cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/6932972

On November 19, 2025, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch announced her decision to accept Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s offer to remain in her post within his administration. We strongly oppose this decision. Retaining Tisch represents a political alignment with the NYPD’s legacy of racialized policing, surveillance, and repression, and a retreat from the values of justice and liberation that Mamdani’s campaign claimed to champion.

Far from being a minor personnel choice, it is instead a political alignment with the world’s largest and most militarized police state whose record of surveillance, racial profiling, repression, and state violence threatens and criminalizes our communities. Mamdani’s decision to retain Tisch effectively endorses the NYPD’s ongoing collaboration with the Israeli occupation at a time when Gaza and the rest of Palestine are facing a genocide. It undermines the commitments made to the Palestinian community in New York City and to our families living under occupation abroad. At home, Tisch’s tenure has revived Broken Windows–style policing that has long terrorized Black and Brown New Yorkers. Since Eric Adams took office and appointed Tisch as NYPD Commissioner, stops of Black and Brown New Yorkers have tripled when compared to the previous administration.

For nearly two decades, Jessica Tisch has been central to building the NYPD’s surveillance state. Beginning in 2008 in the Counterterrorism Bureau, she rose through the department’s intelligence division during the height of the city’s illegal surveillance of mosques, Muslim student groups, and Arab and Muslim neighborhoods. She later helped construct the NYPD’s Domain Awareness System, a multibillion-dollar network that aggregates surveillance footage, license plate readers, social media data, and biometric information.

Tisch’s record is inseparable from the NYPD’s direct collaboration with the Israeli occupation. In 2015 she traveled to occupied Palestine as Deputy Commissioner for Information Technology to train with Israeli Occupation Forces. She later hosted the top brass of Israel’s National Police at NYPD headquarters in November 2024, and marched in the “Israel Day Parade” this past May. In January 2025 Tisch oversaw an NYPD training that labeled keffiyehs and watermelons as antisemitic symbols, turning Palestinian cultural expression into a policing target. And in October 2025 she spoke at the Anti-Defamation League’s annual conference, where she defended the Gaza genocide, condemned pro-Palestine protestors, and equated anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

On the same day that Mamdani and Tisch announced her reappointment at a joint press conference, twenty-eight Palestinians were massacred in Gaza, a stark reminder that the state violence Tisch oversees at home is directly linked to colonial violence abroad.