5 things to know about Jessica Tisch

Jessica Tisch’s crimefighting won’t end with the Eric Adams administration. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani announced Wednesday that the New York City police commissioner has accepted his offer to stay on in the role when he takes office in January. 

Tisch is already one of the most powerful – and widely praised – commissioners in New York City. Here’s what you need to know about Mamdani’s first commissioner hire.

She diverges from Mamdani on some major policy areas

The fervor around Mamdani’s decision to retain Tisch is rooted in part in their apparent disagreements on how to best approach policing. Mamdani, who ran on a plan to shift some major responsibilities away from the NYPD – and in 2020 called for defunding the agency – was likely going to encounter some awkwardness with the agency regardless of its leader. (Former Mayor Bill de Blasio, who ran on being a reformer, certainly did.) But Mamdani and Tisch have some specific documented differences – on bail reform, Raise the Age laws and headcount, for example. How Mamdani’s planned Department of Community Safety and stated desire to disband the Strategic Response Group will play out are still open questions.

Tisch addressed these differences in opinion matter-of-factly in an email to the NYPD rank-and-file on Wednesday. “Now, do the Mayor-elect and I agree on everything? No, we don’t,” she wrote. “But in speaking with him, it’s clear that we share broad and crucial priorities: the importance of public safety, the need to continue driving down crime, and the need to maintain stability and order across the department. We also agree that you deserve the city’s respect and support.”

Her appointment – and retention – has won bipartisan praise 

Gov. Kathy Hochul is a huge fan of Tisch, and Hochul thinks her appointment will mollify President Donald Trump. “This is one item I suggested would be very helpful,” Hochul said on Wednesday of earlier conversations she had with Mamdani. “It does tie into our overall narrative to the president that, listen, it’s going to be fine here.” Republican Rep. Nicole Malliotakis told The New York Times that Tisch had “done a good job and she will be a steady hand.” Police Benevolent Association President Patrick Hendry was also pleased. Socialist Mamdani ally and state Sen. Julia Salazar has also previously voiced support for Mamdani’s decision to keep the commissioner. 

To be fair, Tisch has her fair share of detractors – including those on the left who argue that Mamdani should have appointed his own more reform-oriented commissioner.

She comes from a billionaire family

New York City isn’t short on career civil servants. But they don’t usually come from Tisch’s background. The NYPD commissioner is a scion of the billionaire Tisch family, who assembled a hotel empire starting in the mid-20th century that grew into the conglomerate Loews Corp. today. The family’s mark on the city is hard to miss – there’s the Tisch School of the Arts, the Tisch Gallery at the Met, and prolific donations to political candidates. (Members of the extended family donated to Andrew Cuomo’s campaign, but Tisch herself declined to endorse any candidate even after her current boss dropped out of the race.)

As someone with a wealth of other options likely available to her, Tisch’s commitment to civil service was described in a Post op-ed as Carnegian – a throwback to elites like Carnegie and Roosevelt who felt compelled to give back through public service. She isn’t the only one in her family to hold public office: Her mother Merryl Tisch was chancellor of the state Board of Regents.

She is a 17-year civil servant

Many, though not all, police commissioners start out as beat cops, racking up years of uniformed service before climbing the ranks. Tisch isn’t one of them. But the vast majority of her career has been in public service, starting out at the NYPD in 2008 as a civilian specialist in the Counterterrorism Bureau after finishing a dual graduate degree at Harvard. If she didn’t climb the uniformed ranks, she did the equivalent on the civilian side, rising through the Counterterrorism Bureau to becoming the deputy commissioner of information technology at the NYPD. De Blasio later appointed her to the first of three commissioner-level positions she would hold, heading the city’s tech agency, the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications. Mayor Eric Adams then picked her to lead the Department of Sanitation – a role she also called her dream job – before being appointed at a time of political crisis for Adams to what a source described as the real longtime dream, NYPD commissioner.

Only a few previous short-term roles early in her career diverged from her public service track record, including a summer internship at the New York Post. 

She’s put the “tech” in technocrat

Those who have become familiar with Tisch during the Adams administration likely know her for her work on trash containerization at the Department of Sanitation or the clean-up job that won her some praise after taking the reins at the NYPD. Or, even more likely, for “the rats don’t run this city, we do” – a throwaway line turned viral TikTok sound.

But in her prior roles at the NYPD and DoITT, Tisch had a direct hand in some of the city’s largest tech and IT-related undertakings. That includes the development of the city’s sprawling network of surveillance cameras known as the Domain Awareness System. The system has been credited with protecting the city from threats while also being criticized by civil liberties advocates as an “Orwellian nightmare.”

At DoITT, Tisch worked on early efforts to deploy 5G service. She was also at the helm of the agency during the COVID-19 pandemic, leading efforts to distribute iPads to students for remote learning and bringing a vaccine sign-up infrastructure online.