'VIOLENCE INTERRUPTERS' IN PLACE OF COPS

Outrage as New York mayoral shoo-in Zohan Mamdani plans to bring back Bill de Blasio's boondoggle program to sub social workers for cops

 

By Dana Kennedy 

 

Daily Mail

Oct 24, 2025

 

Mamdini intends to adopt a program similar to the ThriveNYC program of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and his wife Chirlane McCray  

 

New York City may experience a failure to thrive - again.

Former Mayor Bill De Blasio’s biggest boondoggle – the widely-mocked $1.5 billion mental health initiative called ThriveNYC run by his then-wife Chirlane McCray – could have a comeback of sorts if, as expected, State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani wins the mayoral election next month.

The 33-year-old Democratic Socialist proposes forming a new $1.1 billion ‘Department of Community Safety’ to deploy social workers and ‘violence interrupters’ rather than NYPD officers on certain non-emergency calls in the city.

While ThriveNYC was primarily a sprawling mental health and wellness initiative and Mamdani’s proposed agency is more narrow in scope, focusing on public safety and crisis response, they share the same ultra-progressive focus: hiring civilians for ‘crisis’ response while both criticizing and diminishing the role of the NYPD.

‘De Blasio and Mamdani are the two heads of the Siamese twins of bad policy,’ veteran political strategist Hank Sheinkopf, who’s worked on 700 political campaigns all over the world, told Daily Mail.

‘When the elitists take over, the first people they go to are the people they think are lower than they are… people who believe that police officers and people who work for a living are obviously garbage. Therefore, we can tell them what to do, tell them to shut up, and rearrange their lives.’

Convicted fraudster and former ‘Crazy Eddie’ CFO Sam E. Antar who has become a respected forensic accountant for the government, spent years looking into Thrive’s books – and says Mamdani is on track to repeat those mistakes with his ‘Department of Community Safety'.

‘You know what he is? A mama’s boy who’s being given a new toy, New York City,’ Antar told Daily Mail. 

‘He wants to create this whole new agency to do what? Send guys with clipboards to domestic violence situations? Can you imagine calling a 9-11 dispatcher with a guy bleeding on the sidewalk and she has to figure out whether to send an ambulance or a social worker? It’s f**king insane.’

 

Mayoral hopeful Zohran Mamdani's proposed $1.1billion 'Department of Community Safety' has echoes of the program, but takes a more focused approach but focusing on public safety and crisis response

ThriveNYC became infamous for its opaque finances, as the hundreds of millions it received were spread across more than 50 initiatives and funneled through at least 30 different agencies, all without a central line-item budget 

 

One of the few city lawmakers who spoke out against ThriveNYC after it was first launched in 2015 is now sounding the alarm again about Mamdani’s plans.

Councilman Robert Holden, a Democrat who’s represented part of Queens since 1988, says there was almost zero oversight and transparency involving Thrive.

To this day, he said, he and others routinely ask where did all the money go – but never get an answer.

He said he fears Mamdani’s fleet of social workers-to-the-rescue will turn out to be another ineffective financial fiasco for the city.

‘Mamdani’s plan is pie in the sky – as was De Blasio’s Thrive,’ Holden told Daily Mail.

‘He wants to create a whole new agency which just means a money pit for the city. Like Thrive, it sounds like a feel-good press release but the proof is in the pudding. These things never work. Thrive didn’t work and Mamdani’s agency will never work. 

'In both cases they want to send people into harm’s way when it comes to responding to 9-11 calls.’

Holden said he knew of other city council members appalled by ThriveNYC’s enormous cost and how little it had to show for it- but were afraid to say anything.

 

 

Mamdani's plan would hand non-emergency calls to social workers and 'violence interrupters' instead of cops - aiming to cut down the city's sluggish police response times 

 

‘I remember someone at Thrive saying oh we’re going to have mental health teams in the subway,’ Holden said.

‘I was like, two teams in the entire New York City subway system? Are they kidding? There were other people on the city council at the same time who were very critical of Thrive but they didn’t want to speak up. The same thing is going to happen if Mamdani wins and starts this new agency up.’

Antar spent years looking into ThriveNYC explaining: ‘Normally, a big program like Thrive –$850 million or more – would have a paper trail,’ said Antar, who publishes his investigations on his blog, White Collar Fraud.

‘Detailed expenditures, financial reports, some transparency. But with Thrive, virtually no information of substance appears anywhere.’

What really set him off, he said, was the difficulty tracing Thrive spending through Checkbook NYC, the city’s public-facing expenditures portal.

‘New York City has Checkbook – you can look up every expenditure,' he said.

‘But for some reason, that Thrive stuff is coded. I can’t find $850 million of expenditures on Thrive. It’s the lack of a document trail that makes it smell. It’s like a crime of omission.’

No one’s ever been able to confidently point to where ThriveNYC’s millions of dollars really went because there were more than 50 ‘initiatives' and the money for them was doled out to at least 30 different agencies without a central line-item budget.

 

New York City Councilman Robert Holden was just one of several local lawmakers who told Daily Mail how frustrated they were during the de Blasio years, being told by the first lady to not 'demonize the homeless' when asked where the money was going to

 

The wonky metrics of Thrive’s books also made it difficult to measure the program’s impact.

Holden said he was just one of several local lawmakers who told Daily Mail they were frustrated over the enormous amount of money allotted to ThriveNYC and what it was being used for.

‘We questioned them multiple times asking where is this money going but the answers were always vague,’ Holden said.

‘They’d always come up with ridiculous answers like the money is going to help educate people – cops, teachers, everyone – on mental illness. Like a New Yorker has no idea how to recognize a mentally ill person in the streets?’

 

Embattled Republican mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa compared Mamdani's plan to ThriveNYC saying they had 'eerily similar' vibes and the plan would likely hit a snag with its big budget

 

Holden said that he is not optimistic that Mamdani, if he wins, will be an improvement.

‘It’ll actually get worse,’ Holden said. ‘A lot of Democrats come out of non-profits. Out of 51 New York City council members, about 30 used to work for non-profits. That’s what this city does – they burn money by shipping it off to non-profits. They’ll come up with a new name for a program like Thrive that also won’t work.’

Embattled Republican mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa, who’s under heavy pressure to quit the race so former governor Andrew Cuomo has a better chance of beating Mamdani, called ThriveNYC a ‘shell game'.

‘It was a billion and a half dollars spent in five years with no accountability and no transparency,’ Sliwa told Daily Mail.

‘I deal with emotionally disturbed people in the city all the time and not one of them has ever said they had any experiences with Thrive. They just moved the money from this agency to that agency without being able to show what they did.'

Sliwa said Mamdani’s plans for dealing with the mentally ill have eerily similar vibes.

‘The whole emphasis is on social workers going out to help these people, not cops,’ Sliwa said. ‘But trust me, in the end the cops will end up getting called.’

 

Aside from a single interview last year, McCray has remained out of public view following her separation from de Blasio, although they are reportedly still cohabiting in their Brooklyn residence 

 

Cuomo’s spokesman Rich Azzopardo did not mince words about ThriveNYC.

‘Thrive was an ill-conceived, badly managed, poorly defined vanity project for de Blasio’s ex-wife,’ Azzopardo told Daily Mail. 'That’s all it was.'

He said Mamdani’s new network of what he called 'super social workers’ could be even worse.

'Their mission, to the point where they’re even defined, is to undercut police – to handcuff them from responding to mental health calls, even when someone may be in danger,’ he said.

‘It also puts the social workers themselves in danger. It’s ill-conceived, it’s not going to work, and the money will come from the police department. Bill De Blasio’s protégé, Zohran Mamdani, will in fact be defunding the police even though he says he’s not.’

But De Blasio hit back. ‘Over six years, every single Thrive dollar was spent in our neighborhoods to help New Yorkers with mental health challenges,’ he responded to Daily Mail's request for comment.

‘Over 250,000 residents received Mental Health First Aid training. Hundreds of thousands were served through our helpline. Intensive Mobile Teams were dispatched to intervene to help the seriously mentally ill. Police precincts and public schools were given mental professionals to assist them on a level never seen before. 

'And the stigma related to mental health was greatly reduced, helping tens of thousands of NYC families come forward without shame to get the help they needed.'

Mamdani spokesman Andrew Epstein did not return several calls and texts from Daily Mail.