Jessica Tisch and Eric Adams have a lot more in common than one might expect for a hotel heiress who grew up on the Upper East Side and a cop from Brownsville. They’ve both proclaimed they are passionate about public service, hate rats and bail reform, and support a policing strategy that revolves around quality-of-life enforcement: cracking down on sex workers, e-bikes, homeless New Yorkers, and street vendors. That’s probably why Adams tapped Tisch in November 2024 to be his fourth and final NYPD commissioner—that, and her reputation as a competent bureaucrat, an archetype largely absent from the Adams administration and especially the scandal-ridden NYPD.

As for why Tisch said yes, well, a stint as NYPD commissioner—even in a department as scandal-marred as Adams’s—is yet another stepping stone in Tisch’s rise in City government, which could eventually go, if the buzz is to be believed, all the way to Gracie Mansion. But despite her promises of departmental reform and accountability for cops who engage in misconduct, and the veneer of respectability she lends the department, her tenure has largely been more of the same: cracking down on the city’s most vulnerable residents, serving the interests of the powerful, and helping cops who hurt New Yorkers dodge accountability.

Tisch was born with the proverbial silver spoon in her mouth, part of the third generation of the Loews Corporation business dynasty built in 1940s Brooklyn by a pair of entrepreneurial brothers (that’s her family’s name on New York University’s arts school, just one of their many philanthropic endeavors; others include a wing at the Met, a children’s zoo in Central Park, and a hospital in the NYU Langone system). She has two brothers: One is the current president and CEO of Loews, and the other launched his own hedge fund in 2023. But Tisch has always had a higher calling, she’s said, a noblesse oblige to commit her life to public service in New York City. 

Tisch attended Harvard University thrice over, earning first a B.A. in 2003 and then a J.D. and M.B.A. in 2008. As soon as she graduated, she headed back to New York City—and straight into its police department, as an analyst in the NYPD’s counterterrorism unit. From there, she made her way up the ranks, becoming the agency’s deputy commissioner of information technology in 2014. She was a lead in developing the NYPD’s Domain Awareness System, a public-private partnership with Microsoft allowing the City to create what anti-surveillance advocates have described as a “real-time surveillance map of New York City” through CCTV cameras and license plate tracking; New York Focus recently wrote that the system is used “to build dossiers on New Yorkers and support facial recognition analysis, predictive policing algorithms, and the department’s controversial gang database.” (It was also a revenue-generating machine for the NYPD, which took 30 percent of the profits from any sales of the technology to other municipalities when it was launched in 2013.) Despite critics describing it as a major police incursion on privacy, DAS is still in use, and is now available to NYPD officers in mobile app form. 

A less successful partnership with Microsoft that Tisch spearheaded during her time as the NYPD’s deputy commissioner of information technology? Some 36,000 Nokia phones, bought as part of a $160 million “NYPD Mobility Initiative,” that were quickly rendered obsolete and scrapped after the tech company decided to stop supporting the operating system on the devices—a waste of time and money that law enforcement sources who spoke with the New York Post blamed squarely on her.

That rather expensive mistake notwithstanding, in December 2019, Tisch again moved up the bureaucratic ladder when then-Mayor Bill de Blasio named Tisch as the commissioner of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (now the Office of Technology and Innovation), overseeing the City’s IT services and programs like LinkNYC. Tisch made a show of lambasting CityBridge, the company in charge of LinkNYC, for failing to deliver as many Wi-Fi-emitting kiosks as promised and to maintain its existing ones, in front of the City Council in March 2020. “What we have is a contract…One of the means is to pursue enforcement. Our patience is up,” she said at that council hearing. But the myriad problems with CityBridge—particularly the lack of functional LinkNYC kiosks—persisted through her time at DOITT, with no apparent change for the better.

Tisch entered the Adams administration in April 2022, when Adams appointed her as commissioner of the City’s Department of Sanitation. She had a moderately successful (if unexciting) couple of years helming Sanitation, inching along the City’s trash containerization  and composting programs. It was there that Tisch uttered her most Adams-esque quote, during an October 2022 press conference about getting garbage bags off of City sidewalks. “The rats are going to absolutely hate this announcement,” Tisch said, with a straight face. “But the rats don’t run this city. We do.” 

During her time as the head of DOITT and the Sanitation Department, some of Tisch’s staff took issue with her management style. According to the Times:

Commissioner Tisch also brings a reputation as a sometimes abrasive boss, according to seven former and current employees who worked with her when she ran the Sanitation Department and was head of information technology under Mayor Bill de Blasio. The employees, who did not want to be identified for fear of retribution, said she belittled people publicly and shouted and even swore at workers who questioned her. One former manager left her position after Commissioner Tisch told her not to speak at meetings and then ostracized her.

Another former employee countered to the Times that maybe a bit of sexism was at play: “I worked with a lot of blunt guys…they don’t get talked about the same way.” 

By the fall of 2024, Adams had had an absolutely miserable track record with police commissioners, burning through three, Keechant Sewell, Edward Caban, and Thomas Donlon, in record time, and his administration required some serious image rehabilitation. After much of his inner circle either jumped ship or were indicted and forced to resign in a series of scandals (you might have read about those already), Adams needed a police commissioner who was too squeaky clean (and, perhaps, too filthy rich) to carry even a whiff of corruption, and Tisch was his answer. 

He appointed her to the position on November 20, 2024, and she was sworn in five days later— a little over two months after Caban resigned in the middle of a federal probe into his alleged nightlife enforcement side hustle, and weeks after the two-month tenure of interim Commissioner Donlon, who stepped down after his home, like Caban’s, was also raided by federal investigators.

Tisch returned to the NYPD with former Commissioner Bill Bratton’s stamp of approval. “If I were a betting man, I’d put all my money on her,”  he said in an interview with the Times. “She’s tough. And she doesn’t tolerate incompetence and she doesn’t tolerate posturing.” Indeed, as she entered the department, Tisch cleaned the proverbial house, ousting Tarik Sheppard as head of the NYPD’s Public Information department and replacing almost a dozen other top cops. (Tisch’s ascension also coincided with the December 2024 resignation of Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey, the longtime Adams ally who left the department under a cloud of horrific sexual violence and coercion allegations made by a female NYPD lieutenant, who said Maddrey forced her to perform sexual acts in exchange for more than $200,000 in overtime pay.)

By many standards, Tisch’s time as the head of the NYPD has been just what the mayor needed—inoffensive and efficient. If you take the department’s stats at face value, a questionable decision, then violent crime is down. Meanwhile, thanks to relaxed requirements for becoming one of New York’s Finest, NYPD recruitment numbers are finally on the rise after a dismal few years. 

But by other metrics, Tisch and her NYPD have been more of the same. Although she has told her cops that they are not to directly assist ICE agents in targeting and arresting New Yorkers and said she was “revolted” by the idea of a National Guard incursion into the City, Tisch has insisted that the department will continue to aid other federal law enforcement investigations, even after troubling instances of possible collusion between the NYPD and federal agencies. In March 2025, the sealed NYPD records of a New Jersey woman who was arrested at a pro-Palestine protest outside of Columbia University were somewhat mysteriously delivered to the Department of Homeland Security and used to justify her detention and possible deportation. Three months before that, in February 2025, the CITY reported that a pair of Venezuelan immigrants who were arrested in the Bronx but never prosecuted or convicted of any crimes were nonetheless deported to the notorious prison CECOT in El Salvador, moving from NYPD to FBI and ICE custody in a move that none of the three aforementioned agencies were willing to comment on. And the NYPD has clearly had no issue with arresting anti-ICE protesters, including City and state elected officials. 

The commissioner has also repeatedly trotted out the Adams administration party line when it comes to bail reform. She described the reforms as having “rendered the criminal justice system in New York City a high-speed revolving door for recidivists” in a March 2025 interview with the Wall Street Journal, then reused the metaphor at a press conference in April 2025, despite available court data proving otherwise. Tisch has also zeroed in on the state’s “Raise the Age” law, which raised the age of criminal responsibility in New York to 18-years-old, a change the commissioner said “[makes] it very difficult to responsibly keep dangerous youths in the criminal system” in an August 2025 op-ed for the New York Post. “Instead,” Tisch wrote, “they cycle pinball-style through family court and other avenues of diversion and return immediately to terrorizing younger kids. Simultaneously, social media and drill rap have grown exponentially since RTA passed. This means youths now always track each other, advertising where they are, what violence they’ve committed, and how the courts freed them yet again.”

Tisch has also hewed to the party line on officer discipline in at least one major case where an NYPD officer killed a New Yorker. In August, she rejected both the CCRB’s recommendation and an NYPD judge’s ruling when she declined to fire Lieutenant Jonathan Rivera, the officer who killed Allan Feliz during a 2019 traffic stop. Her rationale? That “given the timeline of what transpired, by far the most plausible reason that [Rivera] discharged his firearm was because he believed that doing so was necessary” to save another cop’s life, an interpretation that the NYPD’s own judge rejected. In September 2025, Tisch did advance the internal disciplinary case against two officers who shot and killed Win Rozario, a teenager who called 911 himself while in a mental health crisis, in accordance with a CCRB determination—but it remains to be seen whether she’ll actually follow through with any charges.

Meanwhile, Tisch has also ramped up the department’s focus on “quality-of-life” enforcement, zeroing in on the pet issues of top Adams administration cops like Kaz Daughtry, as well as outgoing department leaders like John Chell, and Maddrey. Those include cracking down on immigrant sex workers and street vendors on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, in an operation launched just before she became commissioner but that has continued under her leadership; stoking xenophobic Tren de Aragua panic alongside Adams; instituting criminal summonses for biking infractions in April 2025, implicitly aimed at cracking down on immigrant delivery drivers riding e-bikes; and dramatically increasing the number of public urination tickets in a city with vanishingly few accessible, public restrooms. Tisch herself admitted that New York is safe enough that “you can go your whole life, if you’re lucky, without being a victim of crime,” in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, “but you can’t really go a day without seeing or experiencing some quality-of-life issue that is irksome.” To that end, the commissioner has instituted “Q-teams” in every precinct in the city under a new division that’s dedicated to targeting the appearance of disorder—homelessness, public drug use, reckless scooter riding, illegally parked cars. The New York Civil Liberties Union has described this effort as “broken windows policing under a new name, and the latest example of the Adams admin’s unwillingness to think beyond the Giuliani playbook.”

What does the future hold for a devoted public servant like Tisch? Some have hinted that she’s got mayoral ambitions, or that she should at least consider a run—but for now, she may be staying exactly where she is. 

In October 2025, during a mayoral debate, Democratic candidate Zohran Mamdani announced his intention to retain Tisch as NYPD commissioner, a move he’d been strongly encouraged to make by business leaders and Governor Kathy Hochul alike. Mamdani’s decision raised eyebrows among his progressive base, but Mamdani later told Hell Gate that he admired Tisch’s work rooting out corruption in NYPD leadership. Although much of Tisch’s policing strategy in the Adams administration (and her stance on bail reform) clashes with his public safety platform, Mamdani said that when he’s in City Hall, he’ll be the boss. 

“New Yorkers will see that there will be people in my administration to the left of me and to the right of me,” Mamdani told Hell Gate, “and the thing that will unite all of them is the very clear agenda—there can be disagreement with me on issues and policies, but there cannot be disagreement on what you’re being hired for in that agenda.”

Although the commissioner and the democratic socialist mayor-elect are in conversation, Tisch reportedly has yet to formally accept Mamdani’s offer to extend her time at the department. The only thing that’s certain: She will likely be one of the only major players in the Adams administration to emerge untainted by its general atmosphere of scandal and corruption—with a golden parachute to soften the landing, wherever that may be.

When asked about Tisch and her relationship with the Mayor Adams, the NYPD’s public information office declined to answer any specific questions, but chose to “share and acknowledge the Police Commissioner’s accomplishments during her tenure,” like a record decline in shootings and shooting victims, increases in department recruitment, and the fact that Tisch “instituted a new internal review structure for discipline” instead.