Jessica Tisch accepts offer to remain NYPD commissioner under Mamdani

Rocco Parascandola, Thomas Tracy, Graham Rayman and Chris Sommerfeldt, New York Daily News on Nov 19, 2025

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NEW YORK — NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch has accepted an offer from Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani to remain New York City’s top cop under his administration.

In an email to NYPD officers on Wednesday, Tisch wrote that she agreed to stay on following “several conversations with him.”

“I wanted you — the men and women of the NYPD — to hear this directly from me first,” she wrote in the email obtained by the Daily News. “Because the reason I have chosen to stay is you.”

The decision comes just under a year after she was sworn in as the city’s 48th police commissioner and amid widespread speculation about her staying on as police commissioner under Mamdani’s leadership.

Mamdani had repeatedly said both during the campaign and after his Nov. 4 election that he wanted to keep Tisch on.

During an interview on WABC Eyewitness News aired on Sunday, Mamdani said he had talked to Tisch about her remaining as police commissioner “just last week” but wouldn’t say if she accepted his offer.

Tisch, 44, has been lauded for leading the NYPD as the city experienced a massive reduction in crime as well a the lowest number of shootings in the city since the CompStat (computer statistics-driven policing) era began in 1994.

Her precision policing model of sending cops to communities in the city where the most violence occurs “has delivered record-low shooting incidents and victims over the last nine months, and the safest quarter ever on our subways,” Tisch said in October. “This is not a coincidence — it’s the result of an unprecedented, data-driven deployment of thousands of officers to the areas they are needed most.”

Tisch was the fourth police commissioner selected by Mayor Eric Adams since taking office four years ago. Adams had named her Sanitation Commissioner in the beginning of his term and promoted her to police commissioner last November.

Tisch succeeded Interim NYPD Commissioner Thomas Donlon, who was involved in a high-profile kerfuffle with a top deputy commissioner at last year’s New York Marathon but otherwise kept a low profile since his swearing in last September. Donlon’s predecessor, Edward Caban, resigned Sept. 12, 2024, just over a week after the feds confiscated electronics from Caban and four other top Adams administration officials in a coordinated early-morning operation as part of a sprawling federal corruption probe.

Adams’ first police commissioner, Keechant Sewell, the first female top cop in city history, resigned in June 2023, with police sources saying she had grown tired of City Hall interference.

Tisch was no stranger to the nation’s largest police force when she took the job — she has worked in the past as a civilian NYPD employee, first as a counterterrorism analyst, then later as Deputy Commissioner of Information Technology.

Earlier this month Fire Commissioner Robert Tucker announced his resignation as head of the fire department.