Moving to stabilize an administration roiled by investigations, resignations and his own indictment, New York City Mayor Eric Adams on Wednesday appointed sanitation chief Jessica Tisch as police commissioner. A city government stalwart and ex-NYPD official, she'll be just the second woman in the high-profile, high-pressure post.
The move comes at a critical time for the nation’s largest police department, shoring up its leadership after a tumultuous stretch punctuated by former commissioner Edward Caban's exit in September amid a federal investigation. Days later, his interim replacement, Thomas Donlon, disclosed that he, too, had been searched by the FBI.
Tisch,
43, the Harvard-educated scion of a wealthy New York family, has worked
for the city for 16 years, holding leadership roles in several
agencies. As sanitation commissioner, she beca
me TikTok famous when she declared in 2022, “The rats don’t run the city, we do.”
“I need someone that’s going to take the police department into the next century,” Adams said, praising Tisch as a “visionary” and lauding her track record of improving city operations.
Tisch said she believes “very deeply in the nobility of the police and the profession of policing” and is “looking forward to coming home.”
