Mayoral candidates Zohran Mamdani, Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa agree on virtually nothing. But one key personnel decision unites them: They all say they will keep NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch in her job if elected.
Mamdani’s announcement last week that he’d like to keep Tisch in her post if he’s elected earned him praise from more moderate Democrats, as well as skepticism among progressives whose support helped him win the Democratic primary.
Tisch, a 44-year-old heiress to the Loews empire, is not a native to the current mayoral administration, but she is to the NYPD. She graduated Harvard and took a job in government as an NYPD counterterrorism analyst in 2008, and was running the department's IT division within six years. She went on to run the city's IT department under Mayor Bill de Blasio, and the sanitation department under Mayor Eric Adams.
Tisch has earned a reputation as a competent and steadfast manager. Since taking over the NYPD in November 2024, she’s been praised — including by Mamdani — for rooting out some of the most glaring instances of misconduct the department has dealt with in decades.
Many crimes — including shootings and homicides — have dropped to historic lows under her watch, though that has also been the case nationally.
Felony assaults, rapes and instances of domestic assault have remained more intractable and Tisch has devoted more resources to those areas in recent weeks.
She’s also overseen a focus on policing low-level crimes across the city, earning praise from some city lawmakers and media pundits, but angering some Democratic voters and criminal justice reform advocates.
Putting out a ‘dumpster fire’
Adams tapped Tisch to lead the department about a year ago, a time when corruption allegations touched the highest levels of city government and the NYPD.
Federal prosecutors had indicted Adams on campaign finance and other charges months earlier. The two police commissioners who preceded Tisch resigned after the press reported about FBI investigations into both of them. Adams’ deputy mayor for public safety resigned amid a separate FBI investigation and the mayor’s highest-ranking officials began resigning en masse.
At the time, Adams’ poll numbers sunk to new lows and the cloud of corruption led some to question if Gov. Kathy Hochul should use her power to remove him from office.
In the months after her appointment, Tisch made a number of moves to overhaul the department, including ordering hundreds of officers back to assigned posts after determining they had been improperly transferred.
NYPD Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey resigned in December after one of his subordinates publicly accused him of requesting sexual favors for overtime pay. The next day, Tisch removed the head of internal affairs, saying the person in that position “must always be dedicated to preserving integrity and rooting out corruption in all its forms.”
Law enforcement experts said stabilizing a troubled department has been her greatest triumph as commissioner.
“ By far her biggest accomplishment is, and forgive me for being blunt, but putting out the dumpster fire,” said Kirk Burkhalter, a veteran NYPD detective who is now a professor at New York Law School.
Peter Moskos, an associate professor at John Jay College, agreed.
“Her major accomplishment … is that she’s not one of Adams’ cronies. It’s huge that she’s not corrupt,” he said.
Quality of life and progressive skepticism
A hallmark of Tisch’s first year as commissioner has been a focus on quality of life enforcement.
In April, both Tisch and Adams announced the launch of what they called “Q-teams,” which are units of police officers dispatched to respond to quality of life issues such as aggressive panhandling, outdoor drug use, noise complaints and illegal parking.
Months after the teams' rollout in some precincts, Tisch and Adams touted numbers that showed the department had seized hundreds of illegal e-bikes and scooters, as well as hundreds of vehicles towed and thousands of responses to non-emergency 911 calls.
Police oversight advocates said they’re skeptical of the crackdown and said the Q-team pilot was rolled out without transparency.
Jennvine Wong, a supervising attorney with Legal Aid’s Cop Accountability Project, said her office has seen an increase in clients accused of minor crimes.
“We do have a lot of concern about it,” said Wong. “We’re talking about a time that is pretty hard for a lot of New Yorkers with respect to affordability and pushing more people through the criminal legal system is not an answer when we’re trying to protect New Yorkers.”
When the Q-teams were announced, Tisch pushed back on the notion that they represented a return to broken windows policing.
“It is not about preventing more serious crimes. It is about improving quality of life,” she said at the time.
Wong gave Tisch credit for meting out discipline to officers found guilty of wrongdoing at a higher rate than her predecessors, but said some of her decisions were still concerning.
She noted Tisch's decision to overrule a department judge and clear an officer who shot unarmed Allan Feliz during a traffic stop in the Bronx in 2019.
“That is incredibly concerning,” Wong said. “That one is the one that’s most glaring and you have to wonder, why?”
“Those are the kind of cases I think that really impact the way the public perceives whether or not there is accountability,” she added.
Cases solved
A number of high-profile crimes that have taken place during Tisch's tenure have thrust public safety in New York City into the national spotlight.
In December 2024, just weeks after Tisch's appointment, Luigi Mangione assassinated UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Midtown street, according to prosecutors. Days after the shooting, officers in Pennsylvania tracked down Mangione and both state and federal prosecutors charged him with the killing.
And in July, a gunman stormed a Midtown office building, killing himself and four others, including an NYPD officer working security at the Park Avenue tower. In August, three people were killed and 11 others were injured in a shootout at a hookah lounge in Crown Heights. Federal prosecutors charged one man in the lounge shooting, but other suspects are still being sought.
Both Burkhalter and Moskos credited Tisch with being an effective manager by letting the department’s investigators solve cases like Thompson's killing.
“With those types of cases, as a leader, a law enforcement leader, the most important thing they can do is get out of the way of their investigators,” said Burkhalter, the retired detective. “And she has done that effectively.”
This story has been updated to include Commissioner Tisch's response to criticisms of the department's quality of life enforcement.
