NEW YORK (AP) — New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani announced Wednesday that the city's current police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, has agreed to remain in the post, a major coup for the incoming mayor as he moves to assuage concerns over his past criticisms of the New York Police Department.
For Mamdani, a democratic socialist who once called to defund the city's police department, the appointment seals one of the most consequential decisions of his nascent administration and provides further insight into the progressive's looming stewardship of City Hall.
Tisch's decision to stay on as commissioner could provide some level of comfort to city business leaders and others who worried that Mamdani’s past harsh rhetoric about the department during the height of Black Lives Matter protests would translate into radical changes at the NYPD.
It also marks a political alliance between two leaders with starkly different backgrounds and some ideological differences on how to run the nation’s largest police department.
Mamdani, 34, campaigned for transformative social and economic change in the city and has proposed creating a creating a new “Department of Community Safety” that would deploy mental health care teams to handle certain emergency calls. Tisch, often clad in a black leather coat, is the heiress to a multibillion dollar family fortune and is considered a steady, establishment moderate with nearly two decades in public service.
In a statement, Mamdani praised Tisch for “cracking down on corruption in the upper echelons of the police department” while also driving down crime in the city and “standing up for New Yorkers in the face of authoritarianism.”
Tisch, in an email to officers on Wednesday, acknowledged the different views she has with Mamdani but said a series of conversations with him had made her “confident" that she can lead the department under his mayoralty.
“Now, do the Mayor-elect and I agree on everything? No, we don’t. But in speaking with him, it’s clear that we share broad and crucial priorities: the importance of public safety, the need to continue driving down crime, and the need to maintain stability and order across the department. We also agree that you deserve the city’s respect and support,” Tisch wrote in the email, which was shared with The Associated Press.
Tisch was appointed to lead the department last November as both current Mayor Eric Adams and the city’s police force were reeling from overlapping scandals.
In September, federal authorities seized phones from Adams and several high-level appointees, including the police commissioner, Edward Caban, who soon resigned. Agents then searched the home of his interim replacement, Thomas Donlon, just a week after he took over.
In her first weeks as commissioner, Tisch reassigned several top officials, including some seen as allies to the mayor. The department’s top uniformed official, a longtime friend of Adams, resigned in December amid harassment allegations.
Her tenure has coincided with a drop in shootings and several categories of major crime, earning praise from the business community and some police reform groups.
At a debate weeks before the election, Mamdani announced he planned to ask Tisch to stay on as police commissioner. Tisch had declined to discuss the offer both before and immediately after Mamdani’s victory, saying she was focused on leading the department under Adams.
Neither has discussed how they plan to reconcile their political differences. Tisch has fiercely criticized changes to the state’s bail laws, which Mamdani supports. And while the mayor-elect has previously called for defunding the police, Tisch has advocated for expanding their ranks.
Mamdani has since walked back his comments calling to slash department funding and has said he would keep the headcount at its current number.
Since winning the election, Mamdani has moved to surround himself with a cast of seasoned officials as he prepares to enter City Hall under some concern that his limited public experience could create headaches once he assumes control of America's biggest city.
He has tapped a veteran budget official with deep experience in state and city government to be his first deputy mayor, and has named a team that includes two former deputy mayors to help guide his transition into City Hall.
Tisch, a Harvard-educated scion of a wealthy New York family, previously led the city's sanitation department, becoming TikTok famous for declaring “The rats don’t run the city, we do" in 2022.
Her first job in city government was in the New York Police Department's counterterrorism bureau. She has helped shape post-9/11 security infrastructure in the city and, as deputy commissioner for information technology, spearheaded use of body-worn cameras and smartphones.