William Farrington
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 leadership of the NYPD.
He screwed up the department, after all, with his ill-thought out appointments of people like the now-departed Phil Banks and Edward Caban, despite their own shady backgrounds.
If she leaves because he won’t let her do her job effectively, he’s toast.
Tisch should use this power to treat the public as adults who deserve to know the sober picture: No, New York is nowhere near where we need to be with crime numbers.
For starters, get the NYPD to stop insisting that the subways are safe, when we’ve had 10 homicides this year, easily twice the pre-COVID level.
She should also be clear whether she has enough officers to do the job.
Yes, Adams said as he announced Tisch’s appointment that he would un-cancel two Police Academy classes he had cancelled. So 1,600 new officers will graduate by next fall, bringing the number of officers closer to 34,000.
But during the height of the Giuliani-Bloomberg anti-crime era, NYPD ranks were above 40,000.
There’s only so much the department can do with overtime. If she needs more officers, she should say so, publicly.
Finally, Tisch, who helped upgrade CompStat, the police’s crime-fighting data system, should introduce data to better demonstrate what’s not the cops’ fault.
Of the number of arrests cops make, and summonses they issue, how many cases are dropped, compared to the few years leading up to 2019, when state lawmakers finished making their changes to laws on bail, evidence-discovery rules and underage suspects?
Rather than top police brass and the mayor pointing out problems with individual suspects, Tisch should make this an integral part of publicly available, and frequently updated, CompStat: What happens to people who are arrested or given a summons once the NYPD’s responsibility is over?
Then, she should consider compiling and publicizing data on migrant crime.
Sanctuary-city laws don’t preclude this, at least not if done indirectly: She could release regular reports of how many suspects list their addresses at migrant shelters, for example, or how many suspects arrived in New York in just the past three years.
As Tisch said last week, “Let me take a moment to speak directly to New Yorkers. I hear you loud and clear. The mission is to keep you safe, to make you feel safe and to improve your quality of life.”
She can do that by being honest with us about the city’s continued public-safety emergency.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.