Abdul Nasser Rad is the senior advisor for public safety to the First Deputy Mayor in the Office of the New York City Mayor where he leads the public safety portfolio. He is also an affiliated researcher with NYU’s PRISM Lab. He brings extensive experience across government and nonprofits working on public safety and criminal justice.
Before joining the Mayor’s Office, Rad was the chief policy officer at Vital City and the managing director for research and data at Campaign Zero where he worked to ensure policy interventions and implementation efforts were guided by evidence and robust research frameworks. At the NYC Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice (MOCJ), he led research and data for the NYC Police Reform and Reinvention Implementation Task Force, Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes, and the Office of Neighborhood Safety. Earlier, as an applied researcher at the Vera Institute of Justice, he studied enforcement trends and 911 emergency response, evaluated law enforcement agencies, and helped police departments and local governments across the U.S. build more comprehensive public safety performance metrics.
Rad holds a PhD and an MPhil in sociology from the University of Oxford (Clarendon Scholar) and a B.A. from Hunter College, City University of New York.
