Mamdani praise for CAHOOTS cited in Ward 5 race

Presenter: In the Ward 5 City Council race, Athena Aguiar’s campaign has emphasized the need to restore CAHOOTS, Eugene’s nationally known mobile street crisis response.

Athena noted in a recent City Club forum that CAHOOTS was praised by Zohran Mamdani during his own campaign for New York City mayor. He was questioned by WNBC reporter Melissa Russo:

Melissa Russo (WNBC News 4): Roughly 500 times a day someone calls 911 about an emotionally disturbed person, and in a limited number of those cases, when the person is not believed to be violent, social workers are dispatched instead of police.

Mr. Mamdani, you want to do that on a much larger scale. So we want to know how will this work? When will you send police versus social workers? (You have one minute.)

Zohran Mamdani (NYC mayoral candidate, Oct. 16, 2025): You know, we have a program here in New York City called ‘Be Heard’ that is attempting to do this kind of work.

But we’ve had a mayor who has ensured that it’s been unsuccessful to the extent that even when there was an assessment of about 60% of calls that could have been addressed by Be Heard instead of the NYPD, Be Heard was not actually responsive to it.

And that’s because we haven’t had the political will to deliver on what is a crisis that affects so many New Yorkers, which is the mental health crisis.

What my plan will do, an innovative plan of the Department of Community Safety, will take what has worked elsewhere in the country:

A program in Eugene, Oregon where they took 24,000 911 mental health calls out of the police department, they were able to respond to all but 311 without police assistance.

When there is a concern for safety or of violence, absolutely you would have the police there, but what we are doing today is actually ensuring that every single call is going to the police, and not allowing them to do the work that they signed up to do.

Melissa Russo (WNBC News 4): How? How will you determine whether there is a concern for safety or violence? What is the line between the calls in which police will be dispatched and the calls to which social workers will be dispatched? 

Zohran Mamdani (NYC mayoral candidate, Oct. 16, 2025): The line is also going to be one focused on violence and the threat of violence, and I also trust the operators who will be receiving those calls to make that determination as they do every day today for so many emergency services.

Melissa Russo (WNBC News 4): And just two really quick points, please. There has been a lot of discussion that you would send social workers to domestic violence calls which police are concerned about? (No.) So you’re saying no. Okay. And then the other question is: How can you be sure that a situation that does not sound violent when someone calls 911 does not become violent in the moment? Would police be assigned as backup?

Zohran Mamdani (NYC mayoral candidate, Oct. 16, 2025): I think what you do is you actually follow the experts that have shown us this can work when you’re willing to ensure that you’re trusting the mental health experts who have been doing this work elsewhere in the country, where they call for the police when they need the police, but their initial impulse when there’s no violence in that call is to actually address the mental health at the heart of it.

Presenter: Zohran Mamdani praises CAHOOTS and credits Eugene with developing the best practices that allow public safety officials to supply the right resources at the right time and at a lower cost.