City Hall announced a day ago that the mayor ordered the NYPD to complete a full policy and procedural review as he seeks new accountability measures for officers accused of using excessive force.

A spokesperson called the directive “the first comprehensive review” of its kind in a decade.

So, will that include a change at the top?

Nope. Asked Tuesday whether he might fire NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch as part of his administration’s audit and overhaul, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said he planned no change.

“Jessica Tisch is the police commissioner. I have no plans to change that,” Mamdani said.

“The reason I made the decision to have Jessica Tisch as the police commissioner was because of her record on uprooting corruption from the upper echelons of the NYPD while lowering crime across our city,” he added.

Mamdani and Tisch’s working relationship has been the subject of varying speculation throughout his tenure, given their ideological and policy differences.

She was appointed by then-Mayor Eric Adams, and Mamdani kept her on in part because of her established crime-fighting record. Both say they work productively together.

The mayor emphasized that point Tuesday.

“Over the last 10 months that we’ve worked together, we’ve delivered the lowest recorded number of murders in our city’s history, the lowest recorded number of shootings, as well as shooting victims.”

The NYPD declined to comment on the mayor’s directive, referring NBC New York back to City Hall for comment. The police union said it was merely a play to score points with Mamdani’s anti-police supporters.   

A spokesman for the NYPD officers’ union said if the mayor wants to review the NYPD’s use-of-force policies, he should also review what he calls the Civilian Complaint Review Board’s “blatantly biased interpretation.” 

“We have brought several examples of anti-police bias to the attention of the mayor and his team and we’ve seen zero meaningful action,” said PBA Spokesman Patrick Hendry. “The mayor’s radical base wants a wholesale dismantling of the NYPD, and it’s clear this announcement is an attempt to appease them.”

New push for NYPD accountability

City Hall announced details of the mayor’s new push on Monday, soon after his base’s NYPD criticism flared over Thursday’s ICE shooting in Marble Hill and the police department’s handling of ensuing protests.  

But a City Hall spokesperson said the accountability changes had already been planned — and the NYPD informed of the directive — before last Thursday. The spokesperson said Mamdani notified the NYPD earlier in the week that he wanted a thorough use-of-force review to assess encounters with people experiencing mental health crises.

Mamdani’s written statements suggest the impetus involved another, less publicized issue also coming to a head last Thursday.

Loved ones expressed their outrage at City Hall, saying 19-year-old Win Rozario suffered from mental heath issues and claim responding officers escalated the situation, leading the three-minute encounter to turn tragic. NBC New York’s Gilma Avalos reports.

At a news conference that day, the family of a Queens teenager fatally shot by police during a 2024 mental health emergency said the Mamdani administration “betrayed” them by allowing one of the responding officers to retire with a disability pension before facing a disciplinary trial. 

Tisch issued a statement acknowledging “human error” by an unnamed NYPD employee who had failed to flag the officer’s pension request to the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which was in the process of initiating excessive force charges against him. 

The mayor said the following additional steps would be taken to hold officers accused of misconduct accountable:

Share personnel information with the State’s Criminal Justice Division to make it harder for officers to find other law enforcement jobs when they leave the NYPD with serious disciplinary charges pending.

Add $2.6 million to the Department of Investigation’s budget for NYPD oversight, which Mamdani’s DOI commissioner Nadia Shihata said would “reestablish robust oversight of policing in New York City.”

Develop a standardized plan to share information about incidents with the public and family members of people injured or killed in cases of alleged misconduct.

“This review is about making sure our policies reflect that responsibility, that our officers have the guidance and training they need and that New Yorkers and their families can trust their city will treat them with care and dignity,” Mamdani said.