A reform-minded mayor is taking over New York at a time of progress and stability for the NYPD
By Mark Morales, CNN
(CNN) — A reform-minded mayor is taking charge of New York City at a time when the largest police department in the country is finding its stride in its stability, touting a drop in gun violence and homicides while its current leadership stays intact.
New York Police Department Commissioner Jessica Tisch is staying at the helm under progressive Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, providing nearly 35,000 uniformed members sustained leadership after she became the fourth police commissioner to serve in the scandal-scarred Adams administration.
Since Tisch took over, questionable promotions and transfers were stopped altogether while former NYPD executives with good reputations came back to fill out her executive staff. Despite the moves, questions still remain about key operational tools, such as the future of the Strategic Response Group – a specialized unit within the NYPD used for crowd control and major events — and the use of the gang database, among others.
Tisch and her team have been briefing the new Mamdani administration on how the NYPD has been running and how they’ve been able to achieve a drop in crime, including in the transit system, which has been the setting of multiple high-profile murders and assaults over the previous four years.
“I’ve had a number of great conversations, both with the mayor-elect and his team, and we’re doing briefings on different topics, and what I can tell you is both the mayor-elect and his team are committed to public safety and are very pleased with the results that they’re seeing, both in the subway below ground and above ground as well,” Tisch said at a briefing in December related to subway safety.
The commissioner on Tuesday highlighted this year’s “unprecendented reduction in violent crime,” noting in a post on X that as of Christmas Eve the NYPD has 1,000 fewer shootings than it did four years ago.
Mamdani, in the past a harsh critic of the NYPD, has signaled a softening in his stance by virtue of keeping Tisch on the job, a police executive who is not ideologically in lock step with him but has the support of business leaders, law enforcement, and political power players, among others. Among his goals is creating a new civilian agency known as the Department of Community Safety, which would use community-based prevention strategies to tackle homelessness and mental illness.
“I have admired her work cracking down on corruption in the upper echelons of the police department, driving down crime in New York City, and standing up for New Yorkers in the face of authoritarianism,” Mamdani said in a statement regarding her appointment, adding that both will work together to make sure police focus on serious and violent crime. “Together, we will deliver a city where rank-and-file police officers and the communities they serve alike are safe, represented, and proud to call New York their home.”
Shootings, homicides decline
A drop in the number of shootings stands out in the NYPD’s statistics near year-end, coinciding with a drop nationally from a peak in 2021, according to statistics compiled by the Gun Violence Archive.
As of December 21, there were 674 shootings for the year, down almost 24% from 886 during the same time period last year, statistics show. There were also 841 shooting victims, down almost 22% from 1,077 during the same time last year, records show. The first 11 months of the year were the lowest number of shooting incidents and victims since the NYPD started keeping statistics, beating records set in 2018, police said in a news release.
NYPD executives attribute the drop in shootings to their summer violence reduction plan, where up to 2,300 uniformed officers were deployed to areas that had the most crime and shootings. The officers did nightly foot posts near precincts, public housing and the subway system, 72 zones covering 59 communities.
Homicides are also down almost 21%, with 297 so far this year, compared to 375 in 2024, the statistics show. Other major crime categories, such as robbery, burglary, grand larceny and grand larceny auto are also down when compared to the same time period in 2024, the statistics show. Despite these drops in some crime categories, rape is up almost 16%, with 1,999 incidents this year, compared to 1,728 last year, the statistics show. Felony assault is up slightly, the stats show.
“For the first 11 months of the year, New York City had the lowest number of shooting incidents and victims in recorded history,” Tisch said Tuesday in a statement. “These historic gains are the result of our precision policing strategy and officers executing that strategy with the discipline and dedication that defines this noble work. Our plan is working, and the progress is real.”
NYPD Chief of Department Michael LiPetri credits the drop in violence to data collection, collaboration and deployment of extra cops.
“What obviously, really has affected our overall violent street crime is a data mining tool that looks at density-based clustering of violent incidents in New York City,” LiPetri told CNN.
The granular data looks at where violent crimes, like homicides, shootings, assaults and robberies, were taking place, while divisions such as narcotics, or gun violence suppression, shared intelligence and collaborated with each other, LiPetri said. They would then deploy more officers to those trouble spots on the weekends, when most violent crimes would happen, LiPetri said.
“We now have 2,000 officers on foot during those days, where in the past, it was basically half,” LiPetri said.
In August, the NYPD rolled out its Quality of Life Division, responding to more than 530,000 311 calls, which they say reduced nonemergency response times by 20 minutes. Critics have pointed to the Quality of Life teams as the return of “broken windows” policing, whose hallmark was cracking down on lower-level crimes so that larger-scale crimes were less likely to happen.
“They are there to respond to calls for service, from the community. That is what they’re doing,” LiPetri said in defense of the program. “When it takes you two hours to go to a 311 call of a large disorderly group, drinking and throwing dice, that’s a problem. Now, we’ve done so much better.”
More officers join, but they leave, too
While strategies are taking aim at reducing crime, the NYPD hired over 4,000 new police officers in 2025, the its largest number of new officers hired in the NYPD’s history, bringing their head count to 34,700.
Despite this, officials for the Police Benevolent Association, the union that represents rank-and-file members, say the number of retiring officers offsets some of the total number of new hires. More than 3,400 members have quit or filed for retirement over the past 12 months, PBA statistics show.
Meanwhile, law enforcement organizations – from small town police units to a massive federal agency – are trying to poach NYPD officers using Mamdani as part of their latest sales pitch.
The overture relies heavily on what political opponents and critics argue would be hallmarks of Mamdani’s tenure as mayor: apparent disorder, lawlessness and a lack of support for police officers. Mamdani, when asked, has said he plans to support police and will enforce the law.
“He called the NYPD racist, anti-queer, corrupt and said he would defund them,” said Houston Police Officers’ Union President Douglas Griffith, who has been spearheading an initiative on social media to poach New York City cops. “We know from experience that you don’t want to work for somebody that doesn’t respect you and wants to call me (police) a racist. It’s pretty obvious that he never worked with NYPD before he wanted to run for mayor and has pretty harsh feelings about them.”
Throughout the mayoral campaign, Mamdani distanced himself from some of his most controversial statements about the NYPD, which included his call to defund the police, calling them “racist” and “wicked.”
In June 2020, Mamdani posted on X: “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.”
Since Mamdani won the mayoral election in November, he’s said he plans on supporting the police and has continued to distance himself from those statements. Mamdani visited the police memorial in lower Manhattan a short time after his office announced the move to keep Tisch.
‘We’re trying to exploit a situation’
Griffith said the idea to try and sway officers to his department using Mamdani really started about a year ago when he was at a police union conference and spoke to NYPD officers about the idea of working under Mamdani, who was still running for the position he would eventually win.
Volusia County Sheriff Michael Chitwood said he’s been trying for years to get not just NYPD officers but cops from major cities to come to his Florida sheriff’s office. Chitwood said the NYPD is the best trained and usually is at the forefront of innovative policing strategies.
“If you believe the rhetoric, if you believe everything he’s posted in his public career, it’s kind of hard to believe defunding the police and handcuffing them is not going to happen,” Chitwood said. “If (Mamdani) wants to do his plans, those folks won’t have a job in six months.”
Chitwood, who now oversees 538 sworn officers, said he has received lots of calls from parents of current NYPD officers, asking him to speak to their son or daughter in hopes of persuading them to leave. Chitwood said it’s so far fallen on deaf ears.
“We’re trying to exploit a situation,” Chitwood said. “We’re looking for folks who want to start a new life and are going to get support from the administration (me) and the elected officials.”
It’s not just local police units. Immigration and Customs Enforcement made a very public push to recruit NYPD officers. ICE previously posted a recruitment message to social media calling on police officers to “Defend the Homeland” and “work for a President and a Secretary who support and defend law enforcement—not defund or demonize it.”
Mamdani has been a vocal critic of ICE, telling CNN he would not allow the NYPD to engage or cooperate with ICE on civil immigration enforcement.
Smaller police departments have routinely recruited from the NYPD because it has the best trained police officers, said Kirk Burkhalter, a retired NYPD detective and current professor at New York Law School.
“You’re getting a product that’s already proven and trained, and you don’t have to invest a lot of money into training,” Burkhalter said. “New York police officers have seen the full gamut of situations.”
Burkhalter, who runs his university’s 21st Century Policing Project, which works with police departments and municipalities to develop police reforms alongside the communities they serve, called the poaching strategies fear-mongering.
“The elephant in the room here is a tremendous amount of Islamophobia,” Burkhalter said.
“Law enforcement serves the public,” he said. “To think or imply that a police officer can’t do their duty based on who the elected official is perpetuates an us-versus-them mentality.”
A steadying hand as top cop
Meanwhile, Tisch staying has not only seemed to quell the fears of business leaders and security analysts, but also provided some stability to the NYPD.
Tisch, heiress to the Loews family fortune, is a career public servant who previously served as commissioner for the sanitation department and the city’s chief technology officer. She is highly regarded in government circles and was appointed to the job following a string of high-profile corruption scandals that rocked the department under former Mayor Eric Adams.
Police Benevolent Association President Patrick Hendry said the morale for rank-and-file officers has been low for many years. While Tisch staying has helped officers feel more supported, it’s the nature of the job that makes other agencies, like police departments on neighboring Long Island or others out of state, seem enticing, Hendry said.
In December, Tisch sent out a message to rank-and-file members, asking them for feedback on how to modernize the department, telling them that the NYPD will be conducting focus groups and sending out surveys, all in hopes of analyzing everything “from police work to paperwork,” according to a copy of the message.
“The police commissioner has stabilized by staying, but we’re still in a low period where morale is not high,” Hendry said. “They worry about the Civilian Complaint Review Board. They worry about all the oversights that we have.”
Statistics compiled by the PBA so far do not point to an actual exodus by rank-and-file members. Hendry said the current political climate of New York isn’t forcing police officers to uproot their lives. That’s more due to quality of life issues, which range from pay to the grind of being part of the NYPD, which Hendry argues has been understaffed for years.
“I don’t believe at this point they’re making the decision whether to stay or go based on who’s coming into mayor. I think they’re making those decisions based on their family situations and what’s better for them,” Hendry said. “No police officer wants to be on the front page of the paper. They want to go out to be able to do their job on a daily basis without getting over scrutinized when they’re following the rules that they’re asked to go out and do.”
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CNN’s Jeff Winter and Gloria Pazmino contributed to this report.
