Jessica Tisch will confront a crushing list of problems as soon as she returns to the New York Police Department next week.
Officers, complaining of stress and overwork, have been fleeing. Overtime costs are climbing. Crime is inching down, but assaults and rapes have jumped and New Yorkers remain nervous about random attacks.
Then there are complaints about increased surveillance, a rise in the use of stop-and-frisk tactics and a federal judge’s report in September that showed police leaders had failed to punish officers who abused the practice.
Welcome back, Ms. Tisch.
On Monday, Ms. Tisch, the city’s head of sanitation, will be sworn in as the 48th commissioner in the Police Department’s history and its second female leader. The question is whether Ms. Tisch — who has three degrees from Harvard, has never walked a beat and comes from a family worth $10.1 billion, according to Forbes — can bring the change many say is desperately needed.
“That department has phenomenal problems,” said William Bratton, a former New York police commissioner who promoted Ms. Tisch to deputy commissioner of information and technology during an earlier stint of hers there. “The department needs a shake-up. It really does. It needs a new energy.”
Ms. Tisch, who left the department in 2020 after serving as an intelligence analyst and then deputy commissioner, according to city records, will become Mayor Eric Adams’s fourth commissioner during his single term. She will return to an agency that has been buffeted by a federal investigation that drove out one commissioner, another inquiry that overshadowed the brief tenure of her interim predecessor, Thomas Donlon, and a pervasive sense of chaos and indiscipline.
Even before Edward A. Caban resigned as commissioner in September amid an investigation into his brother’s business practices, top chiefs had been straying from protocol, using the department’s public information account to call reporters liars, berating them on social media and tangling with politicians who had criticized the department.
Keechant Sewell, the first female commissioner and Mr. Adams’s initial appointment for the job, left in June 2023, frustrated that the mayor’s allies in City Hall and the department were thwarting her attempts to make her own promotions and staff picks.
Ms. Tisch shouldn’t have the same problems managing the department’s strongest personalities, Mr. Bratton said. She is coming into the department knowing its culture — her previous tenure lasted 12 years — and she already spent two years in Mr. Adams’s administration, leading the Sanitation Department.
“If I were a betting man, I’d put all my money on her,” Mr. Bratton said. “She’s tough. And she doesn’t tolerate incompetence and she doesn’t tolerate posturing.”
Ms. Tisch did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In an interview with The New York Post on Wednesday, after Mr. Adams announced her appointment, she suggested she would have little patience for games.
“I care less about the palace intrigue and more about the substance of the work,” she told the newspaper.
Her family is deeply enmeshed in the city — two relatives sit on the board of trustees of the New York City Police Foundation and family members donated to Mr. Adams’s 2021 mayoral campaign.
The family’s wealth could help distance her from the corruption investigations swirling around the department and City Hall, said Jillian Snider, a lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former New York police officer.
“It would be fair to say someone who comes from that level of wealth would be less susceptible to temptation,” she said. In all Ms. Tisch’s years in government, “there’s been no scandal,” Ms. Snider said. “There’s been no corruption or even the perception of something corrupt in her background that I know of.”
Ms. Tisch first decided to apply for a job at the Police Department in 2008, when she graduated from Harvard Law School, according to a 2019 interview with The Harvard Law Bulletin.
The financial crisis had hit the country and she was worried about finding a job. A friend suggested she go for a position in counterterrorism.
“I can’t even imagine what someone like me would do at the Police Department,” Ms. Tisch recalled thinking, according to the interview.
Raymond W. Kelly, the commissioner at the time, hired her as an analyst and Mr. Bratton later promoted her to deputy commissioner.
She helped build a 911 app, which allowed officers to receive real-time information about emergency calls directly on phones and tablets. Ms. Tisch also helped create the Domain Awareness System, which assimilates data from several surveillance tools — license plate readers, closed-circuit television streams, facial recognition software and phone call histories — and uses it to identify people.
There was resistance, according to officials who worked in the department at the time. Supervisors were reluctant to give officers electronic devices, worried they would spend time online instead of interacting with the public.
But Ms. Tisch insisted that if officers could be trusted with firearms, they could be trusted with smartphones, said John Miller, a former deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism.
“She doesn’t take no for an answer,” said Kenneth Corey, a former chief of department who worked with Ms. Tisch when they were both at the Intelligence Bureau. “She’s not intimidated by anyone.”
Her style of leadership has been described as demanding. Mr. Bratton said she had a “sternness” about her.
“You don’t see her laugh a lot,” he said. “She smiles, but you don’t see her laugh a lot.”
But a no-nonsense demeanor is critical in a department filled with machismo, Mr. Bratton said.
“She was a young woman in a department that is run by tough men,” he said. “Her background was Harvard and she’s in the Police Department. There was a cynicism and a ‘Who the hell is she?’ She didn’t let it bother her.”
Ms. Tisch’s biggest obstacle as she returns could be that she never served in uniform, said Ms. Snider, the lecturer.
She said officers might not feel confident if “their top executor does not know the job that they do every day.”
But someone with a deep background in management and organizing could be more beneficial to the department now than someone who has walked a beat, Ms. Snider said.
Several officers interviewed said they were less concerned about who led the department than about who their direct supervisors were, how many vacation days they got and how much overtime they might be forced to work.
Police departments across the country have struggled to hire and retain officers. New York’s department has had the same struggles in recent years, with many officers leaving to work in other cities. A recent study by John Jay found that at least 25 percent of police officers were planning to either leave the profession or pursue opportunities with other law enforcement agencies.
On Wednesday, as he announced Ms. Tisch’s appointment, Mr. Adams said that he would add two academy classes with the goal of putting 1,600 new officers on the streets by October 2025.
Ms. Tisch has spoken about her desire to comprehend what beat officers endure. In her interview with The Harvard Bulletin, Ms. Tisch said that she had gone to crime scenes involving robberies and shootings and rode with officers in Brooklyn.
“To do my job well, you really need to understand how the officers do their job,” she said at the time.
One ride-along happened after the Police Department first deployed ShotSpotter, a gunfire detection system, in 2015. Since then, police departments like Chicago’s have stopped using the system because of privacy concerns from civil liberties groups and research that has questioned its effectiveness.
A recent report by New York City’s comptroller found that ShotSpotter, on which the department has spent more than $45 million, was overwhelmingly inaccurate and led officers to spend hundreds of hours each month investigating nonexistent shots.
New York, however, continues to use it, and Ms. Tisch’s enthusiasm for surveillance technology has given some civil liberties groups pause.
On Thursday, Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate, said that he hoped Ms. Tisch would seriously engage with groups outside the Police Department. Technology is just one part of that effort, he said, and “technology in itself isn’t the problem.”
“I always have hope when we see new leadership,” he said. “It’s a new opportunity to correct things in the past.”
Mr. Bratton said he hoped that critics and skeptics would give Ms. Tisch the opportunity to implement whatever vision she may have for the department.
“Let’s give her a chance,” he said.
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