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…
— 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.
