The Looming Specter of Jessica Tisch

How The Billionaire Police Commissioner and Her Allies Aim to Stymie Mamdani's Reform Agenda Before It Can Even Begin

Jessica Tisch and Matthew Yglesias graduated from Dalton the same year. Thankfully not my year.

Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, the Holy Writ of New York City Politics Nerddom, opens in January of 1954 with a confrontation between newly inaugurated mayor Robert F Wagner Jr and the titular power broker Robert Moses. Wagner has just officially reappointed Moses Park Commissioner and Construction Coordinator of the City, but has intentionally omitted his appointment slip for his third post, a spot on the all-powerful City Planning Commission. In response, Moses grabs a blank appointment form, fills it out for his appointment to the City Planning Commission, and explains to Wagner that if he does not get this appointment, he will quit the other two positions and leave the administration altogether. He lays the slip on Wagner’s desk, and “without a word, the Mayor pulled the paper toward him and signed it.” Later on, Caro underlines the significance of this encounter. “The oath administered to Robert Wagner should have given him supreme power in New York. In democratic America, supposedly, ultimate power rests with the voters, and the man for whom a majority cast their votes is repository of that power. But Wagner knew better. The spectators may have thought he had a choice in dealing with Moses. He knew he did not.”

Seventy years later, unelected bureaucrats in New York City still hold outsized power over the elected executives at whose pleasure they purportedly serve. And a similar test of that power is coming. Another confrontation looms between a hugely popular incoming mayor, with an emphatic mandate from a broad coalition of voters, and a technocrat with decades of experience within City Hall, who has faithfully served the city’s political elites and has been rewarded in turn with significantly more power than her official title suggests. Six months before his inauguration, Zohran Mamdani already faces a question that will dog him until he resolves it one way or another: what will he do about NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch?

The Times became the latest to pose this question last week. In the story beneath their elliptical headline “Mamdani, Urged to Keep Tisch, is Considering It,” the Times’s Emma Fitzsimmons and Maria Cramer reported that state Attorney General Letitia James and well-connected business elite advocate Kathryn Wilde have independently both made their appeals to Mamdani personally. But they are not the first; the New York Editorial Board, the independent, substack-based NYC politics media Dream Team led by Semafor’s Ben Smith, interviewed each major candidate and asked basically all of them about Tisch specifically. Later on in the campaign, the candidates were all asked again whether they would keep Tisch on at a mayoral forum hosted by The Nation. Lander and Myrie both said they would, while Stringer, Adams, and Mamdani all said they would “consider it.”

Last week, Wilde made her appeal to Mamdani publicly on Bloomberg’s Odds Lots podcast, telling hosts that the first question the city’s business leaders would ask him was going to be “what is your commitment to public safety? You know, symbolically, would you keep Jessie Tisch as police commissioner? And she certainly won’t stay if he’s going to defund the police because she’s looking for more officers.” Wilde’s framing makes clear the Moses-esque leverage that Tisch fans believe she should have in this moment. Not only must Mamdani appease these fans by re-appointing her, but he must pursue a police agenda that she approves of so she doesn’t quit. She should be the one calling the shots, while Mamdani acts like Wagner, and sheepishly, silently signs off on whatever papers she hands him.

Like Robert Moses, Tisch arrives at her power because of her stranglehold on elite public opinion. While no candidate told the New York Editorial Board that they would commit to re-hiring her, all of them took the opportunity to glow about how amazing they all thought she was, including Adrienne Adams (“I think that Commissioner Tisch has been doing a very good job”), Zellnor Myrie (“I’ve been impressed with what I’ve seen over the past couple of months. I think she’s taken some really important steps”), Whitney Tilson (“I’ve heard nothing but great things about Jessica Tisch.”), and Brad Lander (“I have a good working relationship with Jessie Tisch. I respect her, I think highly of her, and I hope she does well.”)

All this after about three months on the job, virtually no public profile, and in fact, no known policy departures from the Adams administration status quo at all. Police commissioner is a technical, behind-the-scenes, managerial, no-news-is-good-news kind of position, so it’s possible that she is secretly a joy to work for, has a gorgeous and efficient org chart, has a keen eye for talent, hires and promotes well, gives really excellent and constructive performance reviews, and always cleans the office coffeemaker herself. It’s also possible that she was given the incredibly low bar of working in Eric Adams’s NYPD without getting embroiled in a scandal involving some combination of nepotism, blatant corruption, and sexual harassment resulting in a federal criminal investigation (Edward Caban, Jeffrey Maddrey, and Tom Donlon all failed to clear this bar). Or that her unconventional background, as a Dalton-Harvard-HLS alum who just happened to get obsessed with public administration data instead of private equity merger contracts, gives her a certain nerdy oddball charm. Or that her pedigree as the scion of one of the city’s wealthiest and most politically influential billionaire clans gives elites both in City Hall and in the business community a sense that they are working with one of their own, and that this is what they truly care about more than actual job performance.

In any case, the narrative that Tisch is doing an exceptional job has taken root, especially among elite media. When she was hired, the Times’s Maria Cramer and Hurubie Meko wrote a 1500-word piece headlined “New N.Y.P.D. Boss Takes Over a Department With ‘Phenomenal Problems’.” That quote, like about half of the piece, is a quote from two-time former NYPD commissioner, broken windows policing architect, and enemy of the police reform movement William Bratton. The story’s only insight seems to be that he likes her personally and hopes she succeeds (“If I were a betting man, I’d put all my money on her.”)

New York Magazine’s Noah Shectman upped the ante in March with his feature-length profile “Commish Tisch to the Rescue,” which, while light on the actual policy questions of running the country’s second largest military force, had plenty of time for charming anecdotes about how Ms. Tisch works late into the night, is pretty quiet but has a folksy, take-no-nonsense confidence that she inherited from her mom and grandmother (“people ask me why I’m so ‘driven… My mother is definitely my role model.”), completes puzzles for fun, and was a calm and poised presence in the control room when the NYPD secured the arrest of Luigi Mangione, piggybacking on the work of the local police of Altoona, Pennsylvania after their own manhunt was an embarrassing, exorbitantly expensive failure.

Then, a month later, the Times clapped back with its own feature, which made up for its similar lack of policy-related newsworthy information with a sexier hook: “Police Commissioner, Heiress and Maybe a Future New York City Mayor.” “I don’t see it,” Tisch herself told the Times, though “she did not dismiss the idea out of hand.” “I’m a public servant, not a politician,” she told Maria Cramer, who had just asked her about whether she wanted to be mayor of New York, a classic thing reporters just randomly ask people all the time, and a thing that must have occurred to Cramer completely organically with no prompting from Tisch’s aides whatsoever.

This combination of two ingredients- first, insistence that public opinion is irrelevant, that the work is technical, and requires a gritty, hypercompetent public servant rather than someone besmirched by the muck of electoral politics, and second, an intense media-driven public relations campaign to ensure that the technocrat in question is widely beloved and therefore politically untouchable- this combination was the classic recipe for Robert Moses’s path to power. “Public authorities are above and outside politics,” Moses said. “Their decisions are made solely on the basis of public welfare.” Caro writes that Moses repeated these mantras thousands of times, that the public believed them, and that “for four decades they were repeated, amplified, and embellished by a press that believed them too. Because of the forty years of adulation of the newspapers, and of the public that read the newspapers, for forty years nothing could stand in Moses’s way.”

Given all the Moses-esque groundwork Tisch has laid, it’s not hard to see Mamdani arriving at the same conclusion as Wagner before him, and deciding that keeping Tisch (and giving up whatever policy concessions she demands in return) is the path of least resistance, that six months before he even takes office, this is not the hill to die on. Ross Barkan made a soft version of this case in his column for New York Magazine, headlined “Can Zohran Mamdani buy NYPD’s support?” He opens by harkening back to Bill de Blasio’s comments after a grand jury declined to prosecute the police officer who choked and killed Eric Garner in 2014. “I see this crisis through a personal lens,” de Blasio said, because of his Black son Dante. “Chirane and I have had to talk to Dante for years about the dangers he may face.” NYPD officers found the relatively banal acknowledgement that parents of Black men worry about their interactions with police to be far beyond the pale. The resulting breakdown in relations between City Hall and One Police Plaza, which eventually escalated to the point where hundreds of officers turned their back on de Blasio at a different officer’s funeral, permanently imperilled de Blasio’s hopes of enacting any kind of policing reform, and decisively marked the end of his first-term honeymoon period and the beginning of his descent into unpopularity.

The de Blasio story serves as an illustration of the significant, and wildly undemocratic, power that cops and their unions have over the elected mayors that they supposedly serve. At the end of the day, the mayor cannot fire them all, just as he cannot fire every single public school teacher or fireman. If the mayor does something the rank-and-file don’t like, they can always threaten to do their jobs a little less, as the New York State corrections officers did earlier this year when the state legislature tried to strengthen its ban on solitary confinement. It rarely gets to this point, because the electoral politics of police reform are so treacherous to begin with. But it takes a special level of job security to feel comfortable publicly disparaging and scorning the mayor of the city government that employs you, and it’s a level that NYPD officers know that they have. And this is on top of the (more democratic, but still not ideal) bully pulpit that rank-and-file police have, such that when their union leader declares that the mayor “has blood on his hands,” it has a significant effect on public opinion of the mayor, even if the union leader in question is a fascist nutjob.

Barkan writes that because governing in opposition to the police is so difficult, because police reform did not end up a central chantable plank of Mamdani’s campaign, and because “the appetite for ambitious policing reform has diminished” more generally, Mamdani would be wise to follow in the footsteps of progressive and widely beloved mayor of Boston Michelle Wu, who mostly scrapped her campaign’s reform agenda, and even negotiated a police pay raise with her city council, earning the union’s endorsement for her re-election campaign in return. Mamdani ran an affordability campaign, he needs to focus on freezing the rent, making busses fast and free, and delivering universal childcare, and he might not have the desire or the bandwidth to get bogged down in a prolonged war with the cops, Barkan posits. On last week’s episode of the Hell Gate Podcast, Chris Robbins agreed with this analysis, commenting that “if it comes down to Kathy Hochul, Chuck Schumer, and Hakeem Jeffries all being like, we will back you if you keep Jessica Tisch, that’s going to be a tough one, and his people will probably tell him to take that deal.”

As a dispassionate, pragmatic evaluation of the situation, Robbins and Barkan may be correct that Mamdani, like Wagner before him, does not have much of a choice here. But what’s missing from all of this commentary is a reckoning with what Mamdani would be giving up by appointing Tisch, which is any real shot at the intensive reform that the department urgently needs. Eleven years after Eric Garner’s killing (and the amnesty given to his killer), NYPD officers routinely harass people and unnecessarily escalate low-level confrontations into dangerous and potentially lethal situations, without any real oversight or accountability. The city paid out more than $206 million in misconduct settlements last year, the new record for the decade, but by no means an anomaly. That means $200 million of your taxpayer dollars (which could have bought childcare vouchers for 10,000 toddlers, or completely paid for the G train signal modernization) was instead spent atoning for cops who used excessive force, or who intentionally withheld exculpatory evidence and intentionally abetted wrongful convictions that sent innocent people to prison for decades. And as the Legal Aid Society of New York pointed out, this gaudy number is actually a considerable underestimate, because it does not include misconduct cases settled by the Comptroller’s office prior to formal litigation.

Absolutely no action has been taken that makes another Eric Garner case, or any of these other destructive and expensive misconduct incidents, any less likely in the future. Instead, the department has tried to become more systematic at sweeping things under the rug, including tossing out hundreds of misconduct cases without even looking at them, ensuring that virtually every cop involved with an excessive force complaint face no consequences whatsoever, and fighting tooth-and-nail for a complete rollback of the state’s discovery reform laws so they can rampantly flaunt due process rules and still secure convictions.

There was hope that Jessica Tisch, Harvard-educated ubercompetent technocrat extraordinaire, might be interested in strengthening police accountability on pure management grounds, that putting issues of justice and human rights aside, she might prefer to run a department where it is possible to make her employees follow basic rules, and to even fire them when they don’t. Whitney Tilson made this case at Vital City’s mayoral forum in April: “One of the things that impressed me most about Commissioner Tisch is that as she is calling for more police officers, as a good manager she recognizes that there needs to be greater accountability. There’s been a large increase under Mayor Adams of cases against police officers dismissed under the statute of limitations. So she correctly, as a good manager, recognizes that greater enforcement and greater activity with police officers needs to be married with greater accountability.”

Tilson was either deliberately lying or he is way too easily impressed. Tisch has demonstrated no interest in accountability whatsoever. Since taking over, Tisch has been a staunch advocate of the discovery reform rollbacks (about which Tilson expressed similarly galling levels of delusional optimism in our conversation in February) that give officers wide latitude to manufacture or obfuscate evidence without consequences for the prosecution’s case. Under her watch, the Civilian Complaint Review Board has dramatically increased its “flip rate,” the rate at which the board dismisses complaints that its investigators found strong substantiating evidence for. And last week, Tisch herself rejected the recommendation of both her own deputy commissioner and a judge administering a Review Board case, and opted not to fire an officer who had fatally shot 31-year old Allan Feliz during a car stop in 2019 that began because Feliz “appeared to not be wearing a seatbelt.” Even for the NYPD, this was an anomalous decision; police commissioners have followed recommendations from Review Board cases 90% of the time since its founding in 2013. Tisch, in her infinite managerial wisdom, opted to buck this trend to protect the police officer’s right to escalate traffic stops without fear of getting fired (let alone facing any kind of criminal liability for, you know, shooting and killing an unarmed man).

As Barkan and Robbins explained, the standard playbook of New York City politics dictates that Mamdani doesn’t have much of a choice here, that to appease the elite establishment, he has to look the other way on this, re-appoint Tisch, repeat these Orwellian lies about how she is a champion of “marrying greater enforcement with greater accountability,” and in effect jettison the policing reform movement so that he can increase his odds of executing on his affordability agenda. In the words of Michael Lange, who very rudely scooped me on the Tisch beat by two days, she has more support than Mamdani among the three crucial cohorts of “The Billionaires, The Cops, and The Media Elite, whose collective institutional power has historically determined whether the Mayor of New York City succeeds or fails.”

On the other hand, you know who else had more support among those cohorts? Andrew Cuomo. Mamdani’s decisive victory over the former governor augured not just a new leader, but an entirely new array of cohorts with power over the city, a complete repudiation of the existing political establishment, and perhaps, a new set of rules over what is and isn’t possible. De Blasio, with his allegiance to the Park Slope liberal elites and his smug lack of charisma, had very little support in the working class neighborhoods that New York City’s cops hail from, and this may have contributed to their fierce antipathy as much as his banal quotes and relatively limp (and quickly abandoned) reform agenda did. While Mamdani did not win these neighborhoods outright, he lost in the Bronx and Staten Island by much less than expected, and overperformed especially in areas with a higher percentage of adults in their 20s and 30s. Cops have to live here too, and are as likely as anyone else to get excited about a guy who promises to freeze the rent and deliver universal childcare. Last week, Brad Lander went on the Jewish Currents’s On the Nose podcast and told Peter Beinart that when he got illegally arrested by ICE agents last month, one of the officers who detained him started chatting about the race, and asked Lander what Mamdani was like in person, and whether he should vote for him.

Anecdotes aren’t data, but if this guy is so charismatic that he is convincing ICE agents to consider voting for him, he might have more latitude to work on police issues than his lamer predecessors. It’s not easy to take on technocratic power brokers and bust up their undemocratic concentrations of power in this city (in Moses’s case, it took four decades before Nelson Rockerfeller finally pulled it off), and there are a million ways that these power brokers might Zohran Mamdani bring to a heel, or bury him in negative press and public backlash if he tries to take them on. What’s exciting about this moment is that for the first time in decades, it is possible for someone to even give it a shot.

Correction: A previous version of this post referred to Eric Garner’s killing happening fifteen years ago. It is 2025 now, and Garner was killed in 2014, so it happened eleven years ago. I regret the error!