One of the first things Zohran Mamdani did when he became mayor of New York City on Jan. 1 was to issue an executive order laying out the structure and operations of his office. Critics noted that he appeared to put a new bureaucratic layer—a first deputy mayor—between himself and the New York City Police Department commissioner.
The deputy is to “supervise and coordinate” the NYPD, among other entities, per the executive order.
Mamdani told reporters on Monday that he wasn’t demoting NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch. “My police commissioner, just like my school’s chancellor, will report directly to me,” he said. “The executive order is in terms of the question of coordination. This is—reporting continues to be directly to me.”
“This is about the daily minutiae of coordination, not about the question of reporting,” he added.
Mark Goldfeder, CEO of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, told JNS that the executive order “is clear that the deputy mayor will be coordinating, so to the extent that he is differentiating, we need more clarification on what that means.”
Earlier in the day, Goldfeder and colleagues sent a letter to Mamdani stating that the order “directs that the NYC police commissioner should report to the first deputy mayor, rather than reporting directly to the mayor.”
The letter called the decision “unprecedented” and “especially puzzling, given the public safety challenges facing New York City, including a worldwide rise in antisemitic violence and the fact that NYC is at the epicenter of federal terrorism prosecution, including most recently of Nicholas Maduro.”
The National Jewish Advocacy Center leaders said the decision will “weaken mayoral-level situational awareness with respect to terrorism, targeted violence and intelligence threats.” They urged Mamdani to reconsider immediately.
“This formal executive action not only violates long-standing precedent and the NYC charter, but is accompanied by reports that your office has downgraded the post-9/11 practice of direct intelligence access and briefings between the mayor’s office and the New York City police commissioner, relegating NYPD leadership to the same access tier as non-public-safety agencies,” they wrote.
Goldfeder told JNS that Mamdani’s press conference didn’t address the issue of whether Tisch would brief the mayor directly.
“The close relationship between the NYPD and the mayor’s office has been key to averting disasters for the Jewish community,” Goldfeder and colleagues wrote. “Only last month, that vital coordination ensured that Chanukah events throughout the city were provided additional security in light of the devastating terror attack on a Chanukah event on Bondi Beach, Sydney, Australia.”
“Yet instead of adding or at the very least maintaining existing frameworks for protecting the particularly vulnerable New York Jewish community, just days ago your administration rescinded the executive order adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism, a globally accepted framework expressly intended to safeguard the Jewish community against precisely the kinds of targeted threats that intelligence and counterterrorism oversight are designed to address,” they added.
