New NYPD Commish Jessica Tischs top job: Be honest about NYC crime

Maybe the fourth time’s the charm: Last week, Mayor Adams appointed Sanitation chief Jessica Tisch to serve as his latest NYPD commissioner.Tisch, who once served as the NYPD’s deputy IT commissioner, is good at data, and so she’ll quickly grasp that the city’s crime figures aren’t stellar.She’ll serve the mayor well if she uses her independence to level with the public about this fact, and explain the problems and solutions.What does Tisch inherit? Through mid-November, major felonies (murder, rape, robbery, assault, grand larceny, burglary and car theft) are down 1.9% from last year.But such crime is still up massively — 30.4% — from 2019, the year before all of New York state’s defendant-friendly criminal-justice laws fully took effect.Murders are 12.1% above 2019 levels — and, since the summer, the mayor’s progress here has slowed, indicating distraction.New Yorkers elected Adams because they were experiencing the biggest increase in crime over such a short time period ever; the murder level rose 53% between 2019 and 2021.So the public had expected a decisive, double-digit drop in crime upon Adams’s reelection.Instead, felony crime rose 23.2% his first year in office, and was slightly up (statistically flat) in 2023.It’s not enough for the mayor to say, as he did after a fatal stabbing spree across Manhattan left three people dead last week, that “we are still looking over [the suspect’s] record, but there’s a real question on why he was on the street” after a short sentence for theft at Rikers.“He has some severe mental health issues that should have been examined.”That something the mayor could forgivably say during his first year in office, not his third: Why does this keep happening?Tisch is in a unique position to impose some discipline on the mayor.

Because of his indictments, and because he’s in office right now only because the governor hasn’t removed him, he has little room to interfere with her leade...