On a walk through Queens with a City Council member in 2022, Jessica Tisch noticed an abundance of trash scattered on traffic islands, step streets, and greenways.
Ms. Tisch, who had just started her tenure as the city’s sanitation commissioner, asked why these particular areas were so littered. The reason was infuriating. City Hall had issued a rule back in 1983 that gave each agency responsibility for maintaining its own properties – leaving refuse to accumulate in no-man’s-lands.
So Ms. Tisch convinced Mayor Eric Adams to allocate $14 million for a new unit that would regularly remove trash from these 1,700 locations.
Why We Wrote This
New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch has won plaudits for modernizing the agency and rooting out corruption. But she and mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani hold different views about the causes of violent crime and how to address it.
“If you live in one of these neighborhoods, you see this dumping every day and you think no one cares about it,” says sanitation department spokesman Joshua Goodman. “The one thing Jessie will not accept is: ‘That’s just the way it is.’”
The public administrator and scion to one of New York’s most powerful families rapidly ascended the city’s bureaucracy to lead the nation’s largest police department last year, a position she has described as her dream job, despite never having served as a uniformed officer. Ms. Tisch’s relentless drive to modernize the NYPD and other agencies has drawn praise from former New York mayors and police commissioners across multiple administrations.
Her next boss may not be as easy to win over.
With New York’s mayoral election just two weeks away, and Mayor Adams out of the race, Ms. Tisch could soon find herself reporting to Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist who has criticized the police department’s entrenched power. The Queens Assembly member, who holds a double-digit lead in the polls, has apologized for past comments calling the NYPD “racist” and a “major threat to public safety,” and has worked to reassure voters that he no longer supports “defunding” the police. But he also campaigned on creating a new agency that would deploy mental health teams instead of police to respond to 911 calls.
He and Ms. Tisch have eyed each other with a wary respect. Mr. Mamdani has praised Ms. Tisch’s efforts to reduce shootings and cull corrupt officers whom Mr. Adams, a former cop, had placed in high-ranking roles.
Still, he has not committed to keeping her on as commissioner, despite pressure from allies. And Ms. Tisch and Mr. Mamdani have expressed sharply different views on the causes of violent crime and the best strategies for tackling it.
If she leaves and crime rises, Mr. Mamdani could find himself in four years facing a political rival already being touted by some as a mayoral hopeful. If he reappoints her but slashes police funding and reorganizes the agency, Ms. Tisch could face a difficult decision.
“Jessie has many great career options, but she is on a mission at the NYPD that I believe requires a few more years on the job,” says Kathy Wylde, president and CEO of the Partnership for New York City. “She can work with anyone.”
“A tough boss”
Ms. Tisch was born into a family of corporate titans and philanthropists. Her grandfather, Laurence, co-owned Loews Corp., a hospitality and insurance conglomerate. Her father, James, led Loews for 48 years before stepping down in January. But it was her mother, Merryl, chairman of the SUNY Board of Trustees and former Board of Regents chancellor, who instilled in her the virtues of civic leadership.
“People ask me why I’m so driven,” Ms. Tisch told New York Magazine. “My mother is definitely my role model.” (The NYPD declined to make Ms. Tisch available for an interview.)
She grew up with two younger brothers on Manhattan’s tony Upper East Side and attended Harvard University, where she won a national championship in crew as a coxswain and completed degrees in law and business.
Although she interned at a law firm and the White House while in school, it was not until a friend prodded her to apply for a counterterrorism analyst position with the NYPD in 2008 that she contemplated a career in public service.
Ms. Tisch found she excelled at the intense minutia of securing sensitive sites and foiling attacks. She was promoted in 2014 to deputy commissioner of innovation and technology.
“She can be a tough boss and doesn’t suffer fools lightly,” says former New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton. But she also “leads in a way [where] people … under her have the opportunity to be heard.”
In December 2019, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio appointed Ms. Tisch to lead the city’s technology office. During the pandemic, she built a contact-tracing system from scratch, then managed the distribution system that provided COVID-19 vaccines to 90% of city residents.
When Mr. Adams asked her what agency she wanted to run, Ms. Tisch picked sanitation. There, she sought to tame the city’s surging rat population, launched a citywide curbside composting program, and unveiled durable plastic garbage bins required for all residential buildings by 2026.
She also made less-publicized changes that had significant effects. She had senior sanitation leaders review data weekly, which reduced missed collections to near zero. And instead of focusing on the amount of trash collected by garbage trucks, she prioritized a different metric: how long it festered on curbs.
“The efficiency metric was important, but the point of data is to improve the quality of life,” says Mr. Goodman, the sanitation spokesman.
Sanitation was a bright spot in an Adams administration riddled by charges of corruption and lawlessness – and no agency exemplified the dysfunction more than the police department. Misconduct complaints jumped to their highest level since 2014, including among Mr. Adams’ hand-picked deputies, as officers retired in droves.
After the third police commissioner in three years resigned last October, Mr. Adams turned to Ms. Tisch to lead the department. She quickly ousted dozens of leaders, including two top internal affairs chiefs, halved the department’s 87-person press office, and began to overhaul its disciplinary process.
Since then, Ms. Tisch has deftly managed several high-profile cases, including the manhunt after the assassination of the UnitedHealthcare CEO. She has also been credited with helping to convince the Trump administration not to send the National Guard to New York.
Her targeted deployment of officers to high-crime areas has already had an effect. The city has experienced seven straight quarters of declines in major crime, with the fewest reported shootings on record for any year’s first nine months.
“She knows when to be in front of the cameras and when to cede attention. That’s a rare skill in politics,” says political consultant Neal Kwatra. “She has far exceeded any perception that she’s in her job because of her name. She’s done a hell of a job.”
Affordability concerns outrank crime
Partly because of Ms. Tisch’s efforts, public safety concerns have not dominated this year’s mayoral campaign, unlike four years ago.
That allowed Mr. Mamdani to gain traction with his message of tackling the city’s affordability crisis, winning the Democratic primary last June.
Ms. Tisch has avoided commenting directly on the race, but has privately indicated she wants to continue in her role next year. In meetings with Mr. Mamdani this summer, business leaders and public officials have urged him to retain her.
“Keeping her on would inoculate the next mayor against any charge that they would be soft on crime,” says Ms. Wylde.
On Sunday, Mr. Mamdani’s rival Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor, said he would keep Ms. Tisch on if he were elected.
Queens Borough President Donovan Richards says Mr. Mamdani’s first question to him in an Astoria meeting two weeks after the June primary was whether he should keep her.
“He’s much more pragmatic than I thought he was,” says Mr. Richards, who hopes Ms. Tisch stays in the job. “Public safety has to be the highest priority, especially with a progressive administration. People are looking for stability.”
But Mr. Mamdani’s progressive allies may want him to go in a different direction. When Ms. Tisch told the Citizens Budget Commission last month that crime rose in the years following the pandemic because of the legislature’s criminal justice reforms, one Assembly member tweeted, “So odd that the heiress of one of the city’s wealthiest families doesn’t seem to understand the sociology of social insecurity and its connection to crime.” (Mr. Mamdani responded by noting that similar crime spikes were seen across the country.)
Mr. Bratton says Mr. Mamdani will not be able to find anyone who can rival Ms. Tisch’s experience and expertise. But the former police commissioner recently said in a podcast interview that he would advise her not to stay on in a Mamdani administration.
“My suggestion is to think long and hard,” Mr. Bratton tells the Monitor. “Right now, she’s well-thought-of by the public. You don’t want to squander that in the first months of a new administration.”
Regardless of what she decides, he predicts that she won’t be intimidated by the Democratic Party’s new wunderkind.
“Jessie likes a challenge,” he says. “You don’t take on the position of police commissioner if you aren’t somebody … interested in taking on that challenge.”
