Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani said Sunday he met with police Commissioner Jessica Tisch and hopes she will stay on to continue leading the NYPD when he takes office.
“I do want her to stay,” Mamdani told ABC7’s Bill Ritter. “I made that commitment during the election and I continue to believe [that].”
The democratic socialist – who has scrambled to walk back past anti-law enforcement statements including “defund the police” rhetoric – has previously said he’d look to retain Tisch but the commissioner has been mum on if she’d consider working in the Mamdani administration.
Mamdani effusively praised the popular commissioner while taking a shot at outgoing Mayor Eric Adams and chaos within the ranks of the NYPD that Tish has been credited with stomping out.
“She came into a police department where Mayor Adams had stacked the upper echelons with corruption and incompetence,” Mamdani said..
“She started to root that out, started to deliver accountability and reduce crime across the five boroughs. That’s something I’m looking to build on under a Mamdani administration.”
The two have very different philosophies and could clash over police staffing levels, with the commissioner hoping to hire more officers and bolster the ranks.
“I think the number of officers we have is the right amount,” Mamdani said.
He also said he’ll follow through on creating a Department of Community Safety to respond to emergency calls involving the mentally ill and or homeless – a move he said would allow officers to focus on more serious crime.
It’s a plan law enforcement officials have blasted as dangerous and impractical.
Mamdani claimed the meeting was about driving down crime, but he dodged a question about whether he’d micromanage the department with an ideology some view as radical.
The meeting, he said, was “more about what it could look like to continue to deliver public safety and what it could like especially without the distractions we’ve seen over the past few years.” .
“I want this to be about the outcomes,” he said. “The most important thing is that New Yorkers are given a city that is safe and a city that is just, and too often those things have been put in tension.”
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