A Trial by Fire for Tisch and Mamdani, New York’s Premier Odd Couple

Counting all its government agencies and departments, the city of New York currently employs just under 300,000 people. However, only a few hundred of these—commissioners, agency heads, and the mayor’s own staff—serve at the pleasure of the mayor. In the coming weeks, as the legislature and the governor negotiate the state’s budget—a process that has a statutory deadline of April 1, but in practice has often blown through that target—we can expect to hear from two of them, First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan and Budget Director Sherif Soliman.

This past week has put another member of the city administration in the spotlight: Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, a holdover from the Eric Adams administration. A confrontation outside the mayor’s residence on Saturday—and the arrest on federal terrorism charges of two alleged Muslim extremists—offered a vivid reminder of the ways in which perceptions of crime and public safety remain central to New Yorkers’ sense of their city. And their sense of how New York’s politicians are performing..

Back in June 2020, when Mamdani was not yet even a freshman assemblyman, the young candidate, responding to both the national crisis in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and a long record of brutality by the New York Police Department (from the killings of Eleanor Bumpurs and Eric Garner to the NYPD’s use of pepper spray just a few days earlier at an LGBTQ+ Pride rally), took what at the time was a popular position on the left.

“We don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety,” Mamdani tweeted. “What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD.” This was the quote weaponized by some of Mamdani’s opponents during last year’s primary—and for which he eventually apologized during an interview with The New York Times in September. Two months later, shortly after his election as mayor, Mamdani announced that he would retain Tisch, whom Adams had appointed a year earlier following the abrupt resignation of Commissioner Keechant Sewell.

A veteran public servant who headed Bill De Blasio’s Department of Information Technology and then was widely praised for her record as commissioner of the Department of Sanitation under Adams, Tisch brought her reputation for calm competence to a department that had been roiled by scandal and allegations of systemic corruption. Tisch is also heiress to one of the country’s great fortunes—Tisch’s grandfather Larry cofounded the Leows Corporation (now run by her brother Benjamin); the family, whose net worth, estimated by Forbes at more than $10 billion, make it one of the richest in the world, also own the New York Giants (though embarrassments arising from Steve Tisch’s mentions in the Epstein files have required changing the names atop the team’s ownership.) Her fortune gives Tisch a measure of political independence: she doesn’t need the gig to make ends meet. Her presence in the administration also seems to serve as a kind of talisman for New York’s permanent government—a reminder that while a democratic socialist and practicing Muslim might sit in Gracie Mansion, the city’s financial elite hasn’t yet lost all its power.

But the relationship is clearly not without its tensions. When Benjamin Tisch described his sister’s new boss as an “enemy” of the Jewish people, the commissioner issued a speedy apology. During last month’s first blizzard, when some NYPD officers were pelted with snowballs in Washington Square Park, the mayor, though urging the public to treat police with respect, downplayed the incident. “From the videos I’ve seen, it looked like kids at a snowball fight.” His commissioner took a different view, describing the actions as “criminal” and “disgraceful”—a depiction her department made good on when it arrested two of the alleged snowball slingers.

But last week’s foiled IED attack demonstrated just how much is at stake in this unlikely partnership. On Saturday, a handful of noisy demonstrators outside Grace Mansion, led by the white supremacist Jake Lang—a January 6 rioter who had called for a DC Metropolitan Police officer to be “put down like a dead dog” but was pardoned by President Donald Trump—confronted a much larger group of counterprotesters. One of this latter group was videotaped lighting a makeshift bomb and throwing it towards Lang’s group. When that failed to detonate, a companion handed him a second device—just before both of them were arrested by the NYPD.

At their joint press conference outside Gracie Mansion on Monday morning, both Mamdani and Tisch noted that the mayor and his wife were safely in Brooklyn on Saturday, visiting the New York Sign Museum. But neither Lang nor his opponents had any way of knowing that. The mayor first thanked the NYPD for acting “quickly to keep New Yorkers safe,” and then noted that “our officers ran toward danger without hesitation, demonstrating once again the courage and dedication it takes to protect this city every single day.”

Will this disturbing incident—which, given the degree of polarization in our country and our city, is unlikely to be the last of its kind— further cement the relationship between the mayor and his commissioner? As each of them has noted, they are unlikely to ever agree completely. The Tisch family are longtime supporters of Israel. Mamdani’s route into politics began with pro-Palestinian activism. He campaigned on higher taxes for the rich—which, if enacted, would doubtless have some effect (however negligible) on her family’s fortune. He also pledged to create a new “Department of Community Safety” to replace the NYPD in responding to mental health and other nonviolent crisis calls—a measure given added support this week by a study from the Vera Institute of Justice revealing that less than half the 3.6 million calls to the city’s 911 dispatchers in 2025 were “crime related.”

Yet for the moment, all those differences seemed less important than what the late Jesse Jackson described as the search for “common ground.” Mamdani may have revised his views of the NYPD—hardly surprising given that he and his wife now rely on the department to keep them safe every day. But the invitation to Mahmoud Khalil—the Columbia University Palestinian activist who had been targeted for deportation by the Trump administration—to join the mayor and his wife in breaking the Ramadan fast last Sunday night at Gracie Mansion ought to reassure his supporters that Mamdani is far from abandoning his principles.

Besides, when it comes to the battle for public opinion the mayor is not without considerable resources of his own. After their appearance at Gracie Mansion on Monday Mamdani and Tisch both attended the Police Academy graduation at Madison Square Garden. This was the equivalent of a hometown crowd for the commissioner; the graduating class of 968 new cops and their families and friends warmly applauded her remarks. But it was the mayor’s introduction that brought the loudest cheers from the crowd. And it was Mamdani who, after congratulating the graduating cadets, was enveloped in a hug by Patrick Hendry, president of the Police Benevolent Association—the same union leader who’d slammed the mayor’s response to the snowball fight. On both sides, it seems, New Yorkers have been enjoying something of a thaw.