Jessica Tisch, Jewish public servant, appointed as commissioner of NYPD

Jessica Tisch, a longtime New York City public servant, was appointed as the commissioner of the NYPD on Wednesday.

Tisch, who comes from a prominent Jewish family, will become the second woman to head the city’s police department in its 179-year history.

Tisch, 43, is a 12-year veteran of the largest police department in the US - she was previously the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for information — and was appointed as the city’s sanitation commissioner in 2022. In that role, she prioritized fighting against the city’s rats, going viral for her pronouncements against the rodents.

As police commissioner, a role she will assume on Monday, Tisch said she would work to keep New York “safe and vibrant,” fight crime and disorder, build on the city’s counterterrorism abilities and implement police technology. 

“We will do all of this with integrity as we continue to build public confidence and trust in the police,” Tisch said in a Wednesday statement.

Tisch will be the city’s fourth police commissioner since Adams took office in January 2022. Announcing the appointment, Mayor Eric Adams said Tisch was “one of the most successful managers in our administration.”

Adams said, “To ensure New Yorkers have the ability to thrive in our city, we need a strong, battle-tested leader who will continue to drive down crime and ensure New Yorkers are safe and feel safe, and I cannot think of a leader more up to the task than Commissioner Jessica Tisch.”

Tisch’s father, James, is the president and co-CEO of the Loews Corporation, which her family has led since the 1950s. Her mother, Merryl Tisch, is the former chair of the New York State Board of Regents and chairperson emeritus of the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty. The family has a stake in the New York Giants and a hand in some of the city’s top Jewish nonprofits, and its name adorns one of the city’s hospitals and New York University’s arts school. The couple’s foundation distributed $18 million in grants in 2023, mostly to the Jewish Communal Fund.

In 2006, Tisch married Dan Levine, who works as a venture capitalist, in a ceremony at Central Synagogue in Manhattan that was officiated by her grandfather, Rabbi Philip Hiat, a Reform rabbi known for his interfaith work.

Tisch joined the NYPD as a counterterrorism analyst in 2008, the mayor’s office said. She climbed the force’s ranks until she left to become the commissioner of the city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications from 2019 to 2022.

She began her public service career after attending Harvard University as an undergraduate, as well as Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School. “My grandmother was incredibly supportive,” Tisch told The New Yorker. “Everyone else was, like, ‘Really?’ 

The NYPD and Adams

The NYPD has about 36,000 officers and 19,000 civilian employees, and a budget of $5.8 billion.

The department is seen as closely tied to Adams, who had a career in the NYPD before entering politics.

The Adams administration has been in turmoil in recent months due to charges of corruption. Adams pleaded not guilty to bribery charges in September.

The previous commissioner, Edward Caban, resigned in September after investigators confiscated his phone in a federal investigation into Adams’ associates. Caban’s lawyers said at the time that he was not the target of the investigation. The subsequent interim police commissioner, Tom Donlon, also became the subject of a federal probe.