When Jessica Tisch, New York City’s police commissioner, announced on Wednesday that she would continue to lead the force under Zohran Mamdani’s mayoralty, she swiftly acknowledged that she and her prospective boss differ in their approaches to policing.
“Do the mayor-elect and I agree on everything? No, we don’t,” Commissioner Tisch wrote in an email to rank-and-file officers.
Their viewpoints, in part, are rooted in their political beliefs.
Mr. Mamdani is a democratic socialist who has said he supports scaling back the Police Department budget, including by cutting officers’ overtime, and increasing the power of an oversight board that recommends discipline. Commissioner Tisch is a billionaire heiress and technocrat who has often criticized liberal policies, including laws that limit bail, set strict time limits for prosecutors to turn over evidence to defense lawyers, and prevent juveniles from being tried as adults.
Here are some points of disagreement between them.
The Makeup of the Force
It remains unclear how much power Commissioner Tisch will have under Mr. Mamdani to choose her executive staff or increase the number of officers in the department.
Since her initial appointment by Mayor Eric Adams in 2024, Commissioner Tisch has focused heavily on hiring. More officers have retired or joined other agencies than have been recruited, she has said, forcing her executives to reallocate resources and roll back overtime. Under past commissioners, the department had exceeded its overtime budget because of the staffing problems.
There are about 33,745 uniformed officers in the Police Department, including detectives, sergeants, lieutenants and captains. Commissioner Tisch supported Mayor Adams’s plan to hire 5,000 more.
Mr. Mamdani, however, has said that he wants to keep the officer head count the same.
He also wants to eliminate the department’s Strategic Response Group, a unit of several hundred officers often deployed to protests that has been the subject of several lawsuits. Commissioner Tisch has called the unit crucial to maintaining order.
Officer Discipline
Mr. Mamdani and Commissioner Tisch have perhaps most vehemently disagreed on imposing discipline.
During his campaign, Mr. Mamdani said that he supports expanding the powers of the Civilian Complaint Review Board, an independent agency that investigates police misconduct. Currently, the 15-member board reviews cases and votes on whether to recommend discipline, but the commissioner has the final authority to punish an officer — or not.
Mr. Mamdani has said he would like to shift that power to the panel, giving the board the final say. Some activist groups have rallied behind the idea, criticizing Commissioner Tisch’s record on discipline, including her decision not to fire a lieutenant who fatally shot a man.
But Commissioner Tisch, who has styled herself a reformer, wants to retain control over meting out discipline in cases the board substantiates, according to two people familiar with her thinking who were not authorized to speak on the record. During a meeting on Friday, she told Mr. Mamdani that she would require the final say in order to continue leading the department, a person familiar with the conversation said.
Many officers and police union leaders are also concerned about increasing the power of the board, whose members they believe are biased.
Criminal Justice Laws
Commissioner Tisch has been adamant that state bail and discovery laws have led to higher recidivism. “Imagine how disheartening it is for our cops to be out there arresting the same people for the same crimes,” she said at a news conference earlier this year.
That stance is at odds with Mr. Mamdani’s, who in 2022 opposed changes to those laws. In September, during a mayoral debate, Mr. Mamdani said the pandemic — not recidivism — had caused crime to spike in New York.
He has also praised the so-called Raise the Age law, which took effect seven years ago. Under the law, most 16- and 17-year-olds accused of crimes are sent to Family Court or to judges with special training, and serve sentences in juvenile centers rather than jail.
For her part, Commissioner Tisch said Raise the Age had motivated more gangs to recruit younger members, many of whom carry guns to commit assaults, robberies and shootings.
The number of children who have been shot in the city increased 81 percent between 2018 and 2024, Commissioner Tisch told City Council members in May. “The current trajectory is unsustainable and unsafe,” she said.
Gang Database
To drive down crime, Commissioner Tisch has emphasized the importance of the department’s robust database of thousands of accused gang members and associates.
In April, she said the trove of information had been instrumental in a sweeping gang takedown in East Harlem. “Calls to get rid of this tool are dangerous,” she said at a news conference. “They fly in the face of public safety.”
Mr. Mamdani said during the September mayoral debate that he supported bills that would dismantle it. A person’s inclusion in the database, he said, is often based on little information.
“We have to take gangs extremely seriously,” he said. “And yet I find that a database that includes New Yorkers on such bases is one that doesn’t actually do exactly that.”
Chelsia Rose Marcius is a criminal justice reporter for The Times, covering the New York Police Department.
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