Mamdani's NYC Can't Afford NYPD Commissioner Tisch

Edited by Sam Thielman

NOT LONG AFTER Zohran Mamdani won, I got into an impromptu conversation about the future of New York City at Bulletproof Comics with a group of regulars and randoms. Their enthusiasm bounced off the walls of the shop. Zohran's election, to them, was a shared victory. The thrill carried over when the conversation turned to another source of civic pride: regular, struggling New Yorkers like them mobbing ICE when the goons came to Canal Street. 

But the mood shifted now that we were talking about ICE. Everyone expects President Trump, as he has foreshadowed since Mamdani's primary victory, to soon send ICE (and Customs and Border Protection) swarming through New York. And except for me, everyone in the conversation can be assumed by their ethnicity to be an undocumented immigrant by an officer of the law, thanks to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Someone warned the group to keep their documents on them at all times. Several people started worrying for their non-English speaking relatives. People began talking about what Los Angeles and Chicago had created for community support. 

A kid who couldn't have been out of high school yet spoke up. If ICE came through Brooklyn like that, he asked, wouldn't the NYPD protect him?

SOCIALISTS ARE ABOUT to be responsible for a city of more than eight million people. Many of them are in the path of ICE. They and many more still are afraid for themselves, their neighbors and especially their children about what it will mean for ICE to arrive in force. Like the teenager at the comic store, they want protection in frightening times. They are not doctrinaire about who provides it. Conditions of emergency don't provide that luxury. 

To protect them, Mayor-elect Mamdani intends to keep on board the current NYPD commissioner, Jessica Tisch. I think this is a portentous, unforced error, for reasons concerning her specifically, the NYPD broadly, and the moment that we're in politically. It's a moment in which the traditional politics of security feel less relevant than ever to the insecurities felt so acutely by so many—insecurities that come from law enforcement, or, more specifically, from Homeland Security. 

Before we proceed, let's give a word of congratulations to the opponents of police abolition. You did it! You got your way! The few politicians who were willing to listen to police abolitionists with an open mind after the police murder of George Floyd in 2020 no longer are. Zohran Mamdani, under elite-media pressure, apologized to the police for the spicier, abolition-inflected takes he posted back then. All public-safety policy options that unfold now do so within the constraints you insisted on. But none of those constraints, by design, ever reckon with a question whose urgency grows with every ICE kidnapping: Who are the police for? 

It's not a question that Jessica Tisch's background has equipped her to answer. A scion of one of New York's oligarch families—think Tisch School of The Arts at NYU, the Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch Gallery at the Met, and the Loews Corporation, notable for its insurance and fracking pipeline holdings—the Tisches of the world can always count on the police. It's one of the messages she sent when she created the spectacle of surrounding a subdued, orange-jumpsuited Luigi Mangione with heavily armed and armored men. The man Mangione is accused of killing, United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, could have been her father, or her grandfather. If you had difficulty relating to Thompson—or found that you sympathized not with the victim but the alleged killer or, at least, his cause—then you were part of Tisch's audience. 

But that's all somewhat abstract. Far more concrete is the case of Leqaa Kordia. Since March 13, ICE has held the 32 year-old Kordia, a New Jersey resident from the West Bank, at its Prairieland, Texas detention facility and portrayed her as a terror supporter.

Kordia, a Palestinian, joined a Columbia encampment protest on behalf of Gaza in spring 2024. The NYPD arrested Kordia as one of many when it cleared the encampment, and soon after dropped the charges—which should have resulted in her arrest record being sealed. But a few months after Tisch became commissioner, ICE sent a request for assistance to the NYPD in what it called a money-laundering criminal investigation of Kordia, and the NYPD gave ICE Kordia's arrest record. 

New York's sanctuary laws bar cooperation with federal officials on immigration enforcement, which is a civil matter. But a criminal investigation launched by ICE provides an opportunity around sanctuary laws. Tisch defended this blatant end-run at a May press conference. "In the case that you are asking about, the member said that they were seeking information on this person related to a money laundering investigation, and that is fairly standard for us, and so the information was provided," she said. 

Even after Mayor Eric Adams pledged his fealty to mass deportation to spare himself prison, attorneys and advocates for immigrants were stunned by the NYPD-ICE cooperation. "The intention of the sanctuary laws is to protect against this kind of collusion and pretextual information sharing," Meghna Philip, the director of special litigation at the Legal Aid Society, told the Associated Press. Philip warned The City that it raised the "potential for wide-scale violations of the sanctuary laws by the NYPD." 

Unsurprisingly, Kordia was not the only victim of NYPD-ICE collaboration. In April, The City and Documented revealed that the NYPD was involved in the February arrest of two young men on gun charges that were dropped but got them sent to CECOT in El Salvador. They were able to do so thanks to federal/local law enforcement task forces—most importantly, the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force that unites the NYPD, FBI and ICE, among other contributors—that are partnerships for sanctuary-city police and the immigration agencies they're not supposed to assist. 

Then there are subtler mechanisms for collaboration. This spring, the NYPD started issuing criminal summonses for cyclists' traffic violations, like not wearing a helmet, that used to result in tickets. The change put the delivery workforce in the city, many of whom are undocumented, in ICE's crosshairs. "We know in this current political context that contact with the NYPD is a premise for the deportation pipeline," City Councilwoman Alexa Avilés told Streetsblog. By July, cyclists' summonses spiked to 6000, up from only 561 the quarter before Tisch's change. 

And ICE's "money laundering" probe into Kordia? It was an attempt to misrepresent her wiring cash home to relatives in the West Bank. Just magic words for ICE to recite so it could cross the sanctuary-city bureaucratic border into cooperation with the NYPD. And ominous ones, considering that Tisch gave the opening remarks to a January NYPD training session on combating antisemitism that was "in large part concerned with pro-Palestine activism, casting the Palestine solidarity movement as a significant threat to Jewish safety despite consistent documentation that antisemitism in the United States is most prevalent among far-right white nationalists," Jewish Currents reported in April.

"Some have asked whether we should reconsider our cooperation with federal agencies on criminal investigations in light of their work with ICE," Tisch told a City Council hearing weeks after acknowledging that the NYPD gave Kordia's sealed arrest record to ICE. "The short, straight answer to this is no." Never mind the documented pattern of ICE lying to judges and local cops to obtain partnership from criminal law enforcement the migrant hunters wouldn't otherwise possess.

THAT WAS WHERE Tisch stood when Mamdani unexpectedly won the Democratic primary. As Mamdani's path to Gracie Mansion withstood an onslaught of elite panic, one of the terms that establishment Democrats set for reconciling themselves to him—for now—was that he keep the billionaire heiress commissioner at 1 Police Plaza, as Tisch embodies the convergence of the two most powerful forces in New York determined to see Mamdani and socialism fail. Advocating for Tisch to remain were, among others, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries and Gov. Kathy Hochul. 

Mamdani notably praised Tisch during the second mayoral debate. His gesture came despite their substantial disagreement on bail reform and Mamdani's endorsement of giving a civilian review board—more on them in a moment—and not the police commissioner the final say in disciplining officers found guilty of misconduct. At that same debate, Mamdani vowed to end collaboration with ICE. But he tellingly framed that collaboration as "between City Hall and the federal government," leaving out the collaboration between 1 Police Plaza and the federal government. 

That elision spoke to how large a pill Tisch is for Mamdani's coalition to swallow. Put aside her ICE collaboration for a moment. As Ali Winston details at WIRED, Tisch's major legacy at the NYPD, where she started as a counterterrorism analyst in 2008, is the Domain Awareness System, a transformative surveillance architecture acquired and established at a time when the NYPD made itself into a secret police amongst the city's Muslim communities. Costing $3 billion, the "Microsoft-based surveillance network of tens of thousands of private and public surveillance cameras, license plate readers, gunshot detectors, social media feeds, biometric data, cryptocurrency analysis, location data, bodyworn and dashcam livestreams, and other technology… blankets the five boroughs’ 468-square-mile territory." It's one of the largest surveillance systems of any major city. 

While critics of the War on Terror warned that the explosion of counterterrorism cash would lead police to use counterterrorism tools for mundane law enforcement, Tisch saw that as a virtue. FOREVER WARS friend Noah Shachtman summarized her reasoning in a New York Magazine profile: "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 I say the Domain Awareness System is transformative, I mean in terms of privacy experienced by New Yorkers, not in terms of crime. FOREVER WARS noted in August, as Winston does, that the NYPD surveillance system now surreptitiously accesses the cameras placed by people's homes in public housing. In or outside of public housing, a recent lawsuit noted that the cameras on the streets see into people's bedrooms, from which Domain Awareness synthesizes the collected imagery along with many other siphoned inputs to help the NYPD "build profiles that construct the activities, religious and political affiliations, and thoughts and beliefs of millions of people—and stores the information indefinitely," Akela Lacy recently reported for The Intercept. Blanketing New York City in surveillance cameras, however, didn’t stop Luigi Mangione from (allegedly) killing Thompson and then escaping the city amidst 24/7 news coverage.

Still, Mamdani, apparently wishing to showcase his willingness to compromise and secure his mayoralty, reserved the top-cop job for Tisch. When Hell Gate caught up with the mayor the day after he won, Mamdani reiterated "my intention of retaining" her. Only Tisch hadn't reached out to him yet. Understandable, perhaps, as it hadn't been 24 hours since the vote. But as of this writing, they merely have a meeting scheduled for an undisclosed date, for them to discuss Tisch keeping what she's described as her dream job. That makes Mamdani, the winner of the biggest municipal political victory since 1969, a supplicant to the NYPD. And that's right where the NYPD wants him.  

MAMDANI IS HIRING a lot of Bill de Blasio veterans. Maybe one of them can remind him what happened after de Blasio, who won his election largely by opposing the NYPD's unconstitutional stop-and-frisk tactics, demonstrated the same high-minded instinct to compromise with 1 Police Plaza by restoring the cherished Bill Bratton as commissioner. 

In December 2014, a grand jury declined to indict NYPD Officer Daniel Pantoleo for killing Staten Islander Eric Garner with a prohibited chokehold. de Blasio, speaking at a church, warned protesters against "violence or vandalism" before adding a personal note that he has had to "literally train" his son, a black teenager, "how to take special care in any encounter he has with the police officers who are there to protect him." For simply vocalizing the basic reality that parents of black children are forced to experience, officers at a Queens hospital turned their backs on de Blasio when he arrived there following a shooting of two cops, Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, whose killings the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, one of the NYPD's three powerful unions, were already blaming on de Blasio. It was a dry run for a stunning display of public disrespect at the funeral for Ramos and Liu, where this time hundreds of officers rebuked de Blasio. He got jeered again when attending a police academy graduation days later at Madison Square Garden. Soon after, cops started a "Blue flu" quiet-quitting campaign. 

It was an open revolt predicated on the cops' demand for both the impunity to murder a man and silence from the city's political establishment. De Blasio's mayoralty never truly recovered. Months later, when a Brooklyn grand jury indicted a police officer for shooting Akai Gurley dead in a stairwell, de Blasio "tread[ed] lightly" so as not to anger the police, the Observer noted. It was a white flag raised above Gracie Mansion. Not only was the mayor uninterested in restraining the NYPD, he would not challenge its willingness to exercise political power. (And not for the first time, as everyone who remembers the 1992 police riot at City Hall knows.) Despite de Blasio's surrender, the police still turned their backs on him years later at a different cop funeral. In 2020, a different NYPD union gloated that the cops arrested de Blasio's daughter at a Black Lives Matter protest. I guess no one told them that making Bratton commissioner again was supposed to win them over. 

After de Blasio's unpopular mayoralty, the police and the local Democratic Party cut out the middleman and elevated former NYPD Captain Eric Adams to Gracie Mansion. Adams' whirlwind four years as mayor showcased what it means for the police to have one of their own wielding political power: jaw-dropping levels of corruption from the Law-And-Order set. Not only did Adams' elite-tier bribeability earn him a federal indictment, the investigations took out the entire inner circle he relied on to govern, including the schools chancellor at the start of the last school year. 

That atmosphere came to City Hall from 1 Police Plaza, where the police knew it was time to party. Adams' second NYPD Commissioner, Edward Caban, and his twin brother used their power to shake down bar owners into paying protection money. Stop-and-frisk came back in a big way, with racial discrepancies even wider under a black mayor. Cops' overtime pay exploded to the point where Adams had to rein it in a year ago after his ally, NYPD chief of department Jeffrey Maddrey, resigned when it emerged Maddrey used overtime as hush money to one of the several officers he sexually assaulted. Maddrey's tenure as the top uniformed officer was previously marked by his pressure on a Brownsville precinct sergeant to undo the arrest of one of Maddrey's friends, an off-duty cop who waved a gun at neighborhood kids. I'm barely even scratching the surface: Adams' third police commissioner accused Adams' NYPD of being a "coordinated criminal conspiracy." 

From the moment of Tisch's elevation as Adams' fourth commissioner, her allies built in the media a narrative of her incorruptibility. She immediately undermined it by making Maddrey's protege, John Chell, chief of department.

In 2008, Chell shot 25-year old Brooklynite Ortanzso Bovell in the back and lied about it, according to a civil suit that found Chell's actions to be intentional. Without any consequences for the killing, Chell rose through the ranks until he served under Caban as chief of patrol. There, Chell introduced two innovations. The first was to let the police drive more recklessly on vehicular pursuits, resulting in an unprecedented number of crashes. (Recall that the Commish has made cyclists' traffic violations a criminal offense.) The second was to establish the Community Response Team, an NYPD unit with an off-the-books culture that ProPublica quoted a source saying reported "directly" to City Hall. When Chell retired last month, The City's Yoam Gonen quoted a portion of former NYPD Commissioner Thomas Donlon's lawsuit that alleged the CRT was established "to harass, injure, and violate the rights of civilians, particularly in communities of color, with no regard for constitutional safeguard." Remember who Tisch made the NYPD's top uniformed officer the next time someone portrays the Commish as a font of integrity. 

With weeks to go before Mamdani's landslide victory, the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, one of the three unions through which the NYPD operates politically, waged a smear campaign against the head of the Civilian Complaint Review Board. Their problem was that Board chair Mohammed Khalid had the temerity to recommend discipline after his investigators determined evidence of officer misconduct. The PBA's assault on Khalid was a proxy for Mamdani, who spoke on the campaign trail about making the CCRB's decisions binding on the NYPD. To make sure no one misunderstood, the New York Post, the conduit through which the smears proceeded, framed Khalid as a "Mamdani-esque" fanatic determined to persecute police. 

Khalid quit the Friday after Mamdani won. While he wanted to continue, he said that he couldn't when the PBA president "can brazenly lie about me without consequence." As things stand, the final decision-maker on police discipline is the NYPD commissioner. The allegedly incorruptible Tisch used her first disciplinary decision to clear Lt. Jonathan Rivera, who killed 31-year old Allan Feliz during a car stop in the Bronx in 2019, over the objections of the CCRB and even an NYPD judge. Currently, Tisch faces decisions on the fate of officers like Omar Habib, a repeat offender who remains on modified duty while awaiting a criminal trial for choking someone out, and Wayne Isaacs, who killed Delrawn Small during a 2016 bout of road rage in Brooklyn. Khalid's CCRB had recommended bringing Small before a disciplinary trial, but an NYPD administrative judge objected to its jurisdiction, since Small was off-duty during the slaying—and then recommended dismissing all charges against Small. 

Hell Gate aptly summed up the PBA's victory over Khalid as "a show of force aimed squarely at the incoming mayor: one Muslim New Yorker who believes in the importance of police oversight brought low just as another prepares to take over City Hall." 

How do you suppose the PBA and its allies interpret Mamdani leaving 1 Police Plaza to its current occupant? As a reasonable gesture that shows he's someone the police can do business with? Or as a de Blasio-esque surrender that shows Mamdani is starting out afraid to challenge the NYPD? 

THE SAME DAY Khalid quit the CCRB, the Daily News reported that Tisch knew about the Canal Street ICE raid in advance. Tisch's people, clearly understanding the damage that the story could do to her continued NYPD tenure, made sure the story incorporated her defense. "[A]n NYPD spokeswoman said Thursday that Tisch ordered officers to remain on the sidelines in order to comply with [sanctuary-city] laws, which bar the city from helping the feds with civil immigration enforcement, and, conversely, to also avoid any sort of standoff between ICE agents and city cops," the paper reported. 

I thought of my conversation at Bulletproof. I haven't run into that frightened teen again yet. But I wonder if those in his shoes would be satisfied by the NYPD remaining on the sidelines as ICE comes to grab terrified, unarmed people. Would they want the NYPD commissioner to "avoid any sort of standoff between ICE agents and city cops"? Or would they want the NYPD commissioner to order quite a direct standoff between ICE agents and city cops, if that's what it takes to stop ICE from rounding up New Yorkers into detention centers and rendering them to unfamiliar countries?    

Will they forgive Zohran Mamdani, or the democratic socialists who champion him, for making excuses for why that can't happen? Will they be satisfied with hearing how ICE can break law after law, but the NYPD – the largest and most expensive police force in the country – must stand aside in an immigrant city and do nothing, as a matter of federalist fidelity?

Because that's where Jessica Tisch's proven track record will lead when ICE challenges Mayor Mamdani next year. The best case scenario is the NYPD stands aside. The other scenario is that the NYPD commissioner who has collaborated with ICE in evading sanctuary-city laws—the results of which include one woman held for eight months in a Texas detention center and two men taken to a Salvadoran torture prison—continues collaborating with ICE. (If Tisch's NYPD was willing to give ICE a sealed arrest record, do we think it wouldn't give ICE access to its surveillance cameras and databases? Such information sharing is the entire point of a Joint Terrorism Task Force.) Which of these scenarios suits Mayor Mamdani's agenda or keeps faith with Mayor Mamdani's coalition? 

The fact of the matter is that the NYPD's power over the mayoralty has steadily grown. First it flexed its power by gelding a mayor,  and then it enjoyed the lucrative thrill of putting one of its own in Gracie Mansion. Mamdani's coalition are the New Yorkers whom the NYPD kettle, pepper spray, nightstick and shoot, and the NYPD is not going to let that coalition wield power just because it won an election. It will never stop challenging Mamdani, never stop testing his weak points, never stop seeking leverage. Or, at least, it won't stop if it thinks Mamdani is too weak to fight back, which is unfortunately how he looks by leaving Tisch in power. 

Far better for New Yorkers and for Mamdani's mayoralty to impose Mamdani's will on 1 Police Plaza. If there is to be an NYPD now that the abolitionists are marginalized, Mamdani has to challenge it to protect New Yorkers from ICE. All of Tisch's experience makes it ridiculous to expect her to do that. I keep hearing how Mamdani has significant support from a rising generation of Desi NYPD officers. He should pick the seniormost among them to run 1 Police Plaza, make the NYPD a problem for ICE, and keep public pressure on the NYPD if it resists protecting people from ICE. An NYPD that won't protect people from ICE is an NYPD that will discredit itself—and in the process raise profound questions about why it needs a $10 billion budget and a citywide surveillance network.

The crisis of ICE is creating a new politics of security in this city, and perhaps beyond. Regular New Yorkers, the sort we saw stand up to ICE on Canal Street, are more afraid of a masked nativist kidnapping force massing outside their homes than they are of the crime-ridden Fear City that the Post and others always say will come from electing everyone left of Mike Bloomberg. Mamdani has a chance to champion that very different kind of security politics, one that addresses people's justified fears, and in so doing exposes the brittleness of the 9/11 politics that stoke their irrational ones. Or he can miss the opportunity to do so because he wants to show the oligarchs and the cops who will never accept him that he's a reasonable guy. If he takes the path of least resistance, far more people than him will suffer. 

In The Nation, Jonathan Ben-Menachem called me out for my rejection of Tisch. He agrees on the merits. But in his view, the issue is that the left has not built sufficient power to bolster Mamdani for a successful challenge to the NYPD. I would only respond that pre-surrendering to the NYPD because the left convinces itself it has "no significant counterweight to the immense forces urging Mamdani to stick with Tisch" is perverse and circular reasoning. The left dethroned Andrew Cuomo with a candidate no one had heard of a year ago and powered him to an outright majority in a three-man race while the local oligarchy spent unprecedented amounts of money to call him an antisemitic jihadist. Pivoting to a posture of impotence frankly condemns New Yorkers to an unaccountable NYPD and to ICE. Why would they trust Mamdani, or the socialist movement, with more power? 

But don't let it be said that I reject the value of compromise. I have a proposal that gives something to everyone, and accordingly respects how the balance of power in this city should tilt after this historic election. Bring Tisch back to the Department of Sanitation. There's a lot of good she can still do at DSNY, which a friend of hers told Noah was also her dream job. DSNY will doubtlessly provide Tisch a chance to showcase her integrity. I support, for instance, her initiative to containerize trash. After all, the wealthy so often tell us that they want to clean up our streets.