As NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch on Tuesday announced the city just saw its safest year since the department began keeping modern-day crime stats in 1994, Mayor Mamdani, standing by her side, didn’t address how he will fulfill campaign promises to reform policing.
Tisch and Mamdani appeared together at NYPD headquarers at 1 Police Plaza in Lower Manhattan to tout the impressive end-of-year crime stats, which included a 20% drop in homicides compared to the year before.
When asked about the more controversial reforms he has promised, some of which Tisch opposes, like eliminating the NYPD’s gang database and outsourcing many mental health calls to a newly created agency, he deferred to Tisch.
“At this time, there is no change planned to the crime-fighting strategy that has delivered historic results,” Tisch said.
“Our crime-fighting strategy in the city is working,” she added, noting that she and Mamdani “continue to meet on issues and crime fighting strategies.”
“I am never satisfied with the status quo because its the status quo,” she said. “We are always going to look for ways to sharpen and refine, but I think its very clear our approach, in particular to violent crime in New York City and to subway crime in New York City, has led to historic results.”
But whether Mamdani is going to allow Tisch to continue running the department exactly as she wants to has been a central question since she agreed to stay on as his commissioner.
During his campaign, Mamdani pledged to keep the NYPD’s headcount flat, abolish the department’s controversial Strategic Response Group and get rid of its gang database — all proposals opposed by Tisch, who supports hiring more cops.
He has also vowed to create a Department of Community Safety, a $1 billion agency that would absorb some responsibilities currently handled by cops, such as mental health calls.
“Police have a critical role to play, but right now we’re relying on them to deal with the failures of our social safety net, which is preventing them from doing their actual jobs,” Mamdani said in a video posted in August.
Mamdani said Tuesday that the Department of Community Safety is still being worked on and remains a priority in his administration.
“To be very clear, (the agency) is about supplementing and not supplanting the work that the NYPD does,” he said Tuesday. “This is the opportunity to build on the incredible work that the NYPD has done.”
Tisch again defended the gang database during Tuesday’s press conference saying it helps predict where retaliatory strikes may occur following a gang shooting and “contributed to the gang takedowns that have been so successful this year.”
Mamdani didn’t give an opinion on the gang database during the presser.
“These are numbers and accomplishments to be celebrated and its also the ones to be built on,” Mamdani said of the crime drops. “We will not rest until we can make this the safest city it can be.”
When asked at an unrelated presser later on Tuesday why he doesn’t push back when Tisch trumpets policies he opposed on the campaign trail, such as precision policing where high crime areas are flooded with cops, which critics say amounts to a return to “broken windows” policing and adversely effects communities of color, Mamdani skirted the question.
“We’re not returning to broken windows policing,” he said simply.
The city saw shootings drop by 24% in 2025, from 904 in 2024 to 688 las year. Murders plummeted 20% with 77 fewer victims than the 382 in 2024, Tisch said.
The department also saw decreases in robberies, which saw a 10% drop; burglaries, which fell 4%; and car thefts, which fell 5%.
The number of violent assaults increased in 2025 by less than a percent, spurred on by increased assaults on law enforcement and an increase in domestic attacks invovling couples or relatives, cops said.
Tisch said rape reports in the city jumped by 16% because of a change made in 2024 broadening the legal definition of rape in New York State to includes more forms of sexual assault.
Out of the 2,049 rapes that were reported last year, a quarter of them were considered domestic in nature.
Cops also made massive strides in bringing down subway crime, which fell by 4% in 2025 to levels not seen underground since 2009 if you exclude crimes during the pandemic years when ridership was way down, Tisch said.
There was a 14% drop in shoplifting and retail theft, with at least half of the thefts ending in arrest thanks to a re-synching of resources from patrol officers, transit cops, detectives and prosecutors, officials said.
Gun violence fell across the U.S. in 2025, with a 14% drop in shootings by the end of September compared with the same period last year, according to The Trace, which monitors shooting trends nationwide. Compared with 2021, shootings were down 30% nationwide this year.
But Tisch said the NYPD saw far less shootings than many other major cities in the U.S., including Chicago, which recorded 1,400 shootings, more than double New York’s total, despite having a population of 3 million compared to New York’s 8.5 million residents.
Philadelphia, she said, recorded more than 825 shooting incidents, exceeding New York’s shooting numbers by 137. Philadelphia just has 1.5 million residents — one-fifth of the Big Apple’s population, she pointed out.
While shootings were down in New York, the number of teenagers shot had increased, said Tisch, who said that 14% of last year’s shooting victims, or 96 victims, were under 18, which is a 5% increase from last year.
Tisch said that saving city youths from violence gooing forward will be an “all of city” and “all of state” approach involving multiple agencies.
