We just updated the Table of Success for the final time, and we would have been remiss not to include the current (and future?) NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who’s branded herself as a competent bureaucrat—rooting out corruption in a department of grifters, dilettantes and sycophants—empowered by Mayor Eric Adams. But is that the whole story? Read her entry below and decide for yourself.
Jessica Tisch and Eric Adams have a lot more in common than one might expect for a hotel heiress who grew up on the Upper East Side and a cop from Brownsville. They’ve both proclaimed they are passionate about public service, hate rats and bail reform, and support a policing strategy that revolves around quality-of-life enforcement: cracking down on sex workers, e-bikes, homeless New Yorkers, and street vendors. That’s probably why Adams tapped Tisch in November 2024 to be his fourth and final NYPD commissioner—that, and her reputation as a competent bureaucrat, an archetype largely absent from the Adams administration and especially the scandal-ridden NYPD.
As for why Tisch said yes, well, a stint as NYPD commissioner—even in a department as scandal-marred as Adams’s—is yet another stepping stone in Tisch’s rise in City government, which could eventually go, if the buzz is to be believed, all the way to Gracie Mansion. But despite her promises of departmental reform and accountability for cops who engage in misconduct, and the veneer of respectability she lends the department, her tenure has largely been more of the same: cracking down on the city’s most vulnerable residents, serving the interests of the powerful, and helping cops who hurt New Yorkers dodge accountability.
Tisch was born with the proverbial silver spoon in her mouth, part of the third generation of the Loews Corporation business dynasty built in 1940s Brooklyn by a pair of entrepreneurial brothers (that’s her family’s name on New York University’s arts school, just one of their many philanthropic endeavors; others include a wing at the Met, a children’s zoo in Central Park, and a hospital in the NYU Langone system). She has two brothers: One is the current president and CEO of Loews, and the other launched his own hedge fund in 2023. But Tisch has always had a higher calling, she’s said, a noblesse oblige to commit her life to public service in New York City.
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