New N.Y.P.D. Boss Takes Over a Department With Phenomenal Problems

Jessica Tisch will confront a crushing list of problems as soon as she returns to the New York Police Department next week.Officers, complaining of stress and overwork, have been fleeing.Overtime costs are climbing.

Crime is inching down, but assaults and rapes have jumped and New Yorkers remain nervous about random attacks.Then there are complaints about increased surveillance, a rise in the use of stop-and-frisk tactics and a federal judge’s report in September that showed police leaders had failed to punish officers who abused the practice.Welcome back, Ms.Tisch.On Monday, Ms.

Tisch, the city’s head of sanitation, will be sworn in as the 48th commissioner in the Police Department’s history and its second female leader.The question is whether Ms.

Tisch — who has three degrees from Harvard, has never walked a beat and comes from a family worth $10.1 billion, according to Forbes — can bring the change many say is desperately needed.“That department has phenomenal problems,” said William Bratton, a former New York police commissioner who promoted Ms.Tisch to deputy commissioner of information and technology during an earlier stint of hers there.

“The department needs a shake-up.It really does.

It needs a new energy.”Ms.Tisch, who left the department in 2020 after serving as an intelligence analyst and then deputy commissioner, according to city records, will become Mayor Eric Adams’s fourth commissioner during his single term.

She will return to an agency that has been buffeted by a federal investigation that drove out one commissioner, another inquiry that overshadowed the brief tenure of her interim predecessor, Thomas Donlon, and a pervasive sense of chaos and indiscipline.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank ...