Cuomo says he’ll keep Jessica Tisch as NYPD commish if elected

Andrew Cuomo says he will ask current NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch to stay on if he is elected mayor on November 4.

“I think Commissioner Tisch has done a very, very good job and I would say right off the bat that I would ask her to stay on,” Cuomo said in an interview Sunday with Marcia Kramer of CBS News New York.

The statement, made in the final weeks of the campaign, comes as Democratic candidate Zohran Mamdani reportedly considers choosing from a field of veteran officials to lead the NYPD. He also publicly stated that he planned to keep Tisch and praised her for “her decisive action to root out corruption at the top levels of the New York Police Department and for her leadership of the lower levels of crime in this city.”

Mamdani’s team is also considering Rodney Harrison and Isa Abbassi, who both held leadership positions with the NYPD, as well as Tracie Keesee, another NYPD veteran with extensive law enforcement experience, sources told the Daily News.

Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa also said he would keep Tisch as police commissioner.

Tisch, who was appointed police commissioner in November 2024, comes from the wealthy Tisch family, which founded the Loews cinema chain. Family members have collectively donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the pro-Cuomo PAC Fix the City since June, according to Board of Elections data.

She spent 12 years working as a civilian with the New York Police Department, starting as a counterterrorism analyst, before rising through the ranks to become the department’s deputy commissioner for information technology.

After her time with the NYPD, former Mayor Bill de Blasio appointed her as commissioner of the city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications in 2019.

When Adams became mayor, he appointed Tisch as sanitation commissioner before handing him the role of top cop last year after a scandal and federal investigations engulfed the highest echelons of the NYPD, leading to the resignations of former commissioner Edward Caban and his interim replacement, Thomas Donlon.

Originally published: October 19, 2025 at 5:13 p.m. EDT