Andrew Cuomo says he’ll ask current NYPD commissioner, Jessica Tisch, to stay on the job if he’s elected mayor Nov. 4.
“I think Commissioner Tisch has done a really, really good job and I would say off the bat I would ask her to stay,” Cuomo said in a Sunday interview with CBS News New York’s Marcia Kramer.
The statement, made in the final weeks of the campaign, comes as front-runner and Democratic candidate Zohran Mamdani is reportedly considering picking from a stable of veteran officials to lead the NYPD. He’s also publicly said he’s considering keeping Tisch, and has praised her for “decisive action to uproot corruption at the upper echelons at the NYPD and her presiding over lower levels of crime across this city.”
Mamdani’s team is also considering Rodney Harrison and Isa Abbassi, who both previously served in senior capacities at the NYPD, and Tracie Keesee, another NYPD veteran with extensive law enforcement experience, sources have told the Daily News.
Barry Williams/ New York Daily News
Zohran Mamdani arrives at the mayoral debate in Manhattan on Thursday. (Barry Williams/ New York Daily News)
Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa has also said he’d keep Tisch on as police commissioner.
Tisch, who was named police commissioner in November 2024, comes from the deep-pocketed Tisch family, which founded the Loew’s movie theater chain. The family’s members have collectively donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the pro-Cuomo Fix the City PAC since June, Board of Elections data shows.
She spent 12 years working as a civilian within the NYPD, beginning as a counterterrorism analyst, before moving up the ranks to become the department’s deputy commissioner for information and technology.
After her stint in the NYPD, former Mayor Bill de Blasio named her commissioner of the city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications in 2019.
When Adams became mayor, he named Tisch sanitation commissioner before giving her the top cop role last year after scandal and federal investigations engulfed the NYPD’s highest ranks, leading to the resignations of former Commissioner Edward Caban and his interim replacement Thomas Donlon.