Mayor Zohran Mamdani had less than a month on the job when the January 26 shooting of Jabez Chakraborty, a 22-year-old man with schizophrenia, in his family’s Queens home, underscored the urgent need for a new approach to how the city deals with people with mental illness.

The ritual captured on body-worn camera footage is unbearably familiar. Chakraborty’s family, desperate for help, asked a 911 operator for medical help but instead got police officers who drew their guns and shouted commands at the young man, who became more agitated and terrified and began waving a knife. Within seconds, gunshots.

Chakraborty is lucky to have survived the shooting, which looked a lot like the way cops killed Deborah Danner. And Kawaski Trawick. And Win Rozario. And Saheed Vassell. And many other New Yorkers over the years.
It’s time to break the cycle. Mamdani and a majority of City Council members have promised to fix a system that has been broken for decades. It’s up to the rest of us to make them keep their word.

“I think what’s frustrating is that we have evidence of approaches that work, but they are not operating at the scale that they could be,” Mamdani told me shortly before Election Day. His plan is to create a Department of Community Safety that would expand the NYPD’s Behavioral Health Emergency Assistance Response Division (B-HEARD), which pairs cops with social workers and psychiatric professionals to respond to calls that require a medical response rather than deadly force. Mamdani says the new agency would be funded with $605 million in existing NYPD funds........

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