Mayor Zohran Mamdani appointed Renita Francois as deputy mayor for community safety on March 19, 2026, and signed an executive order the same day creating a new Mayor’s Office of Community Safety — an early structural move to deliver on a campaign promise to rethink how the city responds to crime, violence, and mental-health crises.

The appointment, announced on day 78 of Mamdani’s term, made Francois the first Black deputy mayor in the administration. She joins a senior team that includes First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan, the de Blasio-era budget director Mamdani named in November 2025.

A new office inside City Hall

The executive order establishes the Mayor’s Office of Community Safety within the mayor’s office, with Francois at the top and a commissioner — not named at launch — set to report to her. The office is organized into three divisions: Neighborhood Safety, Community Mental Health, and Strategic Initiatives.

Rather than create programs from scratch, the office is built to coordinate work already scattered across city government. It is given coordinating authority over existing entities including the Office of Crime Victim Services and the Office of Gun Violence Prevention. Francois has described the current landscape as a set of programs that lack “a cohesive strategy,” with the new office meant to supply the connective tissue.

The portfolio encompasses roughly $260 million in existing allocated funding, according to the administration, with additional amounts expected in the executive budget the mayor would release in May.

Mental-health response at the center

The clearest policy signal in the launch is its emphasis on crisis response. The Community Mental Health division is built around reshaping how the city answers 911 calls involving people in psychiatric distress — work centered on B-HEARD, the city’s civilian crisis-response program that dispatches teams of EMTs and mental-health professionals instead of, or alongside, armed police.

Scaling and improving that kind of response was a recurring theme of Mamdani’s campaign, and it is one of the few public-safety areas where he and NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch — whom he kept on from the Adams administration — have found common ground. Both have backed shifting some mental-health calls away from police.

Francois has cautioned that building a genuinely coordinated response will take time, noting it “is not going to happen tomorrow.” Mamdani, for his part, framed the executive-order route as a deliberate choice to move quickly, saying the city “could not afford to wait” for a longer legislative process to stand the office up.

Francois’s background

Francois is not new to this work. She previously led the Mayor’s Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety (MAP) as executive director under Mayor Bill de Blasio, a cross-agency initiative that concentrated services and anti-violence programming in a set of NYCHA developments. That experience — coordinating multiple agencies around safety in specific neighborhoods — maps closely onto the coordinating mandate of the new office.

What to watch

The early test is whether a coordinating office with no line agencies of its own can actually steer money and outcomes across entrenched bureaucracies — from the NYPD to the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to the agencies running victim services and gun-violence prevention. The unnamed commissioner post, the size of the office’s eventual budget in the adopted plan, and measurable changes to B-HEARD’s footprint will be the markers of whether the structure delivers.

Verification

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Renita Francois?
Renita Francois is Mayor Zohran Mamdani's deputy mayor for community safety, appointed March 19, 2026. She is the administration's first Black deputy mayor. She previously served as executive director of the Mayor's Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety under Mayor Bill de Blasio.
What is the Mayor's Office of Community Safety?
It is a new office created by executive order on March 19, 2026, housed within the mayor's office and reporting to Francois. It has three divisions — Neighborhood Safety, Community Mental Health, and Strategic Initiatives — and coordinates existing entities including the Office of Crime Victim Services and the Office of Gun Violence Prevention.
How big is the new portfolio?
The office consolidates coordinating authority over roughly $260 million in existing allocated funding, with more expected in the executive budget. A commissioner, not yet named at launch, will report to Francois.
How does this connect to Mamdani's public-safety platform?
A core piece of the office is reshaping crisis response, particularly the city's civilian B-HEARD program that sends mental-health teams rather than police to some 911 calls — an approach Mamdani backed during the campaign and that Commissioner Jessica Tisch has also supported.