Who Is Jessica Tisch, NYC’s New Police Commissioner?

Photo: NDZ/STAR MAX/AP Photo

Mayor Eric Adams announced on Wednesday that he would be appointing Jessica Tisch, current head of the Sanitation Department, as the next commissioner of the New York City Police Department. She will be the second woman to lead the department and the fourth person to hold the role during Adams’s tenure of less than three years.

Tisch is a 17-year veteran of city government who spent 12 of those years in civilian roles at the NYPD. Prior to her time at DSNY, she was the commissioner of the city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications from 2019 to 2022. With the NYPD, she first started in the department’s counterterrorism bureau and previously served as deputy commissioner of information technology, where, Adams said, she managed the implementation of the department’s body-worn cameras and helping modernize CompStat. “I need someone who is going to take the police department into the next century. I need a visionary,” Adams said in announcing his decision.

Tisch has been in charge of the Sanitation Department for nearly three years, and her tenure has widely been viewed as a success. She took over from Edward Grayson, who served as Sanitation commissioner under Bill de Blasio and had been with the agency for more than 20 years. Under her leadership, the agency has implemented extensive new rules around trash containerization for both residential buildings and commercial businesses aimed at cleaning up city streets and decreasing rat sightings.

She will officially take office Monday, replacing Edward Caban, who resigned as NYPD commissioner in September after his personal devices were seized under a federal search warrant. Adams then appointed Thomas Donlon, the state’s former Homeland Security director, as interim commissioner, but Donlon soon also found himself under scrutiny after federal investigators raided his homes. Though Tisch previously served in the NYPD in a civilian capacity, she’ll come into the office without uniformed experience, unlike many of her predecessors. Tisch hails from a prominent New York City family; her father, James Tisch, is the current CEO of the Loews Corporation, a multibillion-dollar conglomerate with stakes in real estate, energy, and hotels.

During brief remarks, Tisch promised to address concerns about public safety that have only continued to grow despite city crime rates largely trending downward. “The mission is to keep you safe, to make you feel safe, and to improve your quality of life. To restore dignity and order to every street, every neighborhood, every borough in the city of New York. Not just policing of, but policing for. Fear has no place on our streets,” she said.