If you’re walking through One Police Plaza right now, there is one name you’re going to hear more than any other: Jessica Tisch. She is currently the police commissioner of New York City.
Honestly, it’s a weird time for the NYPD. We just had a mayoral election where Zohran Mamdani—a guy known for being pretty critical of the cops—took the reins. Everyone thought he’d clean house. Instead, he did something that shocked both his supporters and his critics. He asked Tisch to stay on. And she said yes.
Why Jessica Tisch is still the police commissioner of New York City
Jessica Tisch isn't your typical "top cop." She never walked a beat. She never made a collar on a subway platform. She's a civilian through and through, which usually makes the rank-and-file a little skeptical. But she has spent nearly two decades in the guts of city government.
Before she was the police commissioner of New York City, she was the "Garbage Queen." As the head of the Department of Sanitation, she became weirdly famous on TikTok for her "The rats don't run the city, we do" speech. People loved it. But behind the viral clips, she was actually doing the heavy lifting of containerizing New York’s trash—a logistical nightmare that had stumped people for decades.
Now she’s back at the NYPD, where she actually started her career in 2008 as a counterterrorism analyst.
🔗 Read more: Recent Obituaries in Charlottesville VA: What Most People Get Wrong
The transition from Adams to Mamdani
It's been a bit of a revolving door at the commissioner's office lately. Remember Edward Caban? He had to resign in late 2024 after federal investigators started sniffing around. Then we had Thomas Donlon, who was basically a placeholder for a couple of months.
Eric Adams eventually tapped Tisch to take over in November 2024. Most people figured she was an Adams loyalist and would be out the door once the 2025 election wrapped up. But early in 2026, it’s clear she’s not going anywhere.
Basically, Mamdani knows that if he wants to stay afloat as a new mayor, he needs stability. Tisch gives him that. She’s a Harvard-educated data nerd (she has a JD and an MBA) who is obsessed with "precision policing." This means using tech and data to put cops exactly where the crime is happening, rather than just having them drive around aimlessly.
What has she actually done?
If you look at the stats from the start of 2026, the numbers are actually kind of staggering. The NYPD just reported that 2025 was the safest year for gun violence in the city's recorded history.
💡 You might also like: Trump New Gun Laws: What Most People Get Wrong
- Shooting incidents dropped by 24% compared to 2024.
- Subway crime reached lows we haven't seen since 2009 (if you ignore the weird pandemic years).
- Retail theft—the thing everyone complains about at Walgreens—fell by 14%.
She’s also the person who finally got smartphones into the hands of every single officer and pushed the body-worn camera program forward years ago. She’s a tech person in a department that, frankly, used to be pretty analog.
The friction at the top
It isn't all sunshine and roses. Tisch and Mayor Mamdani are sort of the political version of the "Odd Couple." Mamdani wants to shift $1 billion away from the NYPD to a new Department of Community Safety. He wants to stop using the gang database and get rid of the Strategic Response Group.
Tisch? She’s a billionaire heiress (her family owns a chunk of Loews Corp) and a moderate who has been very vocal about needing more cops, not fewer. She’s a fierce critic of bail reform laws that the mayor actually supports.
Why does it work? Probably because they both realize they need each other. Mamdani needs the crime rates to stay low so he doesn't get blamed for "ruining the city," and Tisch seems to genuinely love the challenge of running the world's most famous police force.
📖 Related: Why Every Tornado Warning MN Now Live Alert Demands Your Immediate Attention
What New Yorkers should watch for next
As we move further into 2026, the real test for the police commissioner of New York City will be the budget. Adams promised to hire 5,000 new officers to get the headcount up to 40,000. Mamdani wants to keep it flat at 35,000.
If you want to stay informed on how this impacts your neighborhood, keep an eye on the CompStat reports. They come out weekly. They’ll show you if the "precision policing" model is actually holding up under the new administration's policies. You should also check the NYC Open Data portal; Tisch has always been big on making NYPD data public, so if that starts to dry up, it’s a sign that the transparency she promised might be slipping.
For now, Jessica Tisch is the one holding the shield. Whether she can keep the city safe while her boss tries to reshape the entire concept of policing is the big question for the rest of the year.