Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch touted her recent crime-fighting efforts before a warm crowd of business leaders on Wednesday — becoming the latest well-regarded official whom Mayor Eric Adams has leaned on to restore some confidence in his embattled administration.
Tisch headlined an Association for a Better New York breakfast at the Hilton Midtown, where she emphasized the 15% drop in major crimes in the first two months of 2025 and laid out the administration’s legislative public safety agenda in Albany this year. Tisch is a popular figure in the business world, and her appearance echoed the October ABNY speech by First Deputy Mayor Maria Torres-Springer, who tried to project calm in the weeks after Adams’ indictment.
Tisch, who took over a dysfunctional NYPD in November after helming the Sanitation Department, said nothing about the chaos that has surrounded City Hall amid Adams’ apparent indebtedness to the Trump White House and the planned resignations of four deputy mayors — three of whom were in attendance on Wednesday. But she alluded to her house-cleaning within the department — which has included more than a dozen changes to top leadership — and said the NYPD had to operate with “unimpeachable integrity” and “strong ethical leadership.”
“I am a public servant, not a politician,” Tisch said — a pointed comment, given recent attempts by some commentators, including the New York Post editorial board, to goad her into running for mayor.
Tisch also drew applause from the crowd of executives and lobbyists when she asserted that the NYPD “will not participate in civil immigration enforcement, period, in accordance with the law” — a position that aligns with longstanding policy but was briefly thrown into confusion when Adams appeared to suggest otherwise during a TV appearance this month alongside Trump’s border czar.
She announced that the department would put a new focus on enforcing quality of life issues — such as “out-of-control scooters and e-bikes,” aggressive panhandling and public urination — by creating a new quality of life division within the NYPD with dedicated officers assigned to precincts.
To explain the decline in major index crimes during the first weeks of 2025, Tisch pointed to zone-based policing — an approach the NYPD began in 2023 that deploys more officers to specific blocks or streets where crime is rising. But she said the city continues to contend with “a surging recidivism problem” — with 2024 seeing significant increases in the number of people arrested three or more times for the same crime in a single year.
To that end, Tisch and other Adams officials will push state lawmakers in the coming months to change discovery laws, which will align the administration with prosecutors who say that the state’s 2019 reforms have forced them to drop too many cases after defense lawyers accuse them of not turning over evidence quickly enough.
Although Gov. Kathy Hochul has recently rankled Mayor Adams with her proposals to impose new oversight on City Hall, Tisch credited the governor for aligning with the city on discovery reform and for helping fund new officer deployments into the subway system and said she was “grateful for her partnership.”
At the city level, Tisch took a shot at the City Council for considering a bill that would abolish the NYPD’s “criminal groups database,” which includes the names of thousands of alleged gang members. Although left-leaning lawmakers say the database fuels racially discriminatory policing, the Adams administration has said eliminating the system would badly hamper its police work, and Tisch on Wednesday chuckled bitterly as she chided the council for considering the legislation.
“As the mayor has said, abolishing it would be a huge mistake,” she said.
The commissioner acknowledged other challenges facing the NYPD, including major staffing problems stemming from poor hiring and high numbers of resignations and retirements. In her speech, Tisch announced that the department would ease a policy that requires at least 60 college credits to enter the police academy — shrinking that number to 24 credits.
To improve fitness, she also announced that the department would reinstate a policy that requires officers to complete a 1.5-mile run to graduate from the academy — a requirement that Adams dropped in 2023, reportedly over the objections of then-Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell.
