When It Comes to New York City Public Safety, It’s Commissioner Tisch’s ‘Foot on the Gas’

At a budget hearing on Monday, New York’s police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, told the City Council that the city will hire 580 new officers in 2026 — a development that perhaps was once unthinkable in Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s New York City. During his successful run for Mayor in 2025, Mr. Mamdani pledged to keep the police department’s headcount at 34,000, and even scrapped plans by his predecessor, Mayor Eric Adams, to hire an additional 5,000 cops. Instead, Ms. Tisch said the new hirings would bulk up the New York Police Department’s headcount to 35,555 uniformed officers by the end of the year, giving Mr. Mamdani a larger police force than the one enjoyed by Mr. Adams. It will also give him slightly more officers than the 35,370 his administration budgeted for in fiscal year 2027.“We are keeping our foot on the gas this year,” Ms. Tisch said of the NYPD’s recruitment efforts. The increase is the latest indication that Ms. Tisch is playing a much stronger hand in controlling the direction of the city’s public safety initiatives than the 34-year-old Democratic Socialist mayor may have anticipated when he retained her as police commissioner in November. During that announcement, Mr. Mamdani didn’t necessarily promise the 45-year-old commissioner a “free hand” to run the NYPD, as Mayor John V. Lindsay promised Commissioner Donald F. Cawley in 1973, the year the New York Knicks last won a championship. Instead, Mr. Mamdani pledged that “together” he and Ms. Tisch “will deliver a city where rank-and-file police officers and the communities they serve alike are safe, represented, and proud to call New York their home.” If the two ever disagreed on policy, Mr. Mandani told The New York Times in April, he would hold “the final decision.”Given that latitude, Ms. Tisch appears to be testing just how much authority she can exert while also keeping Mr. Mamdani’s ambitious police reforms at a safe distance.New York City faces a multipronged security challenge this summer, starting with the World Cup, which begins next week. Then, in July, the city will host the Sail250 celebration, which boasts “the largest flotilla of tall ships ever assembled.” A potential Knicks championship could also set off a raucous celebration and subsequent parade down the Canyon of Heroes in Lower Manhattan.Finally, there is the anticipated uptick in crime that usually occurs during the summer season. Those who know Ms. Tisch are not surprised she has so far succeeded in not accommodating Mr. Mamdani’s reform agenda.“I don’t see her responding well to being told what to do when she’s the lead of an agency,” said a retired NYPD Aviation Unit commanding officer, Jim Coan, who worked with Ms. Tisch during her time as NYPD deputy commissioner of Information Technology. “She has a very strong personality.” “I have to imagine that Tisch has drawn some red lines around her continued service, and Mamdani is not ready to cross them just yet,” Councilmember Vickie Paldino, a Republican from Queens, told The New York Sun. Among those red lines are the NYPD’s “gang database” and its Strategic Response Group, both of which Mr. Mamdani pledged to discontinue but remain operational.Instead of scaling back police presence, Ms. Tisch has increased not just the number of police officers but their visibility as well. She is deploying as many as 3,800 officers to walk the beat at nighttime crime hotspots — dubbed the NYPD’s Summer Violence Reduction Plan. She has also, with the mayor’s blessing, assigned a “majority” of her officers to work 12-hour shifts during the first seven days of July, when Independence Day celebrations are at their peak. It is a move that could cost the city an additional $20 million in overtime costs, according to POLITICO.It was a notable reversal for a mayor who campaigned on slashing the NYPD’s overtime budget and redirecting the savings to help fund his new Department of Community Safety at a projected cost of $1.1 billion. In March, Mr. Mamdani signed an executive order to launch the Office of Community Safety, with a different name, smaller staff, and $260 million in funding. The new OCS aims to employ a “prevention-first, community-based solutions” approach on issues like mental health, hate crimes, subway safety, and victim support. Mr. MamdaniIn May, Mr. Mamdani appointed a behavioral health specialist, Dr. Ayesha Delany-Brumsey, as his first OCS commissioner. On Monday, Ms. Tisch told the City Council that no programs have moved to the new department from the NYPD’s purview, and her department has yet to discuss with the administration how it will work alongside her department. Unlike Mr. Mamdani, Ms. Tisch, who some have predicted may be his chief competition in the next mayoral race, doesn’t have to balance ideological promises with real-world pragmatism. Her decision-making appears motivated less by challenging the mayor’s vision and more by attaining results — for which Mr. Mamdani, for now, can take credit. “She’s popular with the rank and file, and you can say she’s a counterbalance to him, and takes some of the hair off as far as the perceptions of him being anti-cop,” a media relations specialist who represents several NYPD unions, Ken Frydman, told the Sun. “She’s winning the narrative battle, because they’re continuing to do pretty well in the public safety arena, so he’s not going to mess with that,” a retired NYPD chief of the department, John Chell, told the Sun.Mr. Mamdani’s team has so far pushed back at suggestions he is abandoning campaign promises. “The mayor has been clear that his public safety vision has always been about reducing violence while also building a system where police officers are no longer asked to serve as the city’s primary response to mental health crises and other failures of the social safety net,” a City Hall spokesman, Sam Raskin, said in a statement.But Mr. Mamdani’s supporters and police reform activists are beginning to lose their patience with the mayor. They accuse the mayor of falling short on his pledge to eliminate the NYPD Strategic Response Group and its so-called “gang database” while also allowing the city to return to the “broken windows” style of policing made famous during Rudy Giuliani’s administration, targeting low-level quality of life offenses.The bump in the NYPD’s headcount is “yet another broken promise from the mayor on police reform, joining a growing list that includes the City’s continued defense of the gang database, its refusal to disband the Strategic Response Group, and its continuation of broken-windows policing,” a Legal Aid attorney, Phil Desgranges, said in a statement. During an appearance on the “Lehrer Show” on WNYC, Mr. Mamdani attributed the slight increase in budgeted headcount to the need for giving officers ongoing training and his and Ms. Tisch’s announcement in May to create a second patrol borough command in the Bronx — two issues that he said he was informed of when he took office. As the city’s top cop in everything but title, Mr. Mamdani has so far shown little interest in exercising the full breadth of his mayoral powers. For now, he’s going along to get along.“You could say you hate the NYPD all day, until you become the mayor, and then you’re like ‘oh my God, I’ve got to keep everybody safe, I’ve got to keep the city moving,’” a retired NYPD lieutenant and host of the podcast New York’s Finest: Retired & Unfiltered, John D. Macari Jr., told The New York Sun. “Reality is smacking him in the face.”“It’s easy to make sense and sway the mayor back as he has no real-world experience in running anything, and his ideas and advisors are inept,” Mr. Coan added. The mayor may wish to reform the NYPD, and perhaps that will happen. Until then, Mr. Mamdani and the commissioner need to survive the summer of 2026, and for Mr. Mamdani, that means deferring to Ms. Tisch’s more seasoned judgment.For Ms. Paladino, however, the “status quo is nothing to celebrate.” “The center cannot hold forever,” she said.

When It Comes to New York City Public Safety, It’s Commissioner Tisch’s ‘Foot on the Gas’

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