Mamdani’s NYPD Problem

Less than three weeks after Zohran Mamdani’s rousing inauguration speech, his supporters are expressing concern over his administration’s first major compromise: the reappointment of Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, an architect of the New York Police Department’s repressive surveillance policing apparatus who has shown a willingness to work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Opponents of Tisch’s role in the administration have been vocal since the decision was made to reappoint her on Nov. 19. In early December, a coalition of more than 120 organizations called on the mayor-elect to “drop Tisch,” citing a range of issues “from New York to Palestine.” They were joined by the Association of Legal Advocates and Attorneys – UAW Local 2325, representing over 3,500 legal services workers in the New York City metro area, which published a statement urging Mamdani to “drop Tisch immediately.” As ALAA put it, “A city committed to justice cannot be built on the foundations of repression, occupation, and billionaire police power.”

The diverse organizations that have spoken out — including NYC ICE Watch, A Better New York Legal Assistance Group and the Equality Rights & Justice Coalition — are not ideological “purists” or keyboard warriors hating from a distance. They represent the activist base that helped power Mamdani’s campaign.

Mamdani has hailed Tisch as among “the best and the brightest,” but her record merits the concern of her opponents. Last May, she reiterated that the NYPD would continue to work with the feds in criminal probes, following the abduction of two Venezuelan immigrants in the Bronx by federal agents. The following month, when the NYPD arrested 86 anti-ICE protesters in Times Square, Tisch delivered a “stern warning” to protesters, stating that the NYPD “will not tolerate” their “chaos and disorder.” 

In October, following controversial ICE raids at Canal Street in Lower Manhattan, it emerged that Tisch not only had prior knowledge, but directed NYPD officers to steer clear of ICE agents as they “bore down” on street vendors. The following month, civilians and NYPD officers were injured in multiple encounters with masked plainclothes ICE agents, including a major confrontation with anti-ICE protesters in Chinatown. Tisch publicly condemned the operation while staying quiet about the NYPD’s collaborative efforts to arrest protesters disrupting the raid. Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., has twice written to Tisch asking her position on arresting federal immigration agents who break the law in the city. She has not responded.  

While Mamdani publicly condemns Trump’s federal “deportation army,” he has been quiet about Tisch’s support for the same. He has also been silent on her role in turning New York into an all-seeing surveillance state, backed by an aggressive police force notorious for racial profiling and abusive practices. Prior to his election, Mamdani was a co-sponsor of the proposed Stop Fakes Act that would prohibit state law enforcement from creating fake social media accounts to spy on the public and joined the New York-based activist group Surveillance Technology Oversight Project in advocating for restraints on the use of artificial intelligence for policing. But Tisch, who helped develop the NYPD’s mass-surveillance architecture, is openly pushing this forward as a self-described “modernizer.”  

Several positions highlight the profound divergence between Tisch and Mamdani’s campaign. Among them: 

No 1: Praising and supporting the Gang Database. A wide swath of activists, nongovernmental agencies and public defenders such as the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Bronx Defenders and LatinoJustice, have criticized the NYPD’s Criminal Group Database (a.k.a. the Gang Database) for “racially disparate targeting, surveillance, and criminalization of tens of thousands of Black and Latino New Yorkers.” Of the 13,200 people in the database, a heart-stopping 99% are people of color, and data about more than 5,100 people in the database is being shared with ICE. In addition to racist profiling, the Legal Defense Fund observes, “Gang Databases are tools for ICE.”

In April 2025, a class-action lawsuit was filed against Tisch and the city of New York deeming the database “unconstitutional” (in violation of First, Fourth, and 14th Amendment rights). During his campaign, Mamdani called it a “vast dragnet” and pledged to abolish it. And in October, a diverse coalition of groups and New Yorkers urged the City Council to pass Intro 798, which would abolish the database.

On Jan. 6, the plaintiffs defeated the city’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit, with U.S. District Judge Brian M. Cogan stating, “So long as the Database exists and so long as plaintiffs are in it, it is plausible that they will continue to be harmed by the police.” Yet that same day, with Mamdani by her side, when an audience member asked about the issue, Tisch praised the database, claiming it reduced gun violence and “contributed to gang takedowns,” including “the arrest of 390 gang members.” Mamdani fell silent.

No 2: Praising the expansion of racist and repressive “stop and frisk” policing. Tisch lauded the expansion of the NYPD’s “quality-of-life” division (called Q-Teams) that conduct stop-and-frisk policing under the “broken windows” framework: policing focused on non-emergencies like outdoor drug use, illegal vendors, public urination, abandoned vehicles and noise complaints. A court-appointed monitor found that these “teams” are conducting illegal stop-and-frisks at rates dramatically higher than regular patrol officers, with 90% of their stops being Black and Hispanic men. People living in highly surveilled areas subject to stop-and-frisk report higher levels of “psychological distress” as well as “more nervousness and [feelings of] worthlessness .… Frisking and use of force by police represent a stronger mental health risk for men.”

For these reasons, critics are staunchly opposed to “quality-of-life” policing. As Brooklyn Defender Services puts it, quality-of-life policing dates back to the foundation of the NYPD in 1845 in response to elite demands. It is a racist, anti-worker, anti-immigrant agenda to crack down on behaviors associated with those communities. Today, quality-of-life policing targets “[n]eighborhoods that demonstrate the intersectionality between race and socioeconomic status” who “are subjected to constant police presence and surveillance and are home to community members who are most likely to be abused at the hands of the NYPD.”

To this, Mamdani was also silent, despite having pledged to “end all misdemeanor charges” during his campaign.

No 3: Expansion of high-tech surveillance and boots on the ground. Jessica Tisch built her notoriety as one of the central architects of the NYPD’s infamous Domain Awareness System (DAS) mass-surveillance network, also called Microsoft Aware, launched in 2012. A system that merges tens of thousands of cameras, sensors (like microphones), facial recognition, drones, helicopters, license plate readers, social media surveillance, biometric databases and troves of data from public records, it has been roundly condemned by civil rights and liberties advocates. Amnesty International has called its facial recognition component a “digital stop and frisk.”

The DAS has been used to target Muslims and people of color. In October, two New Yorkers filed a federal lawsuit against the NYPD, claiming its DAS is an unconstitutional surveillance dragnet that violated their First and Fourth Amendment rights. The plaintiffs allege the system’s cameras peer directly into their homes and that the vast repertoire of data collection constitutes “indiscriminate search.” They also claim that data is shared with state and federal agencies, including ICE.

The following month, Amnesty International and the New York-based Surveillance Technology Oversight Project said they obtained over 2,700 documents detailing surveillance-based instances of racial discrimination and abuse by the NYPD.

Despite these findings, Tisch’s top agenda item as NYPD commissioner is “doubling down on data-driven policing and surveillance.” Having proudly claimed to have “revolutionized law-enforcement technology,” Tisch continues to push the envelope. In November 2024, the commissioner said she planned to combat crime using advances in AI and drones alongside an increase of boots on the ground. She added over 4,000 officers to the NYPD in 2025 — the largest for a single year in recorded history — on grounds that “more officers work.”

No 4: Support for the Strategic Response Group. Alongside the previous mayor, Eric Adams, Tisch lauded the Strategic Response Group (SRG), a unit of several hundred officers responsible for “crowd control” that frequently threatens, attacks and arrests protesters. The SRG is deemed one of the NYPD’s “most dangerous units” by the ACLU, which is calling for its disbandment as part of an initiative to “chip away at the NYPD’s size, scope, and power.” In October, thanks to a class-action lawsuit filed in response to the SRG’s excessive use of force against Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020, the NYPD accepted restraints on how it handles protests and other First Amendment activity. During his campaign, Mamdani called for the elimination of the SRG, but is now silent on the issue.

No 5: Criminalization and persecution of Palestinian supporters and protesters. In December, New York University students supporting Palestinian liberation claimed that NYU administrators received authorization from the NYPD to hire at least six special patrol officers “who will have arrest and physical force powers, just like the NYPD.” A vocal supporter of Israel, Tisch has already supported the suppression of anti-genocide protests. Tisch “signed off on NYU’s request, and will have the power to appoint the officers,” students allege. Instead of taking a stand against these policies, a central part of his mayoral ticket, Mamdani has praised Tisch for enacting them. When asked why he doesn’t publicly push back against Tisch’s policies given that he once condemned them, he declined to respond, simply stating, “We’re not returning to broken windows policing.”