New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani insisted he has no plans to replace NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, even as left-wing allies push for her ouster after a use-of-force review.
The New York Post reported that Mamdani told reporters in Queens on Tuesday that Tisch is staying put as the city’s top cop.
He then stood with her at a memorial for fallen officers in Lower Manhattan, projecting a united front one day after City Hall ordered the NYPD to review its use-of-force rules.
The sequence put the mayor in a familiar bind: praise a commissioner tied to falling murder numbers, while his own political base pressed for her removal and for the breakup of elite police units.
Mamdani did not hedge when asked about Tisch’s job.
He told reporters the choice was settled.
"Jessica Tisch is the police commissioner. I have no plans to change that,"
He also explained why he kept her in the first place.
"The reason that I made the decision to have Jessica Tisch as the police commissioner was because of her record of uprooting corruption from the upper echelons of the NYPD,"
From Queens, the mayor and commissioner moved to the New York City Police Memorial on Liberty Street in Lower Manhattan.
There, 42 officers’ names were added to the wall. Forty-one were first responders who later died from 9/11-related illnesses. The memorial was first dedicated in 1997.
Among those honored was NYPD detective Didarul Islam, a father killed in July 2025 when a gunman stormed a Midtown office building.
Mamdani addressed the families directly.
"I thank you for loving these New Yorkers, for raising these New Yorkers, for tending to them as they tended to all of us,"
He added a pledge on memory and loss.
"While we cannot fill the silence they left behind, we will refuse to let their memory fade,"
Tisch framed the ceremony as a stop in the city’s rush of daily work.
"Here, we pause. We pause to remember the people who helped make all of that possible, and who lost their lives in service to others,"
The Post noted no public sign of tension between the two over the prior day’s directive from City Hall.
The job talk did not appear in a vacuum.
A day before the Queens remarks and the memorial, City Hall ordered the NYPD to review its use-of-force protocol.
That order followed a shooting by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the Bronx last week.
In the same stretch, allies on the left demanded that Mamdani fire Tisch and disband two elite NYPD units. The Post described those calls as coming from his political base. The piece did not name the units or publish the full text of the City Hall order.
Mamdani’s answer on Tuesday was a public refusal to dump his commissioner on that timetable.
Supporters of keeping Tisch point to results the department has already claimed.
NYPD statistics released in July said the city saw the fewest murders over the first six months of any year on record while she led the department.
That claim now sits beside a different demand from the mayor’s left: strip command, reopen force rules, and break up specialized units after a federal immigration enforcement shooting.
Mamdani used the memorial stage to honor officers and families. He used the Queens microphone to say the commissioner stays. He did not, in the reported remarks, grant the firings or unit shutdowns his allies sought.
For a mayor answering both grieving families and an activist base, the choice is concrete. Keep the commissioner tied to the murder decline, or yield to pressure that treats her tenure as the problem. Mamdani said he is not yielding.
Crime control is not a factional trophy. New Yorkers living with the results should weigh who defends the cops who deliver them, and who treats those cops as the obstacle.
