Jessica Tisch will confront a crushing list of problems when she returns to head the New York Police Department next week. Officers, complaining of stress and overwork, have been quitting. Overtime costs are climbing. Crime is inching down, but assaults and rapes have jumped and New Yorkers remain nervous about random attacks, reports the New York Times. There are complaints about increased surveillance, a rise in the use of stop-and-frisk tactics and a federal judge’s report that showed police leaders had failed to punish officers who abused the practice. On Monday, Tisch, the city’s head of sanitation, will be sworn in as the 48th police commissioner and its second female leader. The question is whether Tisch — who has three degrees from Harvard, has never walked a beat and comes from a family worth $10.1 billion, can bring the change many say is desperately needed.
“That department has phenomenal problems,” said former commissioner William Bratton, who promoted Tisch to deputy commissioner of information and technology. “The department needs a shake-up. It really does. It needs a new energy.” Tisch, who left the department in 2020, will become Mayor Eric Adams’s fourth commissioner during his single term. She will return to an agency buffeted by a federal investigation that drove out one commissioner, another inquiry that overshadowed the brief tenure of her interim predecessor and a pervasive sense of chaos and indiscipline. Keechant Sewell, the first female commissioner and Adams’s initial appointment for the job, left last year, frustrated that the mayor’s allies in City Hall and the department were thwarting her attempts to make her own promotions and staff picks. Tisch knows department's culture — her previous tenure lasted 12 years — and she already spent two years in Adams’s administration. If I were a betting man, I’d put all my money on her,” Bratton said. “She’s tough. And she doesn’t tolerate incompetence and she doesn’t tolerate posturing.”
Comments