Commissioner Tisch Agrees To Remain as Mamdani’s Top Cop, but Will She Last?

The NYPD Commissioner, Jessica Tisch, will remain in her role to “deliver genuine public safety” as Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani is set to take charge of New York City, marking an unusual alliance between a precision policing practitioner and a historically anti-cop democratic socialist with strikingly different philosophies on public safety. In an internal NYPD-wide email sent Wednesday, Ms. Tisch announced that she agreed to continue in her role as Commissioner in Mr. Mamdani’s administration after sharing “several conversations with him.”“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,” Ms. Tisch wrote. The new partnership between Mr. Mamdani and Ms. Tisch will “advance a coordinated approach to public safety built on partnership and shared purpose,” the Mayor-elect announced on Wednesday.“I have admired her work cracking down on corruption in the upper echelons of the police department, driving down crime in New York City, and standing up for New Yorkers in the face of authoritarianism,” Mr. Mamdani said in a statement Wednesday morning. News of the announcement came as a relief to some who feared Mr. Mamdani’s radical approach to public safety would push out Ms. Tisch at a time when the department is hemorrhaging rank-and-file NYPD officers. Since January 2024, the NYPD has lost nearly 5,250 rank-and-file officers at an average of more than 300 cops per month. The NYPD’s current uniformed headcount stands at 33,745 — far below the force’s peak staffing of 40,285 in 2000. The NYPD is budgeted for a 35,001 headcount, a number it hasn’t reached in five years, the New York Police Benevolent Association said.“I think the Mayor is going to have a lot of concerns about New York City. The NYPD is not going to be a concern of his because he has someone like Commissioner Tisch at the top,” the president of the NYPD Detective and Detectives’ Endowment Association, Scott Munro, tells the Sun. “As long as she gets the tools she needs like more detectives, more training, more promotions, exactly as she’s been getting now, she’ll continue to succeed.”On the campaign trail, Mr. Mamdani told reporters he was “ensuring that we actually tackle the retention crisis at hand.” But Mr. Mamdani’s progressive vision for public safety, coupled with his history of troubling accusations about the NYPD, has given rank-and-file cops little confidence that staying in the job will be worth the stress. In a 2020 X post he accused it of being “racist,” “anti-queer,” and a “major threat to public safety.”“I hope that they can come together with their philosophical differences with regards to crime fighting,” the former NYPD Chief of the Department, John Chell, tells the Sun.In October, Mr. Mamdani went on Fox News to apologize to the NYPD for his previous statements.“I apologize because of the fact that I’m looking to work with these officers. And I know that these officers, these men and women who serve in the NYPD, they put their lives on the line every single day.”Weeks later, a video resurfaced showing Mr. Mamdani telling the 2023 Democratic Socialists of America convention that “when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by” the Israel Defense Forces. It was just one in a litany of criticisms he has made of the city agency he now needs to execute his alternative approach to law enforcement. Mr. Mamdani’s ideas for public safety include killing the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group, which regularly responds to social protests, and giving the Civilian Complaint Review Board final authority on disciplining cops, a power historically held by the commissioner. He also wants to launch his ambitious — and expensive —Department of Community Safety project, which aims to provide “prevention-first, community-based solutions” on issues like mental health, hate crimes, subway safety, and victim support.Mr. Mamdani believes that mental health clinicians, not NYPD officers, should be sent to non-violent situations, believing it will free up patrol officers to focus on more serious and violent crimes.While news of Ms. Tisch’s decision was applauded by many like the state attorney general, Letitia James, there are still doubts as to whether this unlikely alliance can last. Both people are on the opposite ends of the political spectrum. Ms. Tisch is a billionaire heiress of a prominent Jewish American family. Mr. Mamdani doesn’t believe “we should have billionaires,” preferring instead to spread the wealth across the city and state. Mr. Mamdani continues to promise to arrest Israel Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu when he visits New York City.Mr. Netanyahu regularly stays at the Loews Regency New York on Park Avenue during his visits to New York City — a hotel owned by Ms. Tisch’s family’s parent company. Whether Ms. Tisch will be able to implement Mr. Mamdani’s ambitious public safety agenda — or whether she will last long enough in the role to see it through — remains to be seen.Mr. Chell tells the Sun: “I hope and pray the rank and file get what they need to keep this city safe.”

Commissioner Tisch Agrees To Remain as Mamdani’s Top Cop, but Will She Last?

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