Commish Tisch to the Rescue

Photo: Natalie Keyssar for New York Magazine

Early every morning, Jessica Tisch starts getting a series of emails she says she “lives or dies” by. They detail for the police commissioner how many murders and rapes, robberies and felony assaults, were recorded over the past day — how many shooters, how many guns, how many victims, and where it all took place. The slashing on the F train, the Wingstop robbed on Edson Avenue, the elderly man from Williamsburg gone missing, the body found floating near Pier 1 in Brooklyn Heights. In the reports are the running tallies of protests around the city, the street encampments cleared, the unlicensed scooters seized, the cops who were recently disciplined. These are the figures and facts by which she and the more than 50,000 employees of the world’s largest police department will be judged. And if that were all the role entailed, it would be the sort of big-as-the-city challenge she has always chased.

But doing it all under Eric Adams as his administration cracks beneath scandal has made her whole job particularly complicated. One morning a few weeks ago, his lawyers filed a motion to have his federal bribery indictment tossed; those same lawyers had promised the Justice Department that Adams would use his “political muscle” to make Tisch’s department comply with the Trump administration’s immigration agenda once the case is dismissed. Minutes later, she went to midtown to announce new recruiting initiatives to replace the thousands of cops who left under the previous three police chiefs, two of whom are under federal investigation. It’s diabolically difficult to balance her duties to the NYPD with a need to keep close to the mayor. He shares her views on public safety but also considers the NYPD his “baby” and himself its “overbearing dad.”

Tisch does not need any of these headaches. Her extended family is worth billions. She earned three degrees from Harvard. She has already proved her ability to run big organizations, winning positions at three of the city’s agencies — information technology, sanitation, and police — all by age 43. Still, she has pursued these jobs with the sort of fervor that can drive some of her less intense co-workers crazy; one former colleague spoke of 2 a.m. emails that would be followed by another at 4 a.m. if Tisch hadn’t received a reply. During a previous stint at the NYPD, she helped deploy the citywide expansion of the department’s surveillance and data networks and was responsible for introducing the body cameras cops now wear and the specialized phones they carry. If you got a COVID-vaccination appointment at the height of the pandemic, that was thanks to the system the city’s chief information officer built with her team. And if you’ve noticed that mountains of trash bags are now only foothills, you’re seeing her handiwork, too. Largely from behind the scenes, she has been at the center of many of the city’s most important moments over the past two decades, amassing influence and emerging as one of this town’s most consequential figures. Perhaps it’s a bit of false modesty, but even the ultra-ambitious Tisch expresses a bit of surprise at this. “When I started at the police department, I didn’t imagine I’d be here too long,” she tells me when I visit her on the 14th floor of One Police Plaza, the NYPD’s headquarters. “If back in the day you told me I was going to be the CIO of the city, I would never believe you. Or Sanitation commissioner — never. And police commissioner — also never. Like, all of these things were highly improbable to me.”

Mayoral candidate Brad Lander on the left is publicly courting her to stay on if Adams leaves, as is the New York Post on the right, which has even been trying to draft her to run for mayor, putting her on the front page over and over. Andrew Cuomo’s mayoral campaign isn’t ruling out another term for her at the NYPD. (Members of the two families have been allies for more than a decade.) “I think she has the ability to be the first female mayor in New York City,” says Bill Bratton, her mentor and a former police commissioner. But after spending time with her and talking to dozens of her friends, colleagues, and adversaries, it’s a little hard for me to see. She can sometimes be awkward in crowds, even crowds of cops, and doesn’t have a politician’s hunger to be on-camera. When I press her about the chatter, her expression goes from uncomfortable to deeply uncomfortable. “I am the police commissioner. I have no ambition to run for office,” she says. I point out that’s not a definitive “no.” And it certainly doesn’t rule out a future run. She just repeats the same two sentences in reverse.

What’s undeniable is that Tisch, candidate or not, has been dragged into the city’s politics. At a time when so many of New York’s wannabe leaders seem to be corrupt, lacking substantial experience, only kinda-sorta concerned with public safety, or some combination of all three, Tisch has become a figure for people looking to be led again by a Bloomberg-style technocrat. In a speech in late January, she lashed out at district attorneys who let repeat criminals back on the streets, promised to expand the city’s surveillance systems, and pledged to tackle “aggressive panhandling, unruly street vending, public urination” with the rigor once reserved for violent felonies. The quality-of-life push is data-driven, but in this case, it’s about vibes as much as numbers. New York, as measured by major-crime statistics, may be the one of the safest major cities in the country, she tells me, “but without that sense of order in the streets, in the neighborhoods, people don’t feel safe.”

In late November, Tisch walked into the auditorium at One Police Plaza holding hands with her sons. They wore matching blue blazers, and she had a Magen David on her neck. More than a dozen relatives, buddies from Harvard, a group of moms from her kids’ Manhattan prep school, and the mayor were all standing for her. She was about to be sworn in as New York’s 48th police commissioner.

“Wow,” she said, recalling her first day at the NYPD in 2008: She was a counterterrorism analyst, fresh out of Harvard with a joint law and business degree. “I was in a dark conference room. Well, actually, conference room is quite generous. It was really an oversize closet with a giant refrigerator,” she said, laughing. It was the candidate-processing unit of the personnel bureau. “The name says it all. I really felt like I was being processed. Streams of outrageously repetitive paperwork, so many rules.”

Many ambitious, civic-minded Ivy League lawyers were joining the NYPD then, in the middle of the “War on Terror.” They knew it might be different, but this was “a bit like Mars,” recalls Rebecca Weiner, the current intel chief, who came straight from Harvard too. The paramilitary, outer-borough energy of the department was running particularly high when Ray Kelly, a former Marine and beat cop, was in charge.

Tisch adapted much more quickly than most. That first day, she began a lifelong professional partnership with another civilian analyst, Ryan Merola; he’s now her chief of staff. She also started bonding with some of the uniformed officers — the tendency for cops to be the children of cops appealed to someone who came from a tight-knit family. She loved their sense of mission. The rules became a comfort (some of them, anyway). The power to make things happen in a hurry in a top-down organization was thrilling in its own way. “Ray Kelly definitely taught me the value of command and control,” Tisch tells me.

Within a few weeks, Tisch, 27, was tasked with figuring out what to do with more than $100 million in unspent grant money from the federal Department of Homeland Security, which had just built a surveillance network to prevent another terror attack downtown. What if, she asked, the Domain Awareness System went citywide? And what if, instead of trying to stop a suicide bomber, the system tried to spot all kinds of crooks? What if it included the NYPD’s trove of arrest reports and criminal histories? When Tisch sent the privacy guidelines for the system to the lawyers at the New York Civil Liberties Union, they retched. “She was devastated,” says one colleague from that time. The bosses had the opposite reaction: “‘No, you’ve made it. Congratulations,’” the former colleague recalls them saying. Civil libertarians continue to view it — and her — with suspicion. “It’s really alarming to see a commissioner who built her career on the infrastructure of mass surveillance,” says Albert Fox Cahn of the NYU Information Law Institute.

In 2014, when Kelly was replaced by his old rival Bratton, who preferred a team-sport approach to management, Tisch figured she would be fired any day and boxed up her office. Instead, she was given a promotion. She became the NYPD’s first-ever deputy commissioner for information technology, responsible for putting access to the Domain Awareness System into the hands of cops with phones, some of whom still relied on radios and typewriters. Tisch initially contracted to get 36,000 Windows-based smartphones from AT&T, but two years later, Microsoft discontinued its mobile operating system. The Post beat up on Tisch for allegedly wasting $160 million. (AT&T changed out the devices for iPhones for free, so no money was wasted.) It stung. Tisch was (and is) a daily Post reader. “You believe everything else there,” one former colleague teased her. “But when the Post is wrong about you, it’s a one-off.”

Eight years later, Tisch is still annoyed by the negative coverage. It implies she was sloppy with the small stuff, when she’s absolutely obsessive about it. “She cared about details down to where the buttons were located — even the colors of the icons,” says a former colleague who worked on the phone project. He meant it as a compliment. Others differ. “The most difficult person I’ve ever worked with,” says another former colleague. A third, who says “it was a good day” if he didn’t cross her path, admitted Tisch was effective. “She was a positive force, and I had every reason to think that she wasn’t,” this person says. “The department was better off for her, for her time there.”

By the time she finished at the NYPD in December 2019, she had learned up close from Bratton and Kelly what it takes to do the job of police commissioner. “No schooling could ever compare to the opportunity to learn directly from these extraordinary men,” she would later say.

Mayor Bill de Blasio put her in charge of her own agency and named her the city’s chief information officer — a promotion, for sure, but one that might have seemed a little sleepier than the previous gig. Until COVID hit. Then the entire city government went virtual. Procuring nearly 100,000 iPads in a single week for public-school kids shifting to remote learning. Helping put together a contact-tracing system for hundreds of thousands of people in less than six weeks. Taking over and replacing the city’s online portal for vaccine shots after the initial one crapped out. Suddenly, the police job was the one that looked easygoing.

At one point, de Blasio asked what she wanted to do next. Tisch had an answer ready that confused everyone. Munib Islam, a close friend and Upper East Side neighbor, tells me, “She’s like, ‘Don’t tell anyone. My dream job is to be sanitation chief.’”

The name Tisch was not previously associated with trash collection. At New York University alone, there’s a school for the arts, a center of hospitality, and an entire hospital all named for various Tisches. Then there are the galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the children’s section of the Central Park Zoo, the 92nd Street Y — you get the idea. Forbes estimates the family’s net worth at north of $10 billion, a financial empire that started with hotels and has grown to include natural-gas pipelines, pharmaceutical packaging, insurance, entertainment, and the New York Giants.

She grew up on the Upper East Side, went to the Dalton School and then Harvard (with Jared Kushner and Natalie Portman, both of whom remain friends), and eventually returned to the neighborhood, paying $8 million for a duplex there. But Tisch is unusual for women “in our setting,” says her friend Islam. For example, he adds, she has a full-time job; many others don’t. When she goes to see the Rangers with her sons, they get normie seats, not a luxury skybox. When her family and Islam’s went out to eat, he jokes, “they’d offer a kids’ menu for the two young ones and I’d be like, ‘Also get a third one for Jessica.’ Her eating habits are like a 10-year-old’s” — more chicken strips, less omakase. At her wedding to hedge-funder Daniel Levine, she had one request: a Carvel ice-cream cake, just like every middle-class New Yorker had for a fifth-grade birthday. Her mom ordered 500 custom-made individual Fudgie the Whales, one for every guest.

She and her family are close, but it’s her mother’s side — which included a rabbi and a Jewish community-center principal from the immigrant, working-class heimische era of the Lower East Side — where Jessica had her strongest bond. She was her maternal grandmother Sylvia Hiat’s favorite and vice versa. “I think perhaps a lot of my strength comes from having someone who was just so unconditionally focused on me,” she says. When she decided to go into policing, Sylvia was the most supportive. When Jessica later became Sanitation commissioner, responsible for cleaning up the city after a snowstorm, Sylvia “would wake up every morning, four in the morning — she was in her 90s at this point — and pray to Hashem that it wouldn’t snow. Every day, 365 days a year, even in the summer,” Tisch says.

Sylvia’s daughter Merryl married James Tisch in 1975 (her sister married his brother). Over time, Merryl became a player in New York’s political, philanthropic, and policy circles. During Cuomo’s time as governor, she was named chancellor of the Board of Regents, the state’s top education position, then chair of the board of the State University of New York. She became known for her work ethic and her enthusiastic deployment of money and power. “When my refrigerator is broken, I don’t call the service department,” she was once quoted as saying. “I call the head of G.E.” The mother and daughter still talk all the time, and Merryl is, shall we say, generous with her opinions on “everything from trash policy, hairstyle, criminal-justice reform,” Tisch says. “She has a lot of feedback.”

Tisch’s mother told the Times that while she loved being a Tisch, she also made sure to cultivate “the Merryl part of my name.” Multiple people who know the Tisches well say this is a key to the clan’s dynamics. The family name may come from the men. The men may make the money. (Jessica’s younger brothers, Ben and Sam, are in the family business and in finance, respectively.) But the women — her aunt Laurie, a former Whitney Museum board chair; Sylvia; and Merryl — have the power to make an impact on civic life. And they have a notion, according to one relative, that “you’re not going to get anything unless you ask for it. But also, you have standing to ask for it.”

So I’m not surprised when a former colleague tells me Tisch “said to me once that one of her biggest personal regrets is that she didn’t take her husband’s name. She’s like, ‘It would have saved me a lot of drama if I was just Jessica Levine.’”

“People ask me why I’m so ‘driven,’” Tisch says, making air quotes with her fingers. “My mother is definitely my role model.” Merryl was on her left side when she was sworn in as police commissioner. Her hand was on her grandmother’s Bible.

You could see this as the culmination of a long family arc — or another sign of the alliance between the city’s privileged and its police. Jessica’s uncle Andrew served as chairman of the New York City Police Foundation, which funds all sorts of initiatives for the NYPD, and she used a foundation event in January to outline her vision for the force. Some of her predecessors got themselves into trouble by using the foundation for their own purposes. It did pay for an early pilot test of the body cameras Tisch would later deploy, but “every time Bratton or somebody wanted to do a foundation-related project, I remember her being like, ‘Can someone else do this? Because I don’t want to do this, given family,’” one colleague tells me. “She likes to keep up the wall.”

That seems typical of how Tisch operates: Her single run-in with the city’s conflict-of-interest board in almost 17 years came when she helped pay off a onetime colleague’s student loan; she was fined $2,000. When she was running Sanitation, she and her staff had to work at Times Square through New Year’s Eve to clean up after the open-air party. Business groups would rent out locations like the Hard Rock Cafe, and Sanitation executives would get invited. Tisch told them not to go — it would violate the gift ban. A former colleague recalls, “None of us had ever even thought about it.”

Her directive is a little ironic in retrospect. Tisch’s boss is not exactly famous for turning down perks.

Adams and Tisch didn’t know each other well before he became mayor. She spoke to a number of candidates during the election, including his rival Andrew Yang, but she soon saw in the former police captain a “kindred spirit” who shared a back-the-blue worldview and a disdain of the activist left. He gave Tisch her dream job: responsibility for the cleanup of 45 million pounds of garbage every day.

How was this, of all things, her dream? Was it really her dream? I admit I was skeptical. Tisch, I’ve come to learn, is someone who gets a kick out of making order out of messes — she completes puzzles for fun. And she likes to measure her successes; she still gets a daily email from Sanitation about the number of rat sightings in the city. (It’s about 2,500 this year, down 25 percent from this time in 2024.)

Tisch introduced to Sanitation a bunch of changes: specialized trucks that allowed composting to go citywide, surveillance cameras to catch illegal dumping. Perhaps more important was a shift in attitude. Case in point: An obscure interagency memo resulted in a number of city-owned properties not being cleaned. For 37 years. “One day, she was like, ‘Well, how many of these spots are there?’” a high-level Sanitation Department employee says. They counted more than 1,700. “And then she was like, ‘And what would it cost to clean?’ We did the math. We came up with $14 million a year. She went to the mayor and made the case, and we’ve been cleaning them ever since.”

And all the while, there was that unrelenting Tisch approach. Kenneth Corey, then the NYPD’s top uniformed officer, remembers getting a call at 8 a.m. one Sunday. “Hey, I just sent pictures to your email about this encampment on 14th Street,” Corey remembers her telling him. “How quickly can you get some people, with my people, to go out and clean this up?’”

Adams was loving all of this. He had been elected to restore a sense of law and order to the city after COVID, and Tisch’s so-called trash revolution became a rare win. “Jessica Tisch has risen to every challenge our administration has set before her, proving time and again her commitment to being a part of the team,” he tells me in a statement. She admired him, too. “He had an 8 a.m. call every morning with a bunch of commissioners and a bunch of deputy mayors,” Tisch tells me. “And I would hear him talk about sanitation stuff or policing stuff, and I was like, Oh my God, I can complete this guy’s sentences. This is incredible.”

At the same time as he set up Tisch at Sanitation, Adams named the highly regarded Keechant Sewell the NYPD’s first female commissioner — then quickly undercut her. He gave his ex-cop buddies jobs in the administration with authority over the department. Take Tim Pearson, a former detective who put associates in key positions throughout One Police Plaza, naming one head of internal affairs and installing another as Sewell’s chief of staff. “There were all these ways that people could circumvent the chain of command,” Corey tells me. Corey was replaced with another longtime friend of Adams, Jeff Maddrey, whom Sewell had tried to discipline when Maddrey dropped the case against a gun-waving ex-cop who had menaced a group of children. Adams stepped in to protect him.

Sewell quit in June 2023, and Tisch put out the word — quietly — that she was interested in the job, according to one former colleague, so Adams didn’t feel boxed in. She thought it was a long shot because even if she was deeply immersed in cop culture, she still wasn’t a cop. “She would kind of whisper, ‘I’d love to be police chief, but it’ll never happen,’” Islam says.

Edward Caban, who had joined senior leadership just a year earlier, became commissioner. Kaz Daughtry, Maddrey’s former driver, was promoted six levels to assistant commissioner despite 51 misconduct allegations having been filed against him. John Chell — who a jury found had intentionally shot a man in the back, killing him — was named chief of patrol. With the mayor’s blessing, they pushed the image of a chest-pounding, deeply political NYPD. Daughtry was sued after a viral video appeared to show him slamming a protester’s head to the ground. Chell savaged reporters, left-wing politicians, and even a judge on social media. Together, they championed an aggressive vehicle-pursuit policy that resulted in the deaths of 13 people. Police morale, already in the toilet, dropped into the sewer. Retirements and resignations remained nearly double from the pre-pandemic levels. Hundreds of officers were transferred without paperwork to desk jobs or to pad out the chiefs’ entourages. Meanwhile, more cops were pulling extra shifts, and overtime spiked to $1.1 billion. Lawsuits piled up against the top brass, too. In April 2024, a reform advocate who worked closely with the police sued Maddrey, Chell, and Daughtry for organizing a smear campaign — by leaking details of her rape.

If any of this changed Tisch’s mind about the mayor, she and her circle kept those opinions to themselves. In their view, Adams had always done right by them. And if lots of people around the mayor were getting sued or investigated or both, they reasoned, that wasn’t exactly uncommon in City Hall. Adams “supported me when I wanted to ask every New Yorker to change the way they do something three to five times a week, taking out the trash,” Tisch says. That’s something “no other mayor in 50 years would take on.”

But by September, the scandal and dysfunction were impossible to ignore. Things hit a comically awful nadir on Labor Day when a gunman killed one person and shot four more at the West Indian Day Parade — Adams cheered “hats off” to the NYPD for the people who didn’t get shot. A little more than three weeks later, the mayor was indicted. (Damian Williams, another Harvard classmate of Tisch’s, filed the charges.) Caban resigned after federal investigators seized his phone as part of an investigation into him and his brother over an alleged protection racket involving the police and nightclub enforcement. His interim successor was promptly raided by the Feds in another matter, and Pearson was also pushed aside. By this point, the administration had been decimated by scandal.

It was then that Tisch started angling a little less quietly for the commissioner’s chair. She talked to some of the deputy mayors and finally to Adams himself. Given all the allegations of City Hall’s meddling in One Police Plaza’s business, you might expect Adams offered the job with caveats. Or that Tisch took the gig only with promises she would be given independence. Yet some people in her orbit swear there were no terms and conditions from either of them. “This guy doesn’t do well with people giving him ultimatums,” says a source close to the administration. “‘Come in and save my ass’ doesn’t work because there’s no way to guarantee it saves his ass. And if it’s a ‘Come in and leave my friends alone,’ she wouldn’t have done it.”

Maybe that sounds like naïveté, believing in a guy who has trouble answering honestly whether he’s vegan or not. But in Tisch’s case, trust had been built up over time in her relationship with the mayor and, more important, in herself. “She has that unbridled faith in her ability to do these things and manage it and get the principal” — Adams — “to where the principal needs to go,” Merola says. “She damn well knows she can accomplish things most can’t.” For a few weeks, there was silence from City Hall. Then Tisch got the word: Her whispered hope was coming true. Now she just had to hope the mayor would actually let go.

Less than three weeks later, she found herself leading a manhunt that had become a global fixation. An unidentified person had assassinated a health-insurance executive in midtown. Five days into the investigation, in a conference room on the 14th floor of One Police Plaza, the department’s chiefs were briefing Tisch on what they had so far on the guy. They had pulled DNA from what they thought were the suspected shooter’s Kind bar and water bottle, but there were no matches. The surveillance-camera network Tisch had helped build wasn’t of much use. Detectives had to go building by building collecting footage, which produced only a handful of partial photos of the shooter, none of them complete enough for a successful facial-recognition match. Adams might have promised over the weekend that the “net is tightening,” but it was bullshit. Despondent, Tisch slumped in her high-backed leather chair at the head of the table. Kenny, the chief of detectives, started mapping out the next steps in the investigation as the trail cooled. “Oh, that sounds like it could take a long time,” she told him, and Kenny agreed. “So what you’re telling me is we could get this guy six months from now.”

Since receiving a text about the shooting while making breakfast for her kids, Tisch had authorized the department to throw everything at finding the shooter: drones, canines, scuba divers, hundreds of detectives and beat cops. She restrained herself from micromanaging the investigation, even though she was dying to call Kenny every 15 minutes for an update. The only break she took was to bring detectives corned beef and pastrami from her grandmother’s favorite, the 2nd Ave Deli.

In an unprecedented move, she took ten analysts from the NYPD’s intelligence division to help with the case. They scoured social-media profiles of hundreds of young men who both looked like the shooter and had posted about their rage at the health-insurance industry. Tisch debated with Weiner whether potential matches were hot enough to be the guy in the surveillance footage. “I looked at so many photos of people with brown hair, the same complexion. I’d be like, ‘No, that jawline is not chiseled enough. Those eyebrows are not wild enough,’” Tisch tells me.

She found herself staring at the possibility of a catastrophic setback — for the department and for her personally. The killer was already emerging as a folk hero. Who knows how long she would have the job if he wasn’t caught. “I was anxious,” she says. “But I’m always anxious.” Kenny tried to reassure the room that the global interest in the case could well result in the right person at the right time seeing the photo. Once that happened, Kenny said, the whole thing could be done in as little as five minutes.

Five minutes passed. A call came in to the 14th floor. Someone in Altoona, Pennsylvania, had seen the photo. Tisch started pelting Kenny with questions: “Chief, is this right? Do they have him? And who the heck is he?” Then she asked what all the New Yorkers in the room were thinking: “Where the hell is Altoona?” Tisch hugged everyone when confirmation came back that they had the suspect. Then she told Daughtry to book it to Pennsylvania — the NYPD had to beat the Feds. She owed it to her detectives, and she knew that was what the mayor would want.

When pictures of the alleged shooter, Luigi Mangione, started coming out, he was even better looking than his surveillance shots had suggested. “Oh God, this is gonna be a problem,” Tisch said, according to a police colleague. His online fan base was already massive, much to her disgust, and she wanted to bring him back to New York quietly to avoid publicity. But City Hall apparently craved that attention. You’ve seen the pictures: in the foreground, Mangione in an orange jumpsuit; trailing him, a crowd of cops in riot gear — and Adams.

Notably absent from the photo op was Tisch. Six weeks later, I’m in that conference room and I ask her why. She looks at me like I’ve grown a second head. “I didn’t need to be at a perp walk,” she says. “I’m a police commissioner.” Then I press her on what Adams was doing there. It’s the only time in our conversation she can’t quite stay perfectly attached to her boss. “I’m sure he had his own reasons for it. I don’t, don’t — you can ask him.”

Two days after Mangione’s arrest, an aide to Maddrey told the Post that the $204,000 in overtime she made was actually a payoff for enduring the senior cop’s sexual abuse. Tisch hadn’t planned on a wholesale housecleaning at headquarters, at least not right away; to her, integrity issues were important but not the most urgent. Then Maddrey forced her hand. She was “beyond pissed” when she found out, according to one police colleague, and less than three hours later, Maddrey was gone. The next day, she sacked the head of internal affairs, another Pearson ally. The department advocate, in charge of the discipline system, was changed out. Days after that, internal-affairs officers joined the FBI in raiding Maddrey’s home. Adams called the allegations “troubling,” but according to people in Tisch’s orbit, this time he made no attempt to protect his old friend. Tisch gave Adams a heads-up before major moves, and the unspoken agreement between them held.

The cleanup is incomplete by design. Tisch gave two of Adams’s people another shot. Chell was promoted to Maddrey’s job, and Daughtry, a self-described student of the “University of Maddrey,” stayed on as deputy commissioner for operations. They appeared to be loyal to Tisch, and they hustled. “You know who else got promoted seven ranks in two years?” she asks, pointing her thumbs at herself. “People rise to meet challenges. That guy’s a crime fighter. So is John Chell,” she adds, citing declining felony statistics.

And while Chell toned down his broadsides against progressive judges and district attorneys, Tisch ramped up hers, accusing the authors of Cuomo-era reform bills of turning New York’s criminal-justice system into “a revolving door where there are no consequences” for “repeated violent crime. It is out of all control — and something has to give.”

The changes at the top have given senior leaders I spoke with a renewed sense of purpose and energy. How much of that has trickled down to the average cop? I asked around and got a lot of eye rolls: Police commissioners come and go; getting more officers through the door, and more money for the cops who are here, matters more than whoever’s at the top.

Photo: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Tisch is trying to undo some of the worst parts of the Adams administration’s legacy at the NYPD, such as the deadly vehicle-pursuit policy, without getting on the wrong side of Adams himself. She’s trying to keep the department out of his machinations with the Trump administration without showing him up and without bringing the cops into direct conflict with the Feds. Meanwhile, she’s got an agenda to push for however long she’s in the commissioner’s chair.

At the top of her list is doubling down on data-driven policing and surveillance. The city’s camera network showed its limits during the Mangione case; Tisch wants to expand it to include more privately owned cameras so the next manhunt won’t be so labor intensive. Alerts from the ShotSpotter gunshot-detection system may result in confirmed shootings only less than 15 percent of the time, according to the comptroller’s office, but Tisch extended ShotSpotter’s contract, arguing that something is better than nothing. She’s looking to use the data that’s now collected in the Domain Awareness System and measured by CompStat to surge police resources down to a single block. Perhaps the biggest change is that she wants to use those same systems and processes to fight “chaos,” not just crime. Major felonies may be down, especially under Tisch, but complaints about crime reached a ten-year high last year. There’s still a widespread sense of unease, a feeling that the next jump scare is just out of frame. Combating that could be seen as deeply necessary — and as opening the door to something dystopian: Giuliani-style crackdowns, only with better gear.

It’s one of many questions about how all that technology is used. These are systems, originally designed for counterterrorism, that Tisch helped expand to general policing. It’s not a stretch to imagine their being repurposed again to target immigrants.

The NYPD already shares information with any number of federal agencies — and functionally has zero control over what happens next. Tisch says, carefully, that “our policy is very clear that we will not participate in civil immigration enforcement.” As in, the police won’t arrest you if your visa runs out. Of course, the NYPD will work with Homeland Security on criminal cases, but state law forbids anything more. Cops technically aren’t supposed to cooperate on workplace immigration raids or let U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement into schools without a warrant. “We have policies and procedures in place for this,” she says. “This is nothing new to this department.”

It was a by-the-book answer from someone who operates by the book, reassuring in its certainty — as long as the laws are respected and the entire justice system isn’t suddenly turned upside down. Days after we spoke, the mayor made a joint appearance with “border czar” Tom Homan on Fox & Friends, floating (and then quickly walking back) the idea of breaking local law to help with Trump’s deportation agenda. Homan promised he would be in the mayor’s office and “up his butt” if Adams didn’t deliver.

Tisch didn’t meet with Homan when he was here, and less than four hours after Fox & Friends hit, the NYPD’s official account tweeted that the department will not participate in civil immigration enforcement, “period.” Some informed observers saw this as Tisch drawing a line against mayoral pressure — and as another shrewd political move by someone who seemed to be making a lot of them recently. Others took it as a subtle indicator that Adams was doing Tisch (and his beloved department) a solid, routing the most uncomfortable elements of the ICE relationship through City Hall under Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Chauncey Parker and thereby keeping the NYPD out of it. “Chauncey is handling all of that,” one police colleague tells me the day after a meeting between Parker, Adams, and Homan.

Less than 72 hours later, Parker and three other deputy mayors announced they would be resigning. Parker was replaced by Daughtry, one of Adams’s most eager, most willing protégés.

Throughout the past few tumultuous weeks, Tisch and Adams have kept up their normal conversations about the department as if there weren’t a shitstorm raining down. “I talk to him often, not as much as I talk to my mother,” she says. The NYPD has been doing its best to show Washington that it cares about catching immigrants accused of felonies. The department added a couple dozen people to the various federal-local task forces. It was being as cooperative as it could on criminal matters, but when ICE calls and says it’s doing a purely immigration-related raid or when new DHS boss Kristi Noem pulls some migrant-bashing publicity stunt, “we stay the fuck away,” a source close to the Adams administration says of the NYPD. The question is how long they can keep it up.

Tisch has spent her entire career putting her faith in the chain of command. What happens now, when the person up the chain is compromised? Throughout her career, she has followed the rules, stuck to the letter of the law. “Her opinion about the law is clear, right? If the law changes, that’s a question for another day,” says a former colleague. She became a star in local government for solving seemingly intractable problems. What if her solutions are reprogrammed for cruelty? What happens when the rules are rewritten? We’re in the Trump years. Norms and traditions and common sense and legal niceties keep getting smashed against the wall.