Patriot Brief

• Zohran Mamdani quietly reduced the authority of the NYPD commissioner shortly after taking office.

• Jessica Tisch will now report to the deputy mayor instead of directly to the mayor.

• The move appears designed to placate the far left while avoiding a full-blown backlash from business and public-safety voters.

This is what quiet sabotage looks like.

Zohran Mamdani didn’t fire Jessica Tisch. He didn’t announce a dramatic shake-up of the NYPD. Instead, he did something far more revealing: he kept her in place publicly while cutting her off from direct access privately. That’s not reform. That’s containment.

For decades, the daily one-on-one between the mayor and the police commissioner has been one of the most important rituals in New York City government. It’s how mayors stay grounded in reality — crime stats, overnight incidents, emerging threats. By inserting a deputy mayor as a buffer, Mamdani has effectively downgraded public safety from a top-tier concern to just another bureaucratic issue to be filtered, massaged, or delayed.

Politically, it’s a clever move. Mamdani gets to reassure nervous donors, landlords, and middle-class families that he didn’t immediately blow up the NYPD, while simultaneously signaling to his activist base that the commissioner they hate is being sidelined. Everyone gets a little of what they want — at least for now.

But governance isn’t about vibes. It’s about consequences. Tisch represents the last meaningful brake on Mamdani’s most extreme policing instincts. She’s defended cops, cracked down on quality-of-life crimes, and pushed back on ideological nonsense from Albany and City Hall alike. Weakening her influence doesn’t make crime disappear — it just makes accountability murkier.

The real test is coming. If crime ticks up, if a high-profile incident occurs, or if Tisch calls for more officers and Mamdani says no, this “quiet demotion” will turn into a very loud problem. For now, Mamdani is trying to have it both ways. New York City will be the one that pays if that balancing act collapses.

From Daily Caller:

Newly sworn-in New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani quietly crippled what could be the biggest stopgap for his whacky policy ideas.

Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein reported Friday that Mamdani downgraded NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who will now report to the deputy mayor instead of Mamdani — a break from longstanding practice.

“A source intimately familiar with City Hall politics and practice tells me that one of the impacts of this downgrade is a literal change of Mamdani’s day-to-day as mayor. For anyone who has ever covered City Hall or followed the Mayor’s day, the source says, the Mayor sits down one-on-one with the Police Commissioner first thing every morning, emulating the president’s meeting with his national security advisor and receiving the morning intelligence briefing,” Klippenstein reported.

In other words, it seems the deputy mayor will essentially function as Tisch’s complaint box, and Tisch will no longer have as direct a line to Mamdani. Another NYPD source noted that it gives some political power to the deputy mayor, Dean Fuleihan.

“If he [Mamdani] does nothing it’s meaningless; but in theory Zohran and the first deputy mayor can now put added pressure on Tisch,” the source told Klippenstein.

Back in October, Mamdani promised that he would keep Tisch as his commissioner despite big ideological differences. Tisch is far more conservative in her approach to law enforcement compared to the mayor, who previously called the NYPD  a “wicked” and “corrupt” institution that needed to be dismantled. She launched “quality of life” teams in February of 2025 to target lower-level crimes like panhandling and crack down on smoking and drinking in subways, and has defended rank-and-file cops.

“Some of the rhetoric in New York City that’s hurled at cops, for example, at protests, is quite vile and unacceptable,” she said in April 2025, referring to anti-Israel protests that have routinely erupted throughout the Big Apple. “God bless them for taking it as professionally as they have done.”

When he announced that he would be keeping her in his administration, Mamdani faced some blowback from leftists who believed he was already capitulating on a major campaign promise to shake up city policing. After all, Tisch opposed even some Democratic proposals from Albany, which left-wingers argued was evidence that she was just a tool of billionaires and corporate interests.

We don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety.

What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD.

But your deal with @NYCMayor uses budget tricks to keep as many cops as possible on the beat.

NO to fake cuts – defund the police. https://t.co/2RCXU8heg2

— Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@ZohranKMamdani) June 29, 2020

Frankly, his quiet demotion of Tisch is a smart political move. Keeping her around is necessary to avoid completely spooking wealthy New York City residents who might be itching to leave. And stripping her access and keeping her at arm’s length is good appeasement to the left-wingers who still want him to defund or radically reform the police.

Their dynamic will be fun to watch in the coming months. As I wrote back in October 2025, keeping her on as commissioner might lead to some heated and very public political battles. What if, for example, crime spikes and Tisch wants to hire more cops? Or, how will Mamdani respond if a cop becomes embroiled in a scandal or shoots a civilian? If Tisch refuses to blame the cop, what will Mamdani say?

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