the assistant director of community and volunteer management at the Korean American Family Service Center. For nearly 40 years, KFSC has provided culturally specific services to immigrant survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and other forms of gender-based violence.

Each year we serve more than 3,000 individuals, the vast majority of whom are immigrant women facing language, cultural, and economic barriers. Last year alone, we answered 4,834 calls to our 24-hour hotline, provided 2,023 nights of safe shelter, supported 46 women and 21 children through transitional housing, and helped 203 women gain economic independence through workforce development. This is what community safety looks like to us.

It means ensuring that a woman can leave an abusive relationship without becoming homeless. It means helping a survivor access counseling, legal assistance, and employment opportunities so she can rebuild her life safely and independently. We commend the Lamdani administration for recognizing that public safety goes beyond policing and for investing in and in community-based prevention and survivor services through the Office of Community Safety.

We particularly welcome the $15.7 million increase in NGBV funding, including the additional $3 million dedicated to culturally specific organizations. This is an important recognition that culturally specific services are not optional. For many immigrant survivors, they are the only access pathway to safety. KFSC is also proud of to participate in the Partners Against Hate initiative through our anti-hate prevention work.

We have heard directly from immigrant community members who fear harassment, discrimination, and violence, particularly— Thank you, your time's expired. Thank you for your time. Thank you for the opportunity. Thank you so much for joining us today. Next, we'll hear from Estela. You may begin when you're ready. You may begin. Thank you. Thank you, Chair and members of the committee, for this opportunity.

My name is Estella Ngema. I'm a parent in District 30 and District 75 representative of District 30. I'm speaking in my personal capacity. I'm a supporter of Dignity in School campaign. I'm here because we want the Mandani administration and City Council to expand the Office of Community Safety to include school safety and community-based youth mental health and anti-criminalization interventions.

Community safety must mean immigrant safety. District 30 is one of the most diverse districts in the world, nearly 50% born outside the U.S. Since January 2025, ICE has conducted large-scale raids. This summer, Operation Rotten Apple kidnapped nearly 2,200 people statewide, including dozens of our neighbors from Corona, Jason Heights, and Woodside. Several right near districtary schools and playgrounds.

That is why we pass Resolution 212. We resolve that every school needs a Project Open Arms point person, mandatory rapid response, and community defense training for all staff, CLT, and PTA leaders. Know your rights trainings with language access. Walking buses for vulnerable students and school-based teams to collect emergency contact. And connect families to legal support if a parent is detained.

This aligns with DSE New York's fiscal year '27 demands. Baseline, $4 million for immigrant family communications, strengthen data privacy and staff training, pass Intro 416 to eliminate the New York Police Department's gang database, and pass the Intro 214 New York City Trust Act to keep eyes out of city agencies. Safety means dignity and fairness for all families.

Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much for your testimony.

Next, we have some members who signed up. They're no longer here, but I'll still read their name in case they are. Lena Allen, Chowdhury Hassan Mahmood, Charles Rage, Alan Abraham, Miriam Fisher. Is there anyone else who would like to testify whose name I haven't called? If not, I just want to thank everybody who testified today. Thank you to the administration, to the public, and also to all the council members who joined today.

Also, thank you to our wonderful co-chair, Gil Brewer, for co-chairing this. This hearing is hereby adjourned.