Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch vs. New York City Crime — and Corruption

All New Yorkers should hope that Mayor Eric Adams’ public safety agenda will end better than it started. As the two-time NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton recently termed it, the department is facing “phenomenal problems.” Corruption has hobbled the department and demoralized the officers. The crime declines the mayor regularly celebrates have slowed in recent months. And, in any case, those celebrations seem misdirected when major crimes are still 32% above pre-pandemic levels and violent felonies are at a 22-year high. 

And as troubling as the numbers are, the absence of any good explanation of why, for example, assaults are the highest they’ve been since 1998, highlights the lack of a sustained crime-fighting strategy. Good governance cannot guarantee good results. But bad results have been, most assuredly, the result of bad governance.

So it should come as a relief that — three police commissioners and one deputy mayor for public safety later — the mayor has picked two unimpeachable public servants to guide his public safety strategy, Chauncey Parker, the new deputy mayor for public safety and Jessica Tisch, the mayor’s fourth police commissioner.  At any other time, the appointment of such able and well-regarded leaders would be the norm. But the mayor’s public safety appointments have not always met what had once been considered the irreducible minimum qualifications for public officials: integrity and competence. 

We live in norm-bending times, nationally and locally, and Parker and Tisch will need to re-norm how the justice apparatus they oversee works if they are to be successful. This is a particularly hard task because it is a trick of memory — human and institutional — to adapt as norms bend. What a few years ago may have seemed like slack on the reins of acceptable behavior today seems simply the way governing works, however loose and unguided. And it is not clear whether the mayor will permit these two able professionals to do what’s necessary to re-norm.

The Adams mayoralty to date has too often been an adventure in friends and family making up their own rules, with scant respect for whether their behavior benefits New Yorkers or themselves. Just the visible investigative activity gives some sense of the muck out of which Parker and Tisch will need to navigate. There are six ongoing federal and state investigations (that we know of). The FBI has executed search warrants at the homes of at least two deputy mayors and two police commissioners. The executive offices of the Police Department and the mayor’s official residence have been subject to court-ordered searches. The mayor himself has twice had his phones seized, once in a dramatic broad daylight showdown between the FBI and the mayor’s security detail. And, of course, the feds have indicted the mayor on federal corruption charges. 

But it does not need to be an indictable offense for conduct to warp the fair and effective functioning of government. The police department has been a master lesson in how governance gets corrupted. The mayor’s respected first police commissioner, Keechant Sewell, resigned just a year and a half into her tenure, check-mated at every turn in her choice of staff and her priorities in setting crime control strategies by the then-deputy mayor of public safety and a shadowy cohort of ministers without portfolio. A dizzying procession of the unsavory or plainly unsuited vaulted to prominence, carving up the department, looking for their main chance. City Hall placed its picks right next to the commissioner, men who seemed to come out of nowhere and without the necessary qualifications for such important jobs.

This drip, drip of eyebrow-raising behavior by public officials who put self over city has had a corrosive effect. While the mayor has demonstrated some belated gesturing towards good governance, notably in the appointment of Maria Torres-Springer as first deputy mayor and these latest public safety appointments, it remains to be seen whether this is a road to Damascus conversion or a more transactional feint.

Parker and Tisch now have the difficult task of re-directing a moving train that has been heading off the tracks for too long. They need to send clear signals, both within the police department and to the public, about what’s ok and what’s not ok — accompanied by immediate attention to addressing both crime and disorder in the streets. 

Here are four things that should happen right away.

1. Clean house. Both the deputy mayor and the police commissioner need to be able to choose their staff based on who has the commitment and experience to do the job. The ranks of the experienced three-star chiefs have thinned, and only a very few remain holding the fort, focused on actual crime-fighting. Tisch will need to take a close look at the executive team that is the engine of the department. This will require knowing who is able and who is not, and moving with dispatch.

It will be a test for the mayor as much as the police commissioner whether Tisch will have the power and discretion to do so. The trammeling of Sewell’s power and discretion, and the active hand of City Hall in selecting high-ranking police officials like the commissioner’s own chief of staff, are two modes of the administration’s operations that Tisch must resist. 

Then there are the troubling signs of widespread corruption in the department, signaled by the numerous search warrants and other investigative activity across the city, apparently related to a protection racket with former commissioner Edward Caban and his brother allegedly at the center. The feds will do what they do, but it is essential to the good governance of the department that Tisch knows the extent and depth of the schemes and who’s involved. 

2. Have a crime control strategy. What distinguished New York City from the 1990s up until this administration is that it developed a crime strategy based on what the data showed the problem was, communicated the strategy within the department and externally, and executed it relentlessly. 

Today, New Yorkers would be forgiven for thinking they are the targets of a “wag the dog” approach, as announcements come fast and furiously, often timed on the same days as more embarrassing news about the Mayor’s troubles. The department seems to veer between heroic propaganda videos (see the Iwo Jima-style video rendition of police actions at Columbia University this spring) and literally jostling for position in front of TV cameras (see the fisticuffs before the cameras at the New York Marathon as the last police commissioner was elbowed by his subordinates chief of staff and deputy commissioner, both Adams intimates).

The basics have served the department well in the past. A very few blocks and a very few people generate the majority of crime. Focus there with relentless follow-up instead of playing the kind of whack-a-mole that John Hall sharply dissected in Vital City last week. Better management will help across the board, both with crime and with the lesser-known story of increasing response times, which since 2019 have risen from 9:55 minutes to 15:23 minutes for crimes in progress and from 16:18 minutes to 26:53 minutes for non-critical crimes.

All of this administration’s specialized units, initiatives and pop-up strategies have depleted staffing in the precincts where crime-fighting strategies should live: In the year between November 2023 and November 2024, the number of commands grew from 755 to 778, while precinct staffing fell. For example, the Bronx, where crime is on the rise, has lost 180 precinct officers, or 6% of its staff. The cops are working hard. But the job of leadership is to create conditions that will make their work effective — and to have a strategy worthy of the effort demanded.

Tisch has worked in law enforcement before, but not as a law enforcement official — meaning, she has never had to sift evidence, draft indictments or determine investigative strategy. Given this reality, picking the right team will be crucial to her success. She needs to identify the able people still in the department who are well versed in effective crime control tactics and strategies to be part of her inner circle.

Deputy Mayor Parker can play a key role here. He has long experience as a prosecutor and as a crime control strategist. His quiet work organizing the daily meeting of a score of agencies to address shootings through the Gun Violence Reduction Strategy has been exemplary. Tisch and Parker are well-suited to complement each other’s strengths and to work together as a team.

3. Be straight with people, inside and outside of government. The police commissioner has to be a politician in order to navigate the city. But the department cannot be political in the way in which it determines crime reduction strategies or shares information. Tisch and Parker shouldn't keep saying crime is going down when the numbers so plainly show that it is flat or rising in key categories. Our officials should not be crowing about being the “safest city” when, for example, upstate cities are outpacing New York City in the reductions of murders. That’s the fastest way to lose New Yorkers’ confidence, who are weary of each day’s iteration of “who you gonna believe, me or your lyin’ eyes?”

This has been a persistent problem in the past, but an outsized one in this administration. The department has a bad habit of giving “internal” information to favored news outlets who will then run heated stories on, for example, migrant crime or potential juvenile crime waves. Even the newly plumped-up NYPD press office of more than 80 staffers seems too often unable or unwilling to retrieve that information for the public. The numbers inevitably end up showing a much more nuanced story than the one choreographed by the police.

Tisch and Parker should be generous with the data, straight with New Yorkers and let the chips fall where they may. 

4. Know your lane. The police department is key to New Yorkers’ safety. But it is in charge of just one of many strategies to keep the city safe. Other approaches are often “two-fers” — they provide a needed civic service while also having big effects on crime. A randomized controlled trial of lighting in New York City, for example, showed a 36% reduction in nighttime felony crime. Summer youth employment, also in randomized controlled studies in New York City and elsewhere, produced reductions in arrests as well as youth mortality. 

As deputy mayor, Parker has an opportunity to weave those multiple strands of civic and civilian work together with the police as I have written about here and here. It is an extraordinary opportunity to force-multiply the ways to reduce crime and build a thriving city, and realize the Mayor’s interest in addressing the “upstream” causes of crime.

The New York Police Department, despite controversies, has historically been a well-run, well-regulated and effective department. But it should focus on what the department alone can do: solve crimes. All the other tasks and initiatives that have accumulated over the years — the basketball games, the youth initiatives, the bee-keeping and the tree-cutting — should be left to the civilians.

How much time Parker and Tisch have to do all this is anyone’s guess since the mayor’s future is anyone’s guess. His mayoralty may be cut short by a conviction at his April trial or because he is persuaded that continuing is doing more damage than good to his city and his party. Or he may ride out his record-breaking low approval ratings because the new president pardons him (even before trial) or because the charges do not stand up in court or because of the vagaries of politics. Either way, there is no time to lose for the City’s new public safety team to get back on track with, in Parker’s words, the “north star” of public good as their guide.