Meet the new police commissioner — same as the old police commissioner!
Incoming Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced on Wednesday that Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, a veteran of city government and a scion of one of the city’s wealthiest families, would remain in her post when he takes over City Hall next year.
It’s an extraordinary decision with little precedent in modern city history. The last time a new mayor chose to keep their predecessor’s police commissioner was in 1946, when William O’Dwyer kept Fiorello La Guardia’s commissioner, Arthur Wallander.
Last year, when Tisch entered 1 Police Plaza amid the wreckage of Eric Adams’s career-ending corruption scandal, Streetsblog surveyed former city officials and transportation activists to compile five big ways she could fix New York’s deadly roadways.
Since then, Tisch has made progress on several fronts: The constant swirl of scandal has stopped. The number of high-speed chases has fallen. Cops more consistently target illegal parking in bike lanes, though the absolute figures remain middling.
But what about those dang placards? And what about her controversial e-bike crackdown?
“She’s starting to turn the dial back towards deterrence for bad going-ons on city streets, but we let it slide so far that we have a huge distance to travel to get to anything resembling safe streets or Vision Zero,” said Jon Orcutt, who was the policy director at the city Department of Transportation under Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
He would give Tisch’s first year at the Police Department a "B" on issues of safety on the streets, but he added a major caveat to that grade: “I give her a B because of the context of the Adams administration.”
Let's go over what we asked of Tisch back when she got the job ... and how well she did on hewing to our agenda:
1. 'Make police follow the law — and discipline them if they don’t'
Streetsblog aimed its first and most important recommendation at the behavior of police officers behind the wheel — the illegal combat parking outside of precincts, the fraudulent placards, the defaced license plates, the tinted windows, the endless blocking of sidewalks and crosswalks and bike lanes and bus lanes, and so on.
There's no hard data on this — and we've asked the NYPD for it repeatedly.
Anecdotally, it appears that fewer cops are defacing their plates, the relic of both Streetsblog's campaign against this form of corruption, and an NYPD internal crackdown.
But the same crap happens at every precinct station house on any given day, like Thursday at the First Precinct house on Ericsson Street in Tribeca:
Grade: Incomplete.
2. 'Keep the bus and bike lanes clear'
Cycling and transit advocates have hounded the Police Department for years over its seeming unwillingness to crack down on cars illegally blocking bus and bike lanes across the city. Data says that Tisch has had some success in getting the Police Department to respond to 311 complaints about parking violations since taking over in November 2024.
Last month, the Police Department issued summons in response to 26.8 percent of illegal parking complaints called into 311 — nearly 14,000 out of 51,000 calls. That's 5,000 more summons than were issued in the same month last year, when just 20 percent of the 43,000 complaints, or approximately 8,600, netted a summons.
The increase in enforcement is particularly noticeable for complaints about bike lanes, according to a website built by Jehiah Czebotar that crunches the 311 data published by the city.
Between November 2023 and October 2024, there was never a month where more than 5 percent of the complains resulted in a summons. In October 2023, only 1.3% of complaints netted a summons.
However, between November 2024 and October 2025, that figure has exceeded 5 percent seven times, including the four-most recent months. In September 2025, 10.5 percent of 311 complaints reporting blocked bike lanes resulted in a summons.
Summons for obscured and fake paper license plates have also doubled over the last year. In October 2025, which is the most-recent available data, 20.6 percent of complaints about obscured plates resulted in a summons. That's up significantly from 12.7 percent of complaints that netted a summons in October 2024.
"It shows there is consistent change in this area, but obviously, she needs to keep the pressure up," Orcutt said.
Grade: A
3. Placards (Giant sigh)
Placards have long been the scourge of transit and open streets activists. The permits are supposed to help city employees do their jobs by making it easier to find parking for their private vehicles. However, they've basically become a free-for-all that has effectively exempted anyone with a placard — or any item in their windshield that can be reasonably connected to possible government employment, like a high-visibility vest — from any parking enforcement. And that has resulted in a giant mess, and its own share of corruption scandals.
There is good news: Data published by NYPD shows that the number of parking placards that it issues to its staff and officers declined during Tisch's first year as police commissioner. The NYPD handed out 24,910 "restricted" permits in 2025, down from 26,076 in 2024 — and a sharp drop from the 34,579 issued in 2019.
But there is bad news: The Police Department has not filed reports required by the City Council tracking how many parking placard holders have been busted breaking parking rules since February 2024.
And there is stasis: There has been little progress on implementing many of the parking placard reforms that were announced by then-Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2019, which were then never implemented. Mayor Adams was frequently criticized over allowing his staff to illegally park on the plaza at Borough Hall when he was Brooklyn Borough President and did little to reign it in as Mayor, beyond the NYPD's response to the aforementioned DOI report. My colleague, Kevin Duggan, quoted veterans of city government saying that one way Mamdani can make city streets better is by cracking down hard on placards.
Grade: Incomplete.
4. Reduce high-speed chases
One of the first major moves Tisch made upon becoming Police Commissioner was to reverse an aggressive policing policy implemented under Adams and repeatedly defended by then Chief of Department John Chell — now retired — that encouraged high-speed chases. One chase led to a cyclist being struck and killed by a suspect fleeing from cops in a pick-up truck.
The number of chases exploded to 133 in January 2023, up from 54 the month before. That figure would hit 227 in January 2024 and another 208 in February. But Tisch, prompted by Streetsblog, reversed Chell's approach in January 2025 and within weeks the number of chases plunged. There were just 54 in February, 56 in April and 75 in June, NYPD data shows.
Grade: A
5. Supporting 'Vision Zero'
However, Tisch's accomplishments on those points has been overshadowed by the Adams administration's crackdown on e-bikes, in which the Police Department has played a central role.
The police sweeps began in April and targeted bike riders caught running red lights, even if the intersections were clear; or who were riding on the sidewalk. They came after waves of complaints by local elected officials and at local community boards about bad behavior from bike riders, though there was little data to support the claims.
The cops handed out 916 criminal court summons in the first two weeks of the crackdown, which was twice as many criminal court summons as the NYPD issued across the entire city in 2024. Advocates went ballistic, arguing that the crackdown ran counter to the "Vision Zero" principles.
One of the NYPD's policing tactics, exposed by Streetsblog, was setting up a "trap" at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge. That's where the poorly designed on-ramp to the bike lane for the Brooklyn-bound forces riders to make a series of sharp turns to get to the bridge — leading many to take the much more obvious off-ramp for the Manhattan-bound to get onto the bridge.
"If you wanted to get e-bikes off the sidewalk, you'd have to have cops walking around and when was the last time that anyone saw that," Orcutt said. "Instead, they're doing the stupidity trap."
Grade: F
