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Mayor Zohran Mamdani promised to reduce the role of police in responding to mental health emergencies in New York City. Now, the commissioner tasked with helping to deliver on that promise is working to expand the city’s mental health crisis response services with a fraction of the funding Mamdani proposed during his campaign.
Ayesha Delany-Brumsey, whom Mamdani appointed in May to lead the newly created Office of Community Safety, is overseeing efforts to expand access to mental health services, including B-HEARD, a program launched in 2021 that dispatches mental health workers to New Yorkers in distress.
Mamdani created the office through an executive order in March, bringing together several agencies focused on neighborhood safety, violence prevention, and mental health initiatives. During his campaign, he proposed a $1.1 billion budget for the office. Ultimately, it received $260 million.
The office is part of Mamdani’s broader public safety agenda, which has faced criticism from some of his supporters who say he has not done enough to reform policing and the criminal justice system. On Monday, he called for a comprehensive review of the New York Police Department’s use-of-force policies.
Among the challenges facing Delany-Brumsey is expanding B-HEARD, which has faced scrutiny over its reach and effectiveness. A May 2025 audit by then-Comptroller Brad Lander found that the program had limited hours, geographic coverage, and restrictions on the types of emergency calls it could respond to. The audit also found inadequate tracking of program and performance data, raising questions about whether B-HEARD was meeting its goals.
Previously, Delany-Brumsey held senior roles in the Office of Behavioral Health at NYC Health + Hospitals, the largest municipal healthcare system in the United States. She has a background in public health, mental health, and criminal justice reform, and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from UCLA.
In a recent interview with Healthbeat, Delany-Brumsey discussed her vision for the office, efforts to expand B-HEARD, and the city’s push to raise awareness of the 988 mental health crisis line.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Could you tell us a little more about where things stand with the Office of Community Safety and your vision?
It is focused on improving safety outcomes for the people and places most at risk for harm, and focusing on some of the most intractable types of harm and violence. It includes a number of offices: the Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence, which does what it sounds like it does; the Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes, which focuses on addressing hate and bias across New York and ensuring that everyone feels like New York can be their home; the Office of Neighborhood Safety, which focuses on gun violence prevention, or what we call community violence prevention; and then the Office of Community Mental Health, which focuses on improving access to behavioral healthcare and addressing the needs of people in moments of behavioral crisis. Pulled together, they provide a comprehensive approach to improving safety and well-being for communities that haven’t always had access to safety.
Tell us about the 988 campaign.
One of the big gaps that we’re seeing right now is that 988 has existed since 2022, but not enough people are aware of it. Use of it is increasing over time, but there’s still a long way to go, which makes sense. 911 has existed for decades and decades. It will take some time for 988 to be a go-to, burned into people’s brains in the same way. But what we’ve been doing there is raising awareness about how 988 is accessible 24 hours, accessible by chat, text, phone call. When you call 988, you get someone who can provide support, counseling — connect you to long-term mental health resources. We want to make sure that people are connected to long-term care, and then if necessary, 988 can dispatch mobile crisis teams, which are teams of behavioral health professionals. They can be a mix of peers, social workers, (and) other licensed professionals who go to that person, assess what their needs are, help them in that moment in their home, at school, wherever they happen to be, and then provide additional care and, if necessary, help that person get to the hospital.
I would be remiss if I didn’t ask about the audit, but I imagine it’s something that you all have been thinking about — how to improve B-HEARD services.
The concern of the audit that B-HEARD is not as available as it should be is fair. The flipside of that is that it means that people want more of this service. If people didn’t think it was a good idea, people didn’t think what we were doing made sense, then we wouldn’t be getting audited to say that we’re not doing enough of it. The basic premise that B-HEARD should be available everywhere is a premise that we agree with, and so we’re working really closely right now with FDNY and Health + Hospitals to address the steps to growing the program. We want to make sure we’re looking at good data, identifying qualified staff, training them well, and building our capacity every step, from call triage to dispatch to being on the field to making sure that we are expanding effectively and as quickly as possible.
What sort of follow-up care is available for people regarding B-HEARD?
We make sure that once we are connecting with someone, that we have a follow-up call, that we check in. We do a patient satisfaction survey to see how we did. We also always leave people with follow-up care information, and if necessary, we are making sure that people get to hospitals. The focus of B-HEARD is making sure that in that moment someone is safe, and that we have helped them plan for what their next moment should look like. The actual program doesn’t provide ongoing care, but it makes sure that people are connected to that ongoing care.
I imagine that the NYPD is receiving fewer calls because of 988, and maybe hospitals are seeing fewer patients. Is that the case?
That isn’t data that I have. That would be a really good research study to look at whether 988 calls or other calls have reduced hospital admissions. What we are hoping is that when someone is calling 988 or when they are calling B-HEARD, we are hoping that we’ll first assess whether the person is safe to stay where they are, or not necessarily just stay where they are, but to be in the community. Because we want to make sure that if someone can be in the community safely and that we can support them, that’s what we do. Sometimes that means people do have to go to the hospital, but often it means that you can keep people at home.
Any goals that you all have set? How will you know that you all are being successful?
We’re working on setting some of that work up, making sure that we have combined data across all of the teams. That’s been one of the challenges of this work of not having as good data as we need to benchmark how we’re doing. That data will help us understand core program outputs like how many people we are seeing, where we are seeing them, how long we are on the ground — all of those types of things, but much more importantly will also help us improve the program. We are also thinking about the ways in which we are connecting people to care afterward.
Trenton Daniel is a reporter covering public health in New York for Healthbeat. Contact Trenton at tdaniel@healthbeat.org or on the messaging app Signal at trentondaniel.88.
