Sorry: Zohran Mamdani saying he might offer to keep Jessica Tisch as police commissioner means less than nothing, all by itself.
It’s simply another invitation for everyone to hope he’s not as bad as he’s already told us all he is, on both public safety and antisemitism.
We expect Tisch, who’s determined to avoid politicizing the NYPD, won’t say much publicly, but what she would say is blatantly obvious.
For her to even entertain the offer, Mamdani would have to commit to abandoning virtually everything he’s said he wants to do on cops and crime — and to standing up against, rather than passive-aggressively enabling, the rising tide of antisemitism.
First, the public-safety issues.
Mamdani forthrightly wants fewer police, doing much less; fewer perps being sent to jail, let alone prison.
Indeed, he means to close Rikers to ensure the city will lack the cells to hold even half the current jail population.
He wants “sex work” and most drug offenses decriminalized, along with every other quality-of-life offense.
He wants to outsource cop discipline to the anti-policing Civilian Complaint Review Board, seizing an important power of the commissioner and discouraging officers from taking any action that risks a complaint even from the worst lowlives and gangbangers.
He means to disband the NYPD unit that specializes in policing protests, making it easy for “marches” to turn into fullblown rioiting like the city saw in the summer of 2020.
Everyone expects his election to trigger an even faster exodus of police to early retirement and/or jobs somewhere else, yet he won’t breathe a word about boosting NYPD morale or hiring fast enough to get the force up to its currently-budgeted size.
Heck, he hasn’t even offered the long-promised public apology for smearing the NYPD as “racist.”
Unless he backs off of all of this, we see no way Tisch can agree to stay on — not unless she for some reason wants him to fire her after maybe two days.
The fact is, it’s going to be near-impossible for Mamdani to hire anyone who actually believes in policing as his police commissioner, because the would-be mayor himself does not.
Second: antisemitism.
Tisch doesn’t make a big deal of it, but she is a Jew — and not the Brad Lander “toeing the complete progressive line comes first” kind.
And staying on under Mamdani would be a tacit endorsement of not just of his enthusiastic anti-Israel policies — he says he’ll order the NYPD to arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanhayu, remember — but his grinning de-facto antisemitism.
Yes, polls show roughly a quarter of the city’s Jews as planning to vote for Mamdani; lots of Jews are self-deceiving lefties like Lander.
But no Jew who hasn’t drunk the “commie” Kool-Aid can possibly work directly for this guy — not unless he publicly disavows his first and most central belief.
Again, to be clear: We haven’t talked to Tisch or any intermediary; all of this is our words, not hers.
Yet every bit of it is transparently obvious: You know it, she knows it — and so does Mamdani.
Fact is, his talk of offering her the job is nothing but the latest sign he thinks most voters are idiot suckers.
