Jessica S. Tisch, New York’s police commissioner, was giving her two sons their morning cereal on Dec. 4 when she got a text from a deputy telling her that the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare had been shot dead on a Manhattan sidewalk.
“‘Kids, I’ve got to go’,” she said, and jumped in a car that drove her to police headquarters.
She ordered that photos of the gunman be sent to all officers as a manhunt got underway. She assigned 10 analysts from the intelligence bureau to work with detectives analyzing surveillance video that might have recorded the gunman’s movements. For five days, investigators scoured thousands of hours of footage, analyzed ballistics and dove in the ponds of Central Park to look for evidence.
They were not the only law enforcement agencies that sprang into action. In San Francisco, the police recognized a surveillance photo of the suspect as a man declared missing by his family, and told the F.B.I. in New York, which eventually passed the name to the New York police. The suspect was finally captured on Monday 280 miles away from Manhattan in Altoona, Pa., after a McDonald’s patron recognized him.
The case, which has transfixed the nation, was a first test for Commissioner Tisch, who has never been a police officer and just four weeks ago could have been called the city’s street sweeper in chief. As sanitation commissioner, she oversaw more than 2,000 garbage trucks, 450 mechanical brooms, 700 salt spreaders and dozens of specialized machines to clean and plow bike lanes.
Then Mayor Eric Adams appointed her to oversee about 49,000 employees at a law enforcement agency still emerging from chaos and turmoil — and the departures of three commissioners since June 2023.
The killing of Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, placed the department under intense pressure. It thrust Commissioner Tisch, who was appointed on Nov. 20, into the spotlight.
Holding news conferences and appearing on CNN and Fox News with her chief of detectives, Joseph Kenny, she made herself the public face of the New York Police Department during days in which the force was mocked on social media for failing to find its suspect. Other critics complained that the department was expending disproportionate resources on the killing of a wealthy man. And some openly rooted for the suspect to elude capture.
“Every commissioner has their crisis, and it’s almost always immediately,” said James Essig, a former chief of detectives for the department. “Everyone else is doing their job, but everyone in the public is looking at you to see how you handle yourself.”
In an interview Friday, Commissioner Tisch, recounted how she handled the tense five days before the capture of the suspect in Altoona on Dec. 9.
The gunman had lurked outside a Hilton hotel in Midtown, where Mr. Thompson’s company was holding an investors event. He wore gloves, used a suppressor and had waited for Mr. Thompson, ignoring pedestrians around him.
“I knew that this was going to get attention,” Commissioner Tisch, 43, said during the interview in her office on the 14th floor of police headquarters, where she sat on a brown leather couch next to Chief Kenny.
On the day of the killing, Commissioner Tisch scheduled a news conference where she spoke briefly, describing the gunman’s actions as “targeted” and “brazen” before giving the mic to Chief Kenny, who briefed the news media on what investigators knew. The next day, the police released a photo of the suspected gunman that showed his face, smiling.
By then, the police believed he had left the city, and Commissioner Tisch and Chief Kenny went on CNN and Fox News, hoping the national coverage would yield tips from outside of the state.
By Sunday night, the case detectives, many of whom had not been home since the shooting, were exhausted, Chief Kenny said. Commissioner Tisch got 30 pastrami and corned beef sandwiches from the Second Avenue Deli, brought them to the cramped offices of the Manhattan North precinct where investigators had been working and posed for a picture with the investigators.
Commissioner Tisch was getting briefed by Chief Kenny once in the morning and once in the evening, and talking regularly with Rebecca Weiner, the deputy commissioner of the intelligence and counterterrorism bureau. The commissioner said she was anxious for details.
“I’m actually proud of the level of restraint, self restraint, I showed,” Commissioner Tisch said.
The F.B.I. said Friday night that it had passed the suspect’s name to the New York Police Department, a fact earlier reported by CBS News and the San Francisco Chronicle. The F.B.I. did not say when it transmitted that information, according to a statement the agency released. The police in New York, who had been inundated with tips, have said they did not know Mr. Mangione’s identity until his arrest.
On that day, Dec. 9, Commissioner Tisch was holding a morning meeting with her executives. She asked Chief Kenny how long it might take to catch the gunman — the police had recovered fingerprints from a Kind bar wrapper and DNA from a water bottle the killer had discarded.
Unless someone recognizes him from the photos and sends in a tip, he told her, the police might have to wait for DNA testing, which could take weeks if not months.
“‘So what you’re telling me is this could be anywhere from, like, five minutes from now to like several months from now,’” she recalled asking him.
Exactly five minutes later, Kaz Daughtry, the deputy commissioner of operations, who had been the first to text Commissioner Tisch about the shooting, received a new message: Altoona police had arrested someone who looked like the man in the surveillance photos.
Commissioner Tisch said she immediately began smiling. Chief Kenny was less sure and ran downstairs to his office to find out more.
He learned that the man, Luigi Mangione, 26, had been found with a gun, a silencer and fake identification cards, including one from New Jersey like the one used by the man believed to be the gunman at a hostel on the Upper West Side.
Chief Kenny rushed back up to the 14th floor. This time, he was smiling, too.
“It’s the fastest I ever ran up the stairs,” he said.
Commissioner Tisch contacted Andrew Witty, the chief executive of UnitedHealth Group, to let him know about the capture and then held another news conference, this time at City Hall. She was flanked by Chief Kenny, Mr. Adams, and Jeffrey Maddrey, the chief of department.
It was a noticeable change from the past year, when it was hard to tell who was in charge, said Corey Pegues, a retired inspector. Briefings had been led not by the commissioner, but by lower-level executives, many of whom had made a habit of expressing hostility toward reporters and critics as the department was caught up in the swirl of corruption investigations that has engulfed the Adams administration.
Commissioner Tisch is the fourth commissioner in the past three years and the third named in the past year alone.
Edward Caban resigned as commissioner a week after federal investigators seized his phone in one of the investigations. Thomas Donlon, a former F.B.I. agent, lasted one month as interim commissioner. Before them, Keechant Sewell, the first woman to run the department, left after 18 months, frustrated that Mr. Adams was not allowing her to run the department as she wanted.
The New York Police Department did not crack the chief executive murder case alone. But Commissioner Tisch’s news conference sent a new message, Mr. Pegues said: “I’m in charge. I’m the police commissioner, and I’m going to be the one answering to this.”
For Commissioner Tisch, an individual crime — even one like Mr. Thompson’s killing — might be the easiest challenge. The department’s overtime costs have ballooned past $1 billion and officers have complained that they are overworked. She must contend with mistrust of an agency that makes a disproportionate number of arrests and stops of Black and Latino residents, said Robert Gangi, director of the Police Reform Organizing Project.
The city is bracing for an immigration crackdown as President-elect Donald J. Trump has vowed to deport millions of people, and Mr. Adams is looking for ways to skirt the city’s sanctuary provisions. That raises questions about the role Commissioner Tisch and the Police Department will play in such efforts, said Daniel Coates, spokesman for Make the Road New York, an advocacy group for immigrant rights.
“Those are going to be the real tests,” he said. “That’s when we will learn who she works for and what she represents.”
In the interview, Commissioner Tisch spoke only about the case at hand and not what lies ahead. But she said she was the kind of leader who could handle several challenges at once.
“I’m someone who can compartmentalize,” she said. “As most people do.”
The post C.E.O.’s Killing Poses Early Test for New N.Y.P.D. Commissioner appeared first on New York Times.
