Hotly contested mayoral election isn’t just about the candidates. The NYPD’s future is also at stake

By Mark Morales, CNN

(CNN) — With the high-stakes New York mayoral contest hanging in the balance, the largest police department in the country may find itself caught between the promise of reform and the stability that followed a couple of scandal-scarred years.

If Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani wins the election, his choice to lead the NYPD through a period of political transition is already in the job: current Commissioner Jessica Tisch.

While Tisch has managed to earn praise from representatives from both political parties as well as business leaders, her stance on various key issues, from the use of the NYPD’s gang database to the deployment of a specialized unit that responds to protests and major events, stands in opposition to what Mamdani has promised during the campaign.

Despite their stark differences in policing strategies, Mamdani has said each hire he makes for his new administration would be in lock step with his vision for the future. Tisch has declined to publicly address the prospect of staying on as police commissioner, but Mamdani has said he is confident she would accept the position, leaving former police officials and advocates to wonder how both would coexist.

While the New York City police commissioner technically answers to and is appointed by the mayor, a savvy police executive can always carve out some autonomy despite an administration’s reform promises.

“She has leverage over him at the moment, and leverage in the sense of negotiating,” former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton said of Tisch, a former sanitation department commissioner. “I think she would be willing to stay if some of her conditions, whatever they may be, be met.”

Mamdani officially announced his intention to keep Tisch as commissioner from a debate stage on October 22.

“I make the decision to retain Commissioner Tisch not only to build on the results that we’ve seen under her tenure, but also to deliver on the agenda that I’ve been running on,” Mamdani told CNN.

In response, Tisch said she was staying out of the fray.

“As I’ve said many times, it is not appropriate for the Police Commissioner to be directly involved or to seem to be involved in electoral politics,” Tisch said in a statement.

Flashback to over a decade ago

Public safety has been a major issue in the hotly contested mayor’s race that pits Democratic socialist Mamdani against former New York Gov. and independent candidate Andrew Cuomo and the Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa. Cuomo and Sliwa each have said they would keep Tisch as police commissioner.

Judging by the early voting numbers, New Yorkers are already flocking to the polls.

Throughout the course of the campaign, Mamdani has moderated some of his most controversial stances on policing, distancing himself from a previous call to defund the police and apologizing for calling police officers “racist” and “wicked.”

Bratton, an experienced police executive who ran the NYPD twice, was in a similar position in which Tisch may find herself when he came back for the second time during the start of Bill de Blasio’s administration in 2014.

While de Blasio was known as a progressive who rankled many of the rank-and-file, Bratton said they shared the same vision when it came to incorporating neighborhood policing, de-escalation training, more police officers on the street and a robust budget to operate the department, Bratton said.

As a condition of accepting the appointment, Bratton said, he made sure he could pick his team and had the freedom to make decisions without interference.

Mamdani and Tisch appear to be further apart philosophically than he was from de Blasio, according to Bratton.

“The worst thing that can happen for (Mamdani) is, if (Tisch) were to step away, a successor comes in, crime goes up and disorder goes up. And the potential for that is very, very significant,” Bratton said.

Bratton’s retirement as police commissioner in September 2016 came at a time of record declines in crime but heightened distrust of police by minority communities, after the death of Eric Garner, who died at the hands of police on Staten Island in 2014, sparked protests.

Conflicting philosophies emerge

Tisch took over as police commissioner in November of last year, just a week before prosecutors allege Luigi Mangione gunned down the UnitedHealthcare CEO in midtown Manhattan. Since then, Tisch has made her mark on the department, replacing many loyalists of former Mayor Eric Adams who were in positions of power, shuffling others around, and accepting the resignation of former Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey after he was embroiled in an overtime-for-sexual-favors scandal.

She’s also touted the importance of the controversial NYPD gang database used to track gang members, attacked the “Raise the Age” law, which increased the age of criminal prosecution from 16 to 18, and gone after bail reform laws – all positions that are at odds with Mamdani.

The candidate has also spoken out about disbanding the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group – an elite unit that specializes in responding to major events, whether they be protests or even the midtown mass shooting at 345 Park Ave. Mamdani also wants the final disciplinary decision on officers to go from the police commissioner to the Civilian Complaint Review Board, the city agency charged with oversight of the NYPD – though that would need a change to the law. Both are ideas that routinely spark sharp criticism from law enforcement circles.

Despite the seeming differences, if Tisch were to stay, it would provide stability for officers not only out on the street, but for high-ranking officials who would otherwise be walking on eggshells inside police headquarters as they wait for a new administration to take over.

“I think it calms a lot of the cops who may have been nervous. That there’s not going to be this big, dramatic change overnight,” said former NYPD Chief of Department Kenneth Corey, who was the highest-ranked uniformed member of the department on Adams’ first day as mayor in 2022. “Whether they like (Tisch) or not, she’s the devil they know and it also helps calm the business community, who are also very worried about the prospect of what crime would look like under a Mamdani administration.”

Mental health response would be focus

While there may not be wholesale changes to the NYPD if Tisch stays as police commissioner, there would be new initiatives under Mamdani, such as a new civilian agency called the Department of Community Safety. The agency would focus on a community-based prevention approach targeting homelessness and people experiencing mental illness.

Its hallmark won’t be adding more police but rather adding more mental health professionals and violence interrupters – a plan Mamdani says he hopes would free up officers to respond to other crimes.

In 2023, the NYPD responded to under 180,000 calls that involved an emotionally disturbed person, out of roughly 9 million 911 calls, according to statistics unveiled at a city hall hearing in 2024.

Corey said he tried to get a similar plan off the ground but had trouble with appropriate staffing.

“The city is not the greatest employer when it comes to pay. You’re going to hire clinicians and social workers and people with advanced degrees. You’re not going to pay them a whole lot of money,” Corey said. “Then you’re going to tell them, ‘Oh, by the way, you know you’re working Christmas morning, or you’re working the midnight shift every weekend.’ These are the challenges we ran into when we’ve tried to do that before, even as a co-response model. There are just not enough of these clinicians and mental health professionals who are willing to go out into the street and do this kind of work in the hours that it needs to be done.”

Richard Aborn, president of the nonprofit Citizens Crime Commission of New York City, supports mental health professionals being involved but wonders about safety.

“I think it makes a lot of sense to have mental health teams go on calls when there’s an emotionally disturbed person, but having a mental health team go exclusively could be dangerous,” Aborn said. “The question is, how are you going to assess that? A call comes into 911, there’s a person locked up in the bedroom screaming, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ Who’s going to assess whether it’s just a mental health team or if police officers go along?”

Corey recalled a scenario when a woman called 911 asking for help for her son, telling dispatchers they were nonviolent.

“If you heard her, she almost sounded like she was sleeping,” Corey said about the woman’s 911 call. “And she’s just ‘no, he’s not violent. He just needs to go. Somebody just needs to take him to the hospital so he can get his medicine,’ and 11 seconds after the police officers were in the apartment, there was a cop flat on his back. This guy was straddled, with a butcher knife, over him, and (NYPD) shot him.” The man was killed in the shooting, according to Corey.

The specter of the National Guard

Looming in the distance as well is the threat of potential federal intervention into crime-fighting in New York City, should Mamdani win the election.

Mamdani has spoken out about President Donald Trump sending National Guard troops into Democrat-run major cities, a move the president says is to restore law and order. Mamdani previously told CNN he would respond to the attempt by filing a lawsuit.

“What we would do in running this city, is first, to actually take this administration to court and to do so immediately as opposed to being pressured to do it,” Mamdani said, adding he would follow in the footsteps of other leaders like Boston Mayor Michelle Wu.

Bratton is among those current and former law enforcement leaders who say the sheer size and scope of the NYPD, in addition to low crime numbers, are strong indicators New York City doesn’t need the National Guard – who are already deployed but work in a different capacity – to patrol the streets in that way.

It may not even come to that, Bratton said, if Tisch, a billionaire heiress from one of New York City’s most prominent families, remains at the helm.

“Jesse and her family have very good relations with a number of the Trump side of the house,” Bratton said. “Jesse also brings a form of stability against the tide that we know is going to put pressure up against New York, and she has the ability, I think, to dissipate some of what’s going on in Los Angeles and Chicago.”

Tisch took over for interim police commissioner Tom Donlon, who has since gone on to file a lawsuit alleging corruption at the highest levels of the NYPD. She became the fourth police commissioner appointed during the Adams administration – a constant change that became emblematic of the instability and air of corruption at the department.

Meanwhile, the department is struggling with staffing issues as members continue to either retire or get poached by other police departments in other cities. There are currently less than 35,000 members with the NYPD, a figure that’s less than highs in 2000 and 2019, according to statistics provided by the Police Benevolent Association.

So far this year, roughly 300 officers have left the department each month, according to the union’s statistics. NYPD recruit classes continue to lag behind the number of recruits in previous classes, according to a union official.

As staffing is a constant issue, Mayor Eric Adams announced a plan to potentially add 5,000 new police officers to the department by 2029, a move that would boost the department’s headcount to the largest it’s been in the last 20 years.

While the move opens the door to adding more officers, it still leaves the issue of actually finding enough recruits to fill the hiring surge. In April, city officials changed the eligibility standard for recruits, eliminating the need for college credit. The move bolstered applications, with 4,000 ineligible applicants – who did not meet the requirements – reopening their cases, according to city officials.

Mamdani, who credited Tisch with rooting out corruption, believes she has shown during a turbulent period that she’s committed to the department.

The high turnover among top police executives, is something Corey says rank and file officers – who may find themselves having to execute progressive strategies they may not agree with – have noticed.

“What the cops have learned at the bottom is that, ‘If I don’t like your idea, I don’t actually have to do it,’” Corey said. “‘I just need to slow walk it, because you’re going to be gone soon, and so will your idea.’”

This story has been updated with additional information.

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CNN’s Gloria Pazmino contributed to this report.