Police Commissioner, Heiress and Maybe a Future New York City Mayor (April 2025)
www.nytimes.com

... Jessica S. Tisch, the billionaire heiress who is commissioner of the New York Police Department, had just walked into the dining hall on one of her first days at Harvard when she was accosted with an unmannerly question: How much did she weigh?

She was taken aback, but it turned out that the men's lightweight crew team was looking for a coxswain, who shouts orders to the rowers. They needed someone both light and commanding. "They described it to me as, You sit in front of the boat and you tell everyone what to do,'" she recalled in a recent interview.

It had definite appeal.

"I ended up being pretty good at it because of my personality," she said. "I didn't use my muscles so much. I used my voice and my brain." In the end, she concluded, it was "quite the foreshadow" of an unlikely and remarkable career.

Commissioner Tisch, 44, is now five months into a job running the nation's largest police department and telling nearly 50,000 civilian and uniformed employees what to do. Taking command of an agency rocked by scandals and the departure of three commissioners over two years, she has already shaken up the staff and managed her first crisis, the hunt for a man charged with assassinating a United Healthcare executive.

The question is whether a woman with three Harvard degrees, a $12 million Upper East Side duplex and no experience as a uniformed officer can succeed in one of the city's toughest jobs. Her success will be defined in large part by how well she cleans up the battered department and how much she brings down the crime rate, both tall orders in New York. ...

Mamdani says New York City's current police commissioner will stay on the job
www.pbs.org

... Mamdani, 34, has vowed to remake the department as mayor by shifting some responsibilities from the police to new mental health care teams. Tisch is the heiress to a multibillion-dollar family fortune and is considered a steady, establishment moderate with nearly two decades in public service.

She has been a fierce critic of the state's bail reform laws, which Mamdani supports, and has called on the city to hire more officers. Mamdani has walked back his previous comments about defunding the police, but he said he will keep the department's headcount even.

In an email to officers Wednesday, Tisch acknowledged the different views she has with Mamdani but said a series of conversations with him had made her "confident" that she can lead the department under his mayoralty. ...