\n<\/p>\n
Jessica S. Tisch, the billionaire heiress who is commissioner of the New York Police Department, had just walked into the dining hall on one of her first days at Harvard when she was accosted with an unmannerly question: How much did she weigh?<\/p>\n
She was taken aback, but it turned out that the men\u2019s lightweight crew team was looking for a coxswain, who shouts orders to the rowers. They needed someone both light and commanding. \u201cThey described it to me as, \u2018You sit in front of the boat and you tell everyone what to do,\u2019\u201d she recalled in a recent interview.<\/p>\n
It had definite appeal.<\/p>\n
\u201cI ended up being pretty good at it because of my personality,\u201d she said. \u201cI didn\u2019t use my muscles so much. I used my voice and my brain.\u201d In the end, she concluded, it was \u201cquite the foreshadow\u201d of an unlikely and remarkable career.<\/p>\n
Commissioner Tisch, 44, is now five months into a job running the nation\u2019s largest police department and telling nearly 50,000 civilian and uniformed employees what to do. Taking command of an agency rocked by scandals and the departure of three commissioners over two years, she has already shaken up the staff and managed her first crisis, the hunt for a man charged with assassinating a United Healthcare executive.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The question is whether a woman with three Harvard degrees, a $12 million Upper East Side duplex and no experience as a uniformed officer can succeed in one of the city\u2019s toughest jobs. Her success will be defined in large part by how well she cleans up the battered department and how much she brings down the crime rate, both tall orders in New York.<\/p>\n
Her task is more complicated because she reports to Mayor Eric Adams, a former police captain who until recently was under federal indictment. The mayor, who appointed Commissioner Tisch, is now the beneficiary of the Trump Justice Department, which successfully urged a judge to drop the corruption charges against him.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Commissioner Tisch speaks to the mayor daily, but has said little about the Trump administration letting Mr. Adams off the hook. \u201cI don\u2019t want to talk about it,\u201d she said in the interview.<\/p>\n
She, too, is under pressure from a White House that wants local law enforcement officials to help with roundups of undocumented immigrants, a job she adamantly says does not belong to her department. She has had a video call with Thomas D. Homan, the hard-line \u201cborder czar\u201d carrying out what the White House hopes will be the largest deportation effort in history. She described their conversation, initiated at Mr. Homan\u2019s request, only as \u201cshort and formal,\u201d with no official requests, at least so far.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cWe will not engage in civil immigration enforcement, period,\u201d she said in the interview.<\/p>\n
There are other headaches: recruitment problems, excessive police overtime, complaints about increased surveillance<\/a>, a jump in rapes even though most crime is down. There is also a distracting (although flattering) chorus, including from The New York Post<\/a> \u2014 where Commissioner Tisch once worked as a summer intern writing weekend feature stories \u2014 to run for her boss\u2019s current job.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t see it,\u201d she said, though she did not dismiss the idea out of hand. \u201cI am a public servant, not a politician.\u201d<\/p>\n Friends sometimes wonder why Commissioner Tisch works at all. Forbes magazine estimates her family\u2019s fortune, which started with Loews Hotels and now includes insurance, natural gas pipelines and the New York Giants football team, at $10 billion. The family\u2019s philanthropy includes the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, Tisch Hospital at NYU Langone Health, the Tisch Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum, the Tisch Children\u2019s Zoo in Central Park and more.<\/p>\n But Commissioner Tisch, the daughter and granddaughter of two strong women, neither of whom came from money, learned hard work by example. Her mother, Merryl Tisch, is a former chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents. Her grandmother, Sylvia Hiat, who was for 30 years the principal at what was then the Hebrew school at the 14th Street Y, called her granddaughter every morning until her death this past summer. \u201cShe was my alarm clock,\u201d Commissioner Tisch said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n She was also her coach. Her grandmother was worried about her running the New York City Marathon, Commissioner Tisch said in a eulogy, recounting how her phone rang early in the race, just as she got over the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. Her grandmother had been tracking her progress on an iPad via a computer chip in Commissioner Tisch\u2019s racing bib.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIf you\u2019re going to do this,\u201d her grandmother said, \u201cyou might as well speed it up a bit.\u201d<\/p>\n Unlike her two younger brothers, Commissioner Tisch never wanted to enter the family business or finance. Instead, she developed what current and former colleagues call an exceptionally tough management style and poured her drive into nearly two decades working in law enforcement and technology and as sanitation commissioner. All are vital to the city, and a world away from the privileged comforts she grew up in.<\/p>\n \u201cMy career has been one of the great blessings of my life,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Commissioner Tisch took the chair at the head of the table in the conference room at 1 Police Plaza, the department\u2019s 1973 Brutalist headquarters in Lower Manhattan. In an hourlong interview, she wore a turtleneck sweater, black boots and large diamond earrings. She was talkative and purposeful, but circumspect, particularly when discussing the mayor.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have regular, scheduled meetings,\u201d she said. \u201cBut, you know, things come up all the time. So I would say it\u2019s safe to say we either speak or exchange messages every day.\u201d<\/p>\n As the mayor\u2019s reputation has crashed and Commissioner Tisch\u2019s profile has risen, she has been careful not to upstage him. She has profusely praised Mr. Adams in public and credited his leadership for falling crime rates. \u201cHe\u2019s still the mayor,\u201d said Ryan Merola, Commissioner Tisch\u2019s chief of staff. \u201cHe still calls the shots.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The commissioner herself is not a natural public speaker, and no one has ever suggested she has a dazzling political charisma. In January, at her first State of the N.Y.P.D. speech, an annual address to the nonprofit New York City Police Foundation, she projected a technocratic competence as she read stiffly from a Teleprompter. She talked of a \u201chyperlocal, data-driven policing model\u201d while a screen behind her displayed a blizzard of statistics.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The conference room at 1 Police Plaza had the same sensibility. Its walls were lined with screens displaying video surveillance \u2014 Union Square, Times Square, traffic on the Verrazzano-Narrows \u2014 as well as real-time responses to emergency calls. In one corner were reports of an assault and a robbery, both listed as \u201cin progress.\u201d<\/p>\n The displays reflected some of Commissioner Tisch\u2019s earlier successes. Over a dozen years in the department, she helped build an app that provided officers with real-time information about emergency calls directly on their iPhones, and ended decades of relying on radios or paper files at headquarters. She was also a leader in developing the Domain Awareness System, one of the world\u2019s largest networks of security cameras and facial recognition software.<\/p>\n The cameras helped trace the steps of Luigi Mangione, the man accused of killing the health care executive at a Manhattan hotel. The police ultimately apprehended him because a customer at a McDonald\u2019s in Altoona, Pa., recognized him from a photo. The cameras have helped fight crime, but they have also sparked fierce criticism from watchdog groups that New Yorkers are living in a surveillance state.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The commissioner\u2019s extraordinary wealth has prompted questions about how she can lead uniformed officers whose starting salary is $56,000. She says her track record speaks for itself. \u201cI never thought of it as bridging any gap,\u201d she said. \u201cI see it more as a partnership based on mutual respect, different skills, different talents, different experiences.\u201d<\/p>\n She is a fierce defender of the rank and file. \u201cSome of the rhetoric in New York City that\u2019s hurled at cops, for example, at protests, is quite vile and unacceptable,\u201d she said. \u201cGod bless them for taking it as professionally as they have done.\u201d She has been praised by uniformed officers for bringing a sense of order to the mayhem, although there is grumbling about reduced overtime hours and a disciplinary crackdown.<\/p>\n \u201cShe\u2019s holding everybody accountable. It doesn\u2019t matter what rank you are,\u201d said Scott Munro, president of the detectives\u2019 union. But he said discipline has been heavy-handed and has made attrition problems worse. \u201cI\u2019m losing detectives every day,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Commissioner Tisch also brings a reputation as a sometimes abrasive boss, according to seven former and current employees who worked with her when she ran the Sanitation Department and was head of information technology under Mayor Bill de Blasio. The employees, who did not want to be identified for fear of retribution, said she belittled people publicly and shouted and even swore at workers who questioned her. One former manager left her position after Commissioner Tisch told her not to speak at meetings and then ostracized her.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Her defenders say she has an intensity that they like, and that she gets things done. \u201cHave I ever seen her curse or yell at anybody? Of course I have,\u201d Mr. Merola said. \u201cPeople yell back. It will be a dynamic. It is not a pound-the-table-and-everyone-goes-silent.\u201d<\/p>\n Joshua Goodman, who worked with Commissioner Tisch at the Sanitation Department, recalled one late night in 2022 when she was reading a draft of a speech he had written for her to give the next day.<\/p>\n Her critique: \u201cThis is a snoozefest. I know you can do better than this.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Goodman went back to work. \u201cShe\u2019s not, you know, rubbing your head and saying, \u2018Great job,\u2019\u201d he said. At the same time, he said, \u201cI worked with a lot of blunt guys\u201d and \u201cthey don\u2019t get talked about the same way.\u201d<\/p>\n John Miller, a former deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism who worked with Commissioner Tisch, said he had little patience for stories about her management. \u201cThere\u2019s a police department to run and lives are on the line,\u201d he said. \u201cGo out and fill out the hurt feelings report and leave it in the file. It\u2019s called having a boss.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Harry Nespoli, the longtime president of the sanitation workers\u2019 union, described a different energy.<\/p>\n \u201cThe louder she got, the more quiet I got,\u201d he said. \u201cI told her once, \u2018You want to see the scars on my back, Jess? I\u2019ll show the scars on my back.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n And yet, Mr. Nespoli said, she was the only commissioner who got him extra workers and trucks. \u201cShe\u2019s not a slacker,\u201d he said. \u201cShe\u2019s a worker.\u201d<\/p>\n Joseph Kenny, the chief of detectives, said he liked her directness. \u201cWhen Police Commissioner Tisch asks you a question and you give an answer, you\u2019d better be prepared for two more questions,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Accounts of her bruising style are not news to Commissioner Tisch. \u201cI expect if you\u2019re coming to a meeting with me that you\u2019re prepared,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd I expect that you bring passionate intensity to your work. Generally those types of people enjoy working with and for me. Others, maybe not so much.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But she was sensitive to the talk. \u201cI hope you\u2019ve heard from people,\u201d she said, laughing tentatively, \u201cwho tell you how much they love working for me.\u201d<\/p>\n Family friends remember Commissioner Tisch as a classic eldest child, a take-charge sister to two younger brothers. She grew up on the Upper East Side, went to the elite private Dalton School, and spent weekends at the family house in Westchester County. But an otherwise charmed life was marked by arthritis, diagnosed when she was 18 months old. The disease continued well into her teens, caused stiff and inflamed joints and left permanent damage.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve never been able to turn my head,\u201d Commissioner Tisch said. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t bother me at all. Just turn my body or my chair.\u201d It was an issue, however, on the crew team.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the things that you\u2019re supposed to do as coxswain is tell the rowers where they are vis-\u00e0-vis the other boat,\u201d Commissioner Tisch said. \u201cAnd the only way to get a really good sense of it is if you turn your head 90 degrees, because otherwise it\u2019s distorted. And so I had a whole mirror situation set up on certain boats to help me figure out where we were.\u201d<\/p>\n The Harvard team won a national championship in 2003 in Camden, N.J., where the rowers celebrated by throwing Commissioner Tisch into the water, the tradition for coxswains after major victories.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n From there she blazed forward to earn degrees in both law and business. In 2006 she married a fellow student, Daniel Levine, now the managing partner of a venture capital firm. The couple has two sons, 9 and 13.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n By 2008, with both degrees complete, Commissioner Tisch found herself at an uncharacteristic loss.<\/p>\n She had landed coveted summer internships, including at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, a top mergers and acquisitions firm; as a fact-checker in the speechwriting office of George W. Bush\u2019s White House; on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal; and at The New York Post. None appealed as a permanent path.<\/p>\n By that August, she had passed the New York bar exam and was looking for work just as the financial crisis hit. \u201cThe world was ending,\u201d she said. A friend suggested she try the New York police, where there was an analyst position available in what was then the counterterrorism bureau.<\/p>\n Ray Kelly, then the commissioner, did not normally meet with applicants for such entry-level jobs, but he ended up interviewing her. \u201cProbably because she was a Tisch,\u201d he said, adding that he had been impressed with her three Harvard degrees.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Thus began what turned out to be a defining period of her career. The city was still on high alert seven years after 9\/11 and Commissioner Tisch was part of an elite team aimed at thwarting attacks. Other ambitious Ivy Leaguers were signing up, including at one point four women from Harvard.<\/p>\n \u201cThe vibe was very start-up,\u201d said Rebecca Weiner, then an intelligence analyst and now deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism. Commissioner Tisch\u2019s work included, among other things, \u201cradiation detection and how to develop protective overlays\u201d for events, she said. \u201cIt was very intense.\u201d<\/p>\n It was at this point that Commissioner Tisch worked on the Domain Awareness System, including handling contracts to build and expand it. Mr. Kelly heard about how she would confront dawdling contractors. She had a reputation, he said admiringly, of \u201ckeeping them in line. She was very businesslike and took no guff.\u201d<\/p>\n She continued to work on the system under William J. Bratton, who replaced Mr. Kelly. In late 2019 she became the city\u2019s first information technology commissioner under Mr. de Blasio, and within months she was in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, struggling to create a contact tracing system and then a vaccine distribution system. She received accolades for managing both, along with familiar complaints about her style.<\/p>\n \u201cShe had that kind of doggedness about her that sometimes rubbed some folks from the bureaucracy the wrong way,\u201d said Emma Wolfe, then deputy mayor for administration under Mr. de Blasio. \u201cIf some kind of midlevel person in the bureaucracy said, \u2018This is not the way it\u2019s done,\u2019 that just had no bearing for her.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n By 2022 Mr. Adams gave her the job of sanitation commissioner. She has said, earnestly, that she had always dreamed of it.<\/p>\n She worked to get black plastic garbage bags off the streets and replace them with containers, a standard in most other cities but a revolution in New York. In her announcement of the program, one line went viral, written by Mr. Goodman to punch up the snoozefest speech: \u201cThe rats don\u2019t run this city, we do<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Colleagues still remember her office at the Sanitation Department \u2014 a white desk, white furniture, white walls.<\/p>\n \u201cMy homes look the same way,\u201d she said. \u201cI like to clean up messes.\u201d<\/p>\n One of her most immediate goals has been straightening out the Police Department, which was plagued by a federal investigation that drove out a previous commissioner, another inquiry that overshadowed the short tenure of her immediate predecessor and a widespread sense of disorder and meddling by Mr. Adams.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nA Sometimes Abrasive Boss<\/h2>\n
A Childhood Illness<\/h2>\n
Another Bloomberg?<\/h2>\n