Transferring to stabilize an administration roiled by investigations, resignations and his personal indictment, New York Metropolis Mayor Eric Adams on Wednesday appointed sanitation chief Jessica Tisch as police commissioner. A metropolis authorities stalwart and ex-NYPD official, she’ll be simply the second lady within the high-profile, high-pressure publish.
The transfer comes at a essential time for the nation’s largest police division, shoring up its management after a tumultuous stretch punctuated by former commissioner Edward Caban’s exit in September amid a federal investigation. Days later, his interim alternative, Thomas Donlon, disclosed that he, too, had been searched by the FBI.
Tisch, 43, the Harvard-educated scion of a rich New York household, has labored for town for 16 years, holding management roles in a number of companies. As sanitation commissioner, she turned TikTok well-known when she declared in 2022, “The rats don’t run the city, we do.”
“I need someone that’s going to take the police department into the next century,” Adams mentioned, praising Tisch as a “visionary” and lauding her monitor document of bettering metropolis operations.
Tisch mentioned she believes “very deeply in the nobility of the police and the profession of policing” and is “looking forward to coming home.”
Tisch’s first job in metropolis authorities was within the NYPD’s counterterrorism bureau. As planning and coverage director, she helped form post-9/11 safety infrastructure, deploying cellular radiation detectors and serving to develop a digital information-sharing instrument with prompt entry to surveillance cameras and license-plate readers.
As deputy commissioner for data know-how, she spearheaded use of body-worn cameras and smartphones, reworked 911 dispatching, launched a gunshot-detection system and labored with town’s transit company to make police radios work within the subway.
“Once I started, I never wanted to stop,” Tisch informed a Harvard alumni publication final yr.
Tisch’s tenure has transcended three mayors: Michael Bloomberg, Invoice de Blasio and Adams.
In 2019, after greater than a decade on the NYPD, de Blasio appointed her to run the metropolis’s know-how company. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the next yr, she had a key function within the metropolis’s response, managing the digital infrastructure that facilitated a fast shift to distant work, studying and on-line providers.
As Sanitation Commissioner since 2022, Tisch led what the division calls a “Trash Revolution” aimed toward bettering cleanliness, lowering stench and eliminating rats. Town lastly began requiring trash baggage be positioned in bins for pickup — one thing different cities had performed for years.
Earlier than Wednesday’s announcement, Tisch was testifying at a Metropolis Council listening to on the bin necessities — her final act as Sanitation Commissioner. About 90 minutes in, she mentioned she had a “hard stop” and needed to go away with out giving any indication of the brand new job.
Tisch’s household wealth has led to criticism that she’s a nepo child — or, somewhat, a nepo appointee.
Adams pushed again on that, saying Wednesday that Tisch “does not have to be in city government. She’s here because of the love of the city.”
Tisch’s father, James S. Tisch, is president and CEO of Loews Company, the conglomerate that owns Loews Motels and CNA Monetary. Her mom, Merryl Tisch, is former chancellor of the state Board of Regents, which supervises training.
Her late grandfather, Laurence Tisch, as soon as led CBS. Her cousins are co-owners of the NFL’s Giants. The household has given tens of millions of {dollars} to cultural and educational establishments and is the namesake of New York College’s Tisch College of the Arts.
Her husband, Daniel Levine, is a enterprise capitalist. They’ve two sons.
Nearer to her new job, her uncle Andrew Tisch and cousin Alexander Tisch, are on the board of the New York Metropolis Police Basis, a nonprofit that funds some NYPD work, together with stationing counterterrorism officers in additional than dozen cities worldwide, and the Crime Stoppers tip reward program.
Tisch informed the Harvard Legislation Bulletin that it was a good friend that led her to public service.
She graduated in 2008 with legislation and Grasp of Enterprise Administration levels, however the “financial crisis was hitting, and I thought it’d be difficult to find a job,” Tisch informed the publication in 2019.
“A friend said: ‘Why don’t you go work at the NYPD? I know someone there.’ I said, ‘I can’t even imagine what someone like me would do at the Police Department,’” Tisch mentioned.
David Cohen, then deputy commissioner of counterterrorism, prompt Tisch work for him — resulting in her first job as planning and coverage director.
Tisch recalled telling him: “I don’t know. Counterterrorism sounds really scary. I’m more into ‘Law & Order’ kind of stuff.”
However, she mentioned, Cohen informed her: “Trust me, this will be right for you.”
As deputy commissioner of knowledge know-how from 2014 to 2019, she helped modernize the division whereas navigating — and pushing again at — criticism of her determination to equip officers with smartphones utilizing the unpopular Home windows Cellphone working system.
After the New York Publish derided the choice in 2017 as a expensive boondoggle, Tisch defined in a weblog publish that she selected the telephones as a result of they built-in with present division know-how, enabling quicker emergency responses whereas placing very important information at officers’ fingertips. On the time, she wrote, the undertaking was 45% beneath funds and the telephones and their iPhone replacements had been offered for free of charge.
Tisch bumped into hassle once more when she loaned an ex-NYPD colleague $75,000 for legislation college and later forgave the debt after that particular person was rehired, transferred to her supervision and given a pay enhance. Town’s Conflicts of Curiosity Board fined her $2,000.
Now she’s taking cost of a division in but extra chaos.
Adams’ first commissioner, Keechant Sewell, made historical past as the primary lady within the publish however resigned final yr, simply 18 months into her tenure, amid hypothesis that he was undermining her authority.
Below her alternative, Caban, the NYPD tacked extra lenient in disciplining officers and extra aggressive in taking up criticism. Some high deputies posted social media screeds focusing on critics and reporters, or castigated them in particular person or on the cellphone. The division even ditched its longtime slogan — “Courtesy, Professionalism, Respect” — for one targeted on crimefighting and public security.
