Jessica S. Tisch, New York City’s police commissioner, announced on Thursday that she was replacing the department’s combative head of communications, part of a shake-up of the department’s upper ranks and other moves that suggest she is trying to restore order to an agency reeling from chaos and dysfunction at the top.
The announcement came 10 days after Ms. Tisch ordered 500 officers who had been “improperly transferred” from their permanent posts to go back to their regular assignments, according to an internal police memo. That practice, known as “telephone message transfers,” had led to short staffing in parts of the department and slower emergency response times, according to the memo, which went out Dec. 9 and was reported on Thursday by Gothamist.
The Police Department has been shaken by the departure of three commissioners in an 18-month period and a sense that Mayor Eric Adams, a former police captain, was in charge of the agency instead of the leaders he had appointed. On Monday, during a public safety meeting, Mr. Adams praised Ms. Tisch’s leadership since she was sworn in last month, including her decision to conduct an internal audit that led to the discovery that hundreds of officers had been placed in other units without authorization.
On Thursday, she continued to make her mark with five high-ranking appointments.
Tarik Sheppard, the deputy commissioner for public information and an ally of Mr. Adams, will be replaced by Delaney Kemper, who most recently worked as the top spokeswoman for Letitia James, the New York attorney general. Mr. Sheppard has clashed with the news media repeatedly, and made headlines of his own. During the New York City Marathon last month, he and Thomas Donlon, then the interim police commissioner, got into a verbal dispute over where to stand for a photo that became so heated that another high-ranking officer broke it up.
Ms. Kemper, who will start on Jan. 13, “is well versed in the fast-moving, dynamic world of the nation’s largest media market, and possesses a strong fluency in law enforcement communications,” Ms. Tisch said in a statement announcing the appointments.
Carlos Nieves, the assistant commissioner of public information, will serve as acting deputy commissioner until her arrival.
The four other new appointments include people who currently work in the department or had worked there before moving on to other government agencies:
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Kristine Ryan, the chief administrative officer of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority Police Department, will become deputy commissioner of management and budget on Jan. 2.
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Yisroel Hecht will become deputy commissioner of information technology on Dec. 30. He is currently a deputy commissioner in the city’s Office of Technology and Innovation.
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Steven Harte, who was once an assistant commissioner at the Police Department, will become deputy commissioner of support services on Dec. 30. He is following Ms. Tisch from the Department of Sanitation, where he was a deputy commissioner and Ms. Tisch served as commissioner for two years. Mr. Harte oversaw solid-waste management operations, facilities and fleet operations.
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Alex Crohn will become deputy commissioner of strategic initiatives on Jan. 2. Mr. Crohn, who like Ms. Tisch graduated from Harvard Law School, worked in the Police Department as a director of strategic projects and executive counsel before he took a job as assistant counsel in former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office.
It is unclear what Mr. Sheppard and the others who were replaced will do next.
At a brunch with reporters on Thursday, Mr. Sheppard thanked the news media for informing the public, and his staff for their work during what “has been probably one of the toughest years to work in D.C.P.I. in the department’s history.”
“It’s really been a roller coaster of some things that this department has done,” he said.
At times, the city and the department have “been represented in a negative light,” he said. “And some of that is well deserved.”
The other move by Ms. Tisch, to shift 500 officers back to their permanent posts, was to be completed by Dec. 13, according to the memo. The out-of-place officers contributed to slower response times to critical incidents and made it more difficult to “ensure sufficient manpower for operational matters,” according to the memo.
“You need to be back on patrol,” Mr. Adams said during the public safety meeting on Monday. “Everyone needs to be back on patrol so that we don’t have shortages of police personnel. I want my people in the precincts. That is what Commissioner Tisch is going to do.”
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