Can Democrats Govern Big Cities?

By Tunku Varadarajan

New York

New York’s police commissioner is adamant. Jessica Tisch won’t run for mayor. She says no despite being urged to run by many business and civic leaders. A great deal of money, it would appear, is waiting to get behind her if she does. A registered Democrat, she even has the backing of the New York Post’s conservative editorial page. “Allow us to dream,” they wrote last month.

In an interview in her office at One Police Plaza, Ms. Tisch shuts down all talk about the mayor’s job. “I am a public servant. I am certainly not a politician,” she says, almost hissing the word “certainly.” “I enjoy the work of running agencies. So no, I am not a mayoral candidate.” Pesky journalists tend to ask the same question twice, and her second response echoes the first: “I’ve made my career as a public servant, and I have lots more to do as a public servant. I’m not interested at this time in being a politician.”

Which is a pity. Ms. Tisch, 44, is a Democrat who shows that you can run key parts of blue cities competently. She could be an an-

swer to her party’s governance problem. It’s a problem that worries voters enough for there to have been a shift to the right in the election in November. Kamala Harris’s citywide margin over Donald Trump was more than 650,000 votes narrower than Joe Biden’s in 2020.

This year’s mayoral race offers little hope. Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa has a lock on the GOP line and no chance of winning. Which leaves the city with motley Democrats. Incumbent Eric Adams could well exit the race: The Justice Department dropped corruption charges against him, but the stigma persists. Most alternatives are hardcore leftists—except for presumptive front-runner Andrew Cuomo, the former governor, who is discredited by his handling of the Covid pandemic, his capitulation to the Albany left on criminal justice, and his #MeToo downfall.

The silver lining is that even if Ms. Tisch won’t run, she offers a template for governance that could inspire her party to get its act together. In the four months since Mr. Adams appointed her commissioner, she has wrought a minor miracle. February marked the third straight month of double-digit declines in citywide index crime—the seven categories of serious crime that include murder, rape and aggravated assault. Crime “is down across every city borough,” she says, and down “ by 28% below ground, in our subways.”

These gains in safety have been achieved through innovations that make for more effective and rational policing. Ms. Tisch has tweaked CompStat—the daily counting of crime statistics by precinct, introduced by Commissioner William Bratton in 1994—into a computation of crime by “zones.” Precincts are too big, she says, with an average area of 4 square miles. There is an additional focus now on “pockets of crime, or pockets of violence, or trouble spots,” where cops are dispatched in concentration. She calls it “a scalpel approach to fighting crime”—one that has yielded declines of 40% to 50% in such zones as Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, 125th Street in Manhattan and the Fulton Street corridor in downtown Brooklyn.

Another welcome Tisch obsession is with New York’s quality of life—scourges such as abandoned vehicles, unruly vending, out-ofcontrol scooters or e-bikes, vagrant encampments and drinking on the subway that “affect the livability of the city and your ability to enjoy the streets and the streetscape,” as she puts it. New York “is the safest big city in America. You can go your whole life, if you’re lucky, without being a victim of crime. But you can’t really go a day without seeing or experiencing some quality-of-life issue that is irksome.”

The New York City Police Department now tracks quality-of-life complaints in the way CompStat tracks crime. “We’re excellent at responding to 911 calls for service— truly extraordinary,” she says. “But the department still has a lot of progress that it can make in how we respond to 311 jobs”— i.e., nonemergency calls for help.

Ms. Tisch, a graduate of Harvard and a onetime intern for these pages, has been a prominent administrator in the city since February 2014, when she became the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for information technology. “I’ve never been someone who will accept the status quo when the status quo doesn’t serve New Yorkers,” she says. When she was deputy commissioner of IT, “the status quo was no technology for our cops, no basic tools that you and I use day in and day out to do our work.”

Her examples should make jaws drop: “A phone, a voicemail, an email address, apps—the cops had nothing.” The way the police communicated in the field “ hadn’t changed in 50 years. The radio, that was it. So we gave every cop a smartphone, an email address, tablets in every vehicle, body cameras, apps for their 911 jobs, apps to search a name, and completely revolutionized or rethought the way policing could be done in New York City.”

In 2019 Ms. Tisch became the city’s commissioner for informa-

BARBARAA KELLEY

tion technology and telecommunications. Less than three years later, she got her “dream job”: sanitation commissioner. A scion of one of New York’s wealthiest families was responsible for collecting garbage, managing waste and fighting literal rats. “I am so proud of the trash revolution,” she says.

Growing up in the city, Ms. Tisch found it “utterly disgusting that we dump 44 million pounds of trash directly on our sidewalks every day, and also ridiculous that we then wonder why we have a rat problem in the city.” Her solution: “ basically do what every other city and the rest of the world does, and put New York’s garbage in containers.” She is a garbage nerd. “I was walking around the city on Saturday and I was seeing all the containers. And I was like, ‘This is glorious.’” An aide seated nearby chips in to say that she often gets out of her car to photograph trash cans.

Four months into the top-cop job, she’s still “incredibly proud” about her rodent record: “The only thing better than my crime numbers are my rat numbers.” She quickly corrects herself: “I mean the city’s rat numbers. They’re down 25% year to date. That’s incredible. And historically rat numbers only go in one direction, and that is up.”

The equivalent of rats in her new job—in other words, the menace she targets with the greatest passion—is recidivist criminals. On the day we meet, Ms. Tisch has spent the morning at a service to mark the first death anniversary of Jonathan Diller, a 31year-old NYPD detective who was shot and killed during a traffic stop in Far Rockaway, Queens. His killer, Guy Rivera, had 21 prior arrests. “Jonathan’s killer should never have been on the streets that night,” Ms. Tisch said at the service, directing her words at Diller’s widow and young son. “A broken criminal justice system failed him.”

At our interview, Ms. Tisch speaks with impressive bluntness of New York state criminal-justice “reforms,” most of which went into effect in 2020. They “ have rendered the criminal justice system in New York City a high-speed revolving door for recidivists,” she says. These reforms eliminated cash bail for misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies, introduced a presumption of release unless a judge deemed the accused a threat to public safety, raised the age of criminal responsibility to 18 from 16, and radically skewed discovery laws in a direction that works to the advantage of defendants. These changes, she says, “prioritized criminals over victims. They need to be addressed. In New York City, we do not have a surging crime problem, we have a surging recidivism problem. It’s a travesty.”

She offers what she calls “a generous definition” of recidivism: a person committing the same crime at least three times in the same year. “If you use that definition and you compare 2018 to 2024”—i.e., before and after the criminal-justice reform—“the increases are off the charts. It’s a staggering 147% increase for something like felony assault, and an 83% increase for robbery.” Her aide nearby has more stats: 61% for burglary, 64% for shoplifting, 71% for grand larceny, 119% for auto theft.

What should the Legislature do? “The way we can take the biggest swing at the problem is by focusing on the discovery law”—the process by which prosecutors are obliged to disclose evidence to the defense. “The discovery law, as it sits, is weaponized by the defense bar. Oftentimes, violent repeat offenders get their cases dismissed on technicalities that have absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the ultimate outcome of the case.” The executive director of the District Attorneys Association of the State of New York wrote recently that cases have been dismissed for failure to disclose such irrelevant details as information on the battery life of body cameras, duplicative police reports and rosters of police officers on duty on a given day.

Judges have no discretion on whether information would have had any bearing on the outcome of a case. “If a piece of information is not produced by the DA and the clock tolls and it comes out after [the deadline mandated by the law], the case is dismissed, no matter what the information is.” For domestic violence cases, the dismissal of a case also results in the loss of an order of protection. Ms. Tisch sits in her conference room with “a number of our chiefs every morning, and they go over the big cases of the day, and it is maddening. You hear about another recidivist committing another heinous crime in another neighborhood in the city.”

Ms. Tisch she has “worked very closely with all five DAs, with the mayor, who’s led the charge, and the governor, and we all agree and have proposed changes to the discovery law.” The law has to be narrowed, urgently. “Right now it is written so broadly as to be unfeasible . . . infeasible . . .” She turns to her aide, puzzling over the right word. He says: “Not feasible.”

She’s also alarmed about a bill before the New York City Council that would shut down the Criminal Group Database, which keeps track of gang members in the city. She couches her words diplomatically: “I actually believe that many members of the City Council don’t want to shut down the database.” She pauses, then rephrases her point: “I hope that many members don’t want to shut it down. But I also don’t want to speak for them. I think it would be a very bad idea— tragic, really—to shut down a database that’s designed to help cops address gang violence.”

Sixty percent of the shootings in New York, she points out, are gang-related. “It defies common sense to take a tool like that away from the Police Department, especially when we use it in an incredibly responsible way. We need our City Council to start legislating in support of our cops rather than against the police.”

She laments that people “don’t want to be cops in the numbers that they used to want to be cops anymore.” The problem isn’t limited to New York: “It is across the country. The antipolice movements have really hit the profession quite hard.” She asks me to “imagine how frustrating it must be to be a cop. You work a case, you make a great arrest . . . a violent offender. Before you’re done with your work that day, the perp could be back in your precinct picking up their property to go home. Imagine how demoralizing that is. And dangerous for our communities.”

“Some of the rhetoric hurled against our police, it’s vile,” she says. “We need to treat the police like the noble profession that they are.” Sounds as if she could have a future as a politician.

Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.