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By Diego Ramos / Original to ScheerPost
Zohran Mamdani has drawn comparisons to Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for better and for worse. His populist, left-aligned agenda, paired with charisma and relentless action on the streets defined his commendable campaign and brought an international spotlight. With less than two weeks away from Mamdani’s inauguration as New York City mayor, however, some feel his first choices as mayor-elect have already signaled a retrenchment of values.
Will these decisions prove to be a sign of pragmatic politics, made with his agenda of making New York City an affordable place to live in mind? Or will Mamdani follow in the steps of his Democratic Party compatriots, willing to forgo campaign promises in exchange for political capital?
A couple of weeks before the Nov. 4 election, which saw Mamdani rein in the most votes in a New York City mayoral election since 1969, the first signs of controversy began to emerge: Mamdani was to retain Jessica Tisch as police commissioner, NYPD’s top cop.
Other than advocating for the creation of a Department of Community Safety, Mamdani’s campaign didn’t focus much on police reform, but keeping someone like Tisch certainly raised alarm bells for many keeping an eye on the election and Mamdani’s movements.
Journalist Spencer Ackerman wrote about Tisch’s appointment, calling it “a portentous, unforced error, for reasons concerning her specifically, the NYPD broadly, and the moment that we’re in politically.”
Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian-American organizer and co-founder of Women’s March, took to Instagram Live days before the election and said, “I wasn’t really happy about the news that [Mamdani] was going to keep Tisch on for the NYPD.”
“If/When Zohran Mamdani becomes mayor,” Columbia professor Anthony Zenkus wrote on X, “he must immediately fire and replace NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch.”
Perhaps the strongest message came from the Palestinian activist group, Within Our Lifetime, which issued a statement signed by more than a hundred leftist groups and organizations opposing the 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,” the statement reads.
But who is Tisch, and why is she drawing such apprehension?
It’s Personal
Weeks after Tisch accepted Mamdani’s offer to remain police commissioner, her brother, Benjamin Tisch, reportedly said at a private charity dinner that the Muslim mayor-elect was an “enemy” of the Jewish people.
The commissioner apologized to Mamdani, but the comments follow a history of tension between the mayor-elect and his new police chief, including Tisch’s family contributing over $1.3 million to the super PAC that supported Mamdani’s main opponent, Andrew Cuomo.
Jessica Tisch’s devotion to Zionist causes has also come up as the elephant in the room, with Tisch calling college campus protests against Israel “despicable” and claiming that student protestors did not target “Israeli policies or geopolitics or even the horrors of war but the Jewish people themselves.”
In the same address — which she gave at the pro-Zionist Anti-Defamation League’s annual conference — Tisch affirmed that the NYPD would continue to “combat antisemitism,” meaning anti-Israel protests across the city, and speaking on behalf of the NYPD, she called anti-Israel rhetoric “vile.”
“Combatting antisemitism” within Tisch’s NYPD includes, as of January 2025, categorizing keffiyehs and watermelons as antisemitic symbols.
This, along with other examples of Tisch’s clear partiality towards Israel — such as meeting with Israel’s Consul General, Ofir Akunis, and being offered a trip to Israel, as well as her father, James Tisch, being a board member of The Jewish Agency for Israel, an organization that encourages Jews to move to Israel — underscores the difficulties Mamdani will likely face since one of his most daring pledges includes ordering the NYPD to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he were to visit New York City.
Technocrat Extraordinaire
Surveillance watchdogs have sounded the alarm bells about Tisch before she was even appointed commissioner by Eric Adams last year.
Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.), a New York-based privacy and civil rights group, condemned Adams’ appointment, citing Tisch’s work on the NYPD’s Domain Awareness System as well as other surveillance programs.
According to the group’s Executive Director Albert Fox Cahn, “Tisch built her career on building discriminatory surveillance systems across New York, systematically weaponizing technology against our most vulnerable communities. This appointment would be a nightmare under any circumstances, but it’s particularly alarming for undocumented New Yorkers at the dawn of a new Trump Administration.”
The Domain Awareness System made headlines in 2025 as the subject of a lawsuit claiming the system unconstitutionally spies on New Yorkers. According to a report in the Queens Daily Eagle, the surveillance instrument’s “massive scope allows the NYPD to constantly track, watch and inform on specific individuals regardless of whether or not they committed a crime.”
Tisch has stood by the system, co-authoring a 2021 internal report that defends it as a tool that helps policing, improves crime statistics and “is critically important for the people of New York City.”
ICE Collaborator
Just two weeks ago, Mamdani said he was “prepared for any consequence that comes for standing up for New Yorkers,” referring to the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in the city. He also put out a video informing New Yorkers of their rights when dealing with ICE following a raid of Canal Street in Manhattan.
Throughout his campaign, Mamdani had been a vocal advocate against ICE and even had a viral confrontation with President Donald Trump’s border czar Tom Homan following ICE’s kidnapping of Columbia student protest negotiator Mahmoud Khalil.
Tisch, as Spencer Ackerman has reported, has already proven to be a willing collaborator with ICE. Earlier this year during a City Council hearing on the NYPD’s budget, Tisch said, “Some have asked whether we should reconsider our cooperation with federal agencies on criminal investigations in light of their work with ICE. The short, straight answer to this is no.”
One case that has drawn significant attention from immigration advocates is the detaining of Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian woman who participated and was arrested in the Columbia University protests. Kordia was detained by ICE as a result of a legal loophole utilized by the NYPD under Tisch, which allowed them to bypass the city’s sanctuary laws forbidding cooperation on civil immigration enforcement.
The NYPD provided ICE with Kordia’s internal record of her arrest, which listed “her home address, date of birth and an officer’s two-sentence account of the arrest,” according to an AP report. This information was used as evidence to argue for her deportation by the Trump administration.
Despite legal advocates expressing concerns about the potential misuse of this information, Tisch stood by it, saying it was standard request.
While some argue that Mamdani’s appointment of Tisch is a necessary first step in maintaining political leverage as mayor, something that already panned out in the form of endorsements from New York Governor Kathy Hochul and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jefferies, the decision has caused profound perturbations amongst Mamdani’s supporters.
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Diego Ramos
Diego Ramos, ScheerPost managing editor and New York bureau chief, is a journalist from Queens, NY. He graduated from the University of Southern California in 2022 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. He has previously worked at BuzzFeed News and was managing editor of Annenberg News at USC. He’s covered and researched myriad topics including war, politics, psychedelic research and sports.