Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch told the U.S. attorney general, Pam Bondi, on Monday that New York, where crime has been dropping for months, does not need the presence of the National Guard, according to a law enforcement official with knowledge of the matter.
During the 30-minute meeting, held late Monday afternoon at Police Department headquarters in Manhattan, Commissioner Tisch noted the city’s record-low number of shootings and shooting victims, the official said.
She also touted the department’s use of drone technology to solve crimes and its quality-of-life teams that crack down on motorized scooters on sidewalks, double-parked vehicles and blaring music, the official said.
The Trump administration has spent weeks painting major cities as urban hellscapes that require dramatic intervention from the federal government. An executive order on Monday formalizes the creation of specially trained National Guard units that can be mobilized for “ensuring the public safety and order.”
The administration this month sent armed National Guard troops into the streets of Washington, D.C., saying that crime was out of control in the city, and the White House has said that Chicago, Baltimore and New York could be next. In fact, violent crime in Chicago, Washington and other major cities has fallen in recent years.
The president has not suggested sending troops to cities in Republican-leaning states. His order appears to carve out a much larger role for the National Guard than it has previously had, creating a force that the president could deploy regardless of whether state and local law enforcement is able to handle any civil unrest.
Efforts to reach the Justice Department for comment on the meeting were not immediately successful. The Police Department did not issue a public comment on the meeting.
Monday’s meeting in New York came hours after President Trump signed another executive order aimed at stopping states from limiting the use of bail in lower-level criminal cases. As part of the order, he directed Ms. Bondi to identify jurisdictions that have “substantially eliminated cash bail as a potential condition for crimes that pose a clear threat to public safety.” Mr. Trump threatened federal funding cuts in those states.
In 2019, New York rewrote its bail laws to to bar judges from requiring bail in some misdemeanor and low-level felony cases. For decades criminal justice advocates had said that the bail system penalized poor people who remained in jail while those with resources got out on bail. The changes were bitterly opposed by some law enforcement officials.
Since taking office in 2021, however, Gov. Kathy Hochul has repeatedly persuaded the Legislature to make the state’s revised bail laws stricter, giving judges more discretion to keep people they deem dangerous behind bars before trial.
“President Trump has no concept of how the law works in New York,” Governor Hochul said in a statement Monday. Not only had the state not eliminated cash bail, she said, but its violent crime rate was at a six-decade low.
She called the president’s threat to withhold federal funds “reckless,” saying it “would only undercut law enforcement and make our communities less safe.”
In March of 2024, Ms. Hochul herself sent the National Guard to patrol the New York City subway to address what she said were persistent concerns about safety. She has framed that deployment as a success, pointing to decreases in crime rates in the 12 months that followed. Even so, the move was sharply criticized by Democrats from across the political spectrum who said that the sight of armed soldiers on the streets made New Yorkers feel less, not more safe.
Chelsia Rose Marcius is a criminal justice reporter for The Times, covering the New York Police Department.
Grace Ashford covers New York government and politics for The Times.
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