Andrew Cuomo said on Sunday he would keep Jessica Tisch as NYPD commissioner if elected mayor.
“I think Commissioner Tisch has done a really, really good job,” Cuomo said of New York City’s top cop during an appearance on CBS’s “The Point with Marcia Kramer.”
“I would say off the bat I would ask her to stay,” he said.
Kramer had asked Cuomo which top officials or agency heads in Mayor Eric Adams’ administration he would consider keeping if the ex-governor wins the race for City Hall.
Cuomo, who lost the Democratic mayoral primary to Zohran Mamdani in June, is still running on the independent “Fight and Deliver” ballot line.
Front-runner Mamdani has said he was “actively considering” keeping Tisch.
Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, when asked if he would keep Tisch, told Pix 11 on Friday, “Absolutely.”
Public safety has been a major issue in the campaign.
Cuomo has proposed adding 5,000 police officers to the force.
Sliwa vowed to add 7,000 cops.
Mamdani has meanwhile been scrambling to distance himself from his statements in 2020 calling for defunding the police and labeling officers “racist, anti-queer and a threat to public safety.”
“What we need is to #defund the NYPD,” he wrote on X at the time.
Mamdani has since apologized for the “language” he used and now claims he no longer considers officers racist and is against defunding the police, though he has not called for increasing the force.
He has proposed a new city Department of Community Safety to help mentally ill New Yorkers and bolster crime-prevention programs, thus relieving police officers of addressing the “frayed social safety net” instead of serious crime.
As for Cuomo and Tisch, the pair have not always seen eye to eye.
Tisch has blamed state criminal-justice reforms approved by then-Gov. Cuomo, that took effect in 2020 — such as the “Raise the Age” law, which upped the age of criminal responsibility from 16 to 18 — for creating a “consequence-free environment” for crime-committing youths.
“In my opinion, crime went up as a result of the drastic changes we see in our criminal justice laws in New York City,” she said last month.
