Shifting 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 put up.
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 substitute, 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 the 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 file of enhancing metropolis operations.
The mayor mentioned he “needed a battle-tested leader, someone that understands what it is to lead,” however rejected the notion that the suitable individual for the job ought to have been a uniformed NYPD officer, which Tisch by no means was.
“I push back on anyone who believes she has to wear a police uniform to take the police department to the next direction. She can wear any uniform and accomplish the task,” mentioned Adams.
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 device with immediate entry to surveillance cameras and license-plate readers.
As deputy commissioner for data expertise, she spearheaded use of body-worn cameras and smartphones, reworked 911 dispatching, launched a gunshot-detection system and labored with the town’s transit company to make police radios work within the subway.
“Once I started, I never wanted to stop,” Tisch advised a Harvard alumni publication final 12 months.
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 town’s expertise company. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the next 12 months, she had a key function within the metropolis’s response, managing the digital infrastructure that facilitated a speedy 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 enhancing cleanliness, lowering stench and eliminating rats. Town lastly began requiring trash baggage be positioned in bins for pickup — one thing different cities had accomplished 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 depart 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, relatively, 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 Inns and CNA Monetary. Her mom, Merryl Tisch, is former chancellor of the state Board of Regents, which supervises schooling.
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 tutorial 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 advised the Harvard Regulation Bulletin that it was a pal that led her to public service.
She graduated in 2008 with regulation and Grasp of Enterprise Administration levels, however the “financial crisis was hitting, and I thought it’d be difficult to find a job,” Tisch advised 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 advised her: “Trust me, this will be right for you.”
As deputy commissioner of knowledge expertise 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 Telephone working system.
After the New York Put up derided the choice in 2017 as a expensive boondoggle, Tisch defined in a weblog put up that she selected the telephones as a result of they built-in with present division expertise, enabling quicker emergency responses whereas placing very important knowledge at officers’ fingertips. On the time, she wrote, the undertaking was 45% underneath price range and the telephones and their iPhone replacements had been supplied for free of charge.
Tisch bumped into bother once more when she loaned an ex-NYPD colleague $75,000 for regulation college and later forgave the debt after that individual was rehired, transferred to her supervision and given a pay improve. 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 put up however resigned final 12 months, simply 18 months into her tenure, amid hypothesis that he was undermining her authority.
Underneath her substitute, Caban, the NYPD tacked extra lenient in disciplining officers and extra aggressive in taking up criticism. Some high deputies posted social media screeds concentrating on critics and reporters, or castigated them in individual or on the telephone. The division even ditched its longtime slogan — “Courtesy, Professionalism, Respect” — for one centered on crimefighting and public security.
Related Press reporter Philip Marcelo contributed to this report.
