Mamdani says NYC police commissioner to stay in post
New York City’s mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, said the city’s police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, agreed to stay in office to address his concerns about her past criticism of the New York Police Department.
In a statement, Mamdani praised Tisch for reducing crime in the city while “crackdown on corruption in the upper echelons of the police force.”
Tisch’s decision to remain on the job as commissioner is likely to provide some comfort to business leaders and others in the city who were 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.
This appointment also signals a political alliance between two leaders with opposing views and completely different backgrounds.
A democratic socialist, Mamdani campaigned for transformative social and economic change in the city.
Tisch is the heir to a multibillion-dollar family fortune and is considered a stable moderate family.
Tisch said he and Mamdani “share many of the same public safety goals for New York City: reducing crime, making communities safer, rooting out corruption, and providing our officers with the tools, support and resources they need to carry out their noble work.”
Tisch took control of the city’s scandal-plagued police department last November.
He won praise from the business community and some police reform groups by handling a shooting and several major crime categories.
At a debate weeks before the election, Mamdani announced that he planned to ask Tisch to remain police commissioner.
But Tisch had declined to discuss the proposal before and immediately after Mamdani’s victory, saying he was focused on running the department under Mayor Eric Adams.
“Commissioner Tisch addressed the broken status quo, began ensuring accountability, rooting out corruption, and reducing crime in the five boroughs,” Mamdani said in the debate. he said.
However, there are also obvious political differences between the incoming mayor and the police chief.
Tisch strongly criticized changes to the state’s bail laws that Mamdani supported.
While the mayor-elect has previously called for defunding the police, Tisch advocated for expanding their ranks earlier this year, saying “we need more police, and I’m not going to overstate that.”
Mamdani later withdrew his call for the department to be defunded and said he would keep the police force at its current numbers.
