By Rocco Parascandola, Thomas Tracy, Graham Rayman and Chris Sommerfeldt
New York Daily News
NEW YORK — NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch has accepted an offer from Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani to remain New York City’s top cop under his administration — a move that comes despite differences in their outlooks on public safety.
In a Wednesday email to NYPD officers announcing she will stay on as commissioner, Tisch hinted at those political differences. But she wrote she ultimately agreed to remain in the job following “several conversations” with Mamdani, a democratic socialist who’s being sworn in as mayor Jan. 1.
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“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,” she wrote to cops in the email, a copy of which was obtained by the Daily News. “We also agree that you deserve the city’s respect and support.”
She wrote that she appreciates that Mamdani “wants a team with different points of view — a team where ideas and policies are debate on their merits.”
“In those discussions, you can trust that I will be a fierce advocate for you and for this department. You know how I operate: I don’t mince words,” her message said. “When I say something, I mean it. And that is not going to change.”
Mamdani has pledged to keep the NYPDs headcount flat, abolish the department’s controversial Strategic Response Group and get rid of its gang database — all proposals Tisch has publicly voiced skepticism about.
Additionally, Mamdani has said he will as mayor seek to launch the Department of Community Safety, a $1 billion agency that would absorb some responsibilities currently handled by cops, such as mental health calls. Tisch has not said what she thinks of that idea.
Years before launching his campaign for mayor, Mamdani posted messages on social media in 2020 calling for the need to “defund” and “dismantle” the NYPD. In one particularly incendiary post from 2020, Mamdani called the NYPD “anti-queer,” “racist” and “a danger to public safety.”
Since launching his mayoral run, Mamdani has apologized for those remarks and promised to keep NYPD funding levels flat. Still, some Mamdani critics have seized on his past rhetoric about police.
The decision by Tisch to stay on comes just under a year after she was sworn in as the city’s 48th police commissioner and amid widespread speculation about her staying on as police commissioner under Mamdani’s leadership.
Mamdani had repeatedly said both during the campaign and after his Nov. 4 election that he wanted to keep Tisch on.
During an interview on WABC Eyewitness News aired on Sunday, Mamdani said he had talked to Tisch about her remaining as police commissioner “just last week” but wouldn’t say if she accepted his offer.
Tisch, 44, has been lauded for leading the NYPD as the city has seen a sharp reduction in crime as well a the lowest number of shootings since the CompStat (computer statistics-driven policing) era began in 1994.
Her precision policing model of sending cops to communities in the city where the most violence occurs “has delivered record-low shooting incidents and victims over the last nine months, and the safest quarter ever on our subways,” she said in October. “This is not a coincidence — it’s the result of an unprecedented, data-driven deployment of thousands of officers to the areas they are needed most.”
Tisch was the fourth police commissioner selected by Mayor Adams since taking office four years ago. Adams had named her Sanitation Commissioner in the beginning of his term and promoted her to police commissioner last November.
Tisch succeeded Interim NYPD Commissioner Thomas Donlon, who was involved in a high-profile kerfuffle with a top deputy commissioner at last year’s New York Marathon but otherwise kept a low profile since his swearing in last September. Donlon’s predecessor, Edward Caban, resigned Sept. 12, 2024, just over a week after the feds confiscated electronics from Caban and four other top Adams administration officials in a coordinated early-morning operation as part of a sprawling federal corruption probe.
Adams’ first police commissioner, Keechant Sewell, the first female top cop in city history, resigned in June 2023, with police sources saying she had grown tired of City Hall interference.
Tisch was no stranger to the nation’s largest police force when she took the job — she has worked in the past as a civilian NYPD employee, first as a counterterrorism analyst, then later as Deputy Commissioner of Information Technology.
Earlier this month Fire Commissioner Robert Tucker announced his resignation as head of the fire department.
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