Tisch Shakes Up N.Y.P.D. Staff and Orders 500 Officers Back to Key Roles
The New York Times
Commissioner Jessica Tisch is replacing the Police Department’s head of communications, who had clashed with reporters, and sending many officers back to patrol.
Jessica S. Tisch, New York City’s police commissioner, announced on Thursday that she was replacing the department’s combative head of communications, part of a shake-up of the department’s upper ranks and other moves that suggest she is trying to restore order to an agency reeling from chaos and dysfunction at the top.
The announcement came 10 days after Ms. Tisch ordered 500 officers who had been “improperly transferred” from their permanent posts to go back to their regular assignments, according to an internal police memo. That practice, known as “telephone message transfers,” had led to short staffing in parts of the department and slower emergency response times, according to the memo, which went out Dec. 9 and was reported on Thursday by Gothamist.
The Police Department has been shaken by the departure of three commissioners in an 18-month period and a sense that Mayor Eric Adams, a former police captain, was in charge of the agency instead of the leaders he had appointed. On Monday, during a public safety meeting, Mr. Adams praised Ms. Tisch’s leadership since she was sworn in last month, including her decision to conduct an internal audit that led to the discovery that hundreds of officers had been placed in other units without authorization.
On Thursday, she continued to make her mark with five high-ranking appointments.
Tarik Sheppard, the deputy commissioner for public information and an ally of Mr. Adams, will be replaced by Delaney Kempner, who most recently worked as the top spokeswoman for Letitia James, the New York attorney general. Mr. Sheppard has clashed with the news media repeatedly, and made headlines of his own. During the New York City Marathon last month, he and Thomas Donlon, then the interim police commissioner, got into a verbal dispute over where to stand for a photo that became so heated that another high-ranking officer broke it up.
Ms. Kempner, who will start on Jan. 13, “is well versed in the fast-moving, dynamic world of the nation’s largest media market, and possesses a strong fluency in law enforcement communications,” Ms. Tisch said in a statement announcing the appointments.
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