Is There a "Tisch Effect"?
What it might mean if the new Police Commissioner has already taken a bite out of crime.
Can it be that the new Police Commissioner, Jessica Tisch, has already brought crime down? Looking at the NYPD’s weekly CompStat data, this unlikely proposition seems a distinct possibility.
Tisch’s appointment was announced on November 20, 2024, and she was sworn in on November 25. In the seven full weeks of data since Tisch took over (from the week ending on 12/1/24 through the week ending 1/12/25), 14,000 major felonies were committed, compared to 16,844 for the same period in 2023-2024 — a 16.88% year-over-year decrease.1
That 16.88% decrease under Tisch compares to a 6.54% year-over-year decrease in the seven full weeks prior to Tisch taking over (from the week ending 10/6/24 through the week ending 11/17/24), and to a 1.89% year-over-year decrease for all of 2024 through the last full week before her appointment.
The total incident rates for murder and rape are relatively small, so I am reluctant to draw any conclusions there. But the other five major felonies each have more than ten thousand incidents per year, making it less likely that changes in these numbers are statistical noise. Among them, under Tisch, we’ve seen:
A 27.18% year-over-year decrease in robbery, compared to a 6.74% year-over-year decrease in the seven pre-Tisch weeks and a 0.7% year-over-year increase in the pre-Tisch calendar year.
A 10.16% year-over-year decrease in burglary, compared to a 9.30% year-over-year decrease in the seven pre-Tisch weeks and a 6.7% year-over-year decrease in the pre-Tisch calendar year.
A 20.27% year-over-year decrease in grand larceny, compared to a 8.88% year-over-year decrease in the seven pre-Tisch weeks and a 3.8% year-over-year decrease in the pre-Tisch calendar year.
A 24.33% year-over-year decrease in grand larceny auto, compared to a 6.43% year-over-year decrease in the seven pre-Tisch weeks and a 8.9% year-over-year decrease in the pre-Tisch calendar year.2
There also seems to be a clear shift in the trendline for several non-felonies that shape our sense of safety and disorder in the city: petit larceny, retail theft (a subset of petit larceny), and misdemeanor assault (which includes many stranger assaults that make the news when alleged perpetrators are released after arraignment). Under Tisch, we’ve seen:
A 2.09% year-over year decrease in petit larceny, compared to a 3.57% increase in the seven pre-Tisch weeks and a 0.7% decrease in the pre-Tisch calendar year. (This is a modest percentage shift, but in this category, the numbers approach or exceed 100,000 incidents annually.)
A 3.94% year-over year decrease in retail theft, compared to a 6.09% increase in the seven pre-Tisch weeks and a 4.0% increase in the pre-Tisch calendar year.
An effectively flat 0.21% year-over year increase in misdemeanor assault, compared to an 8.35% increase in the seven pre-Tisch weeks and a 9.4% increase in the pre-Tisch calendar year.
The causes of crime, and of fluctuations in rates of crime, are notoriously complex, and I am neither a criminologist nor a statistician. It remains to be seen whether this trend will hold, but to my layman’s eye, there is enough consistency here to at least wonder whether the new Commissioner has had an almost immediate effect on what’s happening on the ground.
How could that happen?
The answer would have to do both with the Department that Commissioner Tisch inherited, and how she has led.
The Department that she took over was, quite clearly, a mess at the top, and had been, more or less, from the start of the Adams Administration. Further down the ranks, the Department faced a growing shortage of officers that was bound up with huge morale problems. I have heard, anecdotally, that newer police officers who went through the Academy in recent years had a more passive conception of the job, inculcated with a sense that deterrence can be achieved merely through visible presence, rather than preemptive intervention. (It is a fair question whether that was in part a rational, or even appropriate, response to shifts in the public discourse and laws related to public safety.3)
It would make perfect sense that a culture of mismanagement at the top led to a lack of accountability throughout the ranks — and that this combined with a depleted, demoralized, and reticent corps of officers to meaningfully diminish the effectiveness and deterrent power of the Department itself, separate and apart from the impact of pandemic upheaval or policy changes made by the State Legislature, City Council, or District Attorneys.
In short, it is almost a certainty that the NYPD in recent years has been leaving some amount of crime-reducing potential on the table.
Enter Commissioner Tisch, like a hurricane. She is unlike any of her modern predecessors, combining the freedom to operate, speak her mind, and take on sacred cows that comes from independent means, years of experience in Ray Kelly’s and Bill Bratton’s NYPD, and a reputation for tirelessness and disruptive drive that most recently had brought about a transformation at the Department of Sanitation.
Before Tisch even walked into One Police Plaza, it’s reasonable to think that anyone almost anywhere within the NYPD who had been giving less than their all would read the press release announcing the new Police Commissioner and begin to sweat — or shift into higher gear. Transfers to Siberia loomed.
And as soon Tisch started the job, she moved almost instantaneously to reshape the Department, ordering 500 “hiding” officers back to crime-fighting, and making changes up and down the ranks:
Commissioner Tisch has begun to aggressively shake up the nation’s largest police department, from high-level commanders to patrol officers. She said in an interview that she had replaced nearly a dozen chiefs and deputy commissioners, including the head of the Internal Affairs Bureau.
“Every police car says ‘courtesy, professionalism and respect,’” she said. “The leadership of the Police Department has to model that. I’m very confident that that direction is now clear.”
If the NYPD was operating at far less than maximum efficacy prior to Tisch’s arrival, it seems entirely possible that her early moves had a swift and significant impact on the culture of the Department and the practice of policing in New York City — and that even if actual criminals have no idea who the Commissioner is, a more proactive, strategic, and focused police force may well have quickly exerted downward pressure on crime.
* * * * *
When discussing the issue of public safety in New York, and the meaningful increases in crime rates that we’ve seen since the pandemic, we can bucket causes into three categories:
Circumstances beyond the control of state or local government — e.g. pandemic upheaval or other broad, societal trends that show up in crime data from many different jurisdictions;
Operations of, and choices made by, those who play a role in administering our criminal justice system — e.g. police, judges, and prosecutors; and
Changes in law — e.g. bail and discovery reforms enacted by the State Legislature.
Those who are most hawkish about crime tend to focus primarily on the latter category — legislative policy changes, with additional criticism reserved for progressive DAs and judges. Depending on who’s speaking, this may variously be rooted in a serious assessment of the facts and data, anger and frustration about those changes in law, the fact that talking about operations is complex and unsatisfying, or a specific political agenda — or some combination of the above.
To be clear, I do believe that certain legislative policy choices have contributed to increases in crime. I think there is clearer data to support revisiting aspects of discovery reform than there is for bail reform. (As a practical matter, judges have retained broad discretion under the bail law, even though the statute is rather incoherent. At no time in the modern history of New York City were judges routinely sending shoplifters, even recidivist shoplifters, to Rikers; bail reform is not why your toothpaste is locked behind plastic.4) But an accumulation of State and City legislative policy choices are part of the reason that someone who commits a crime today in New York City — even a serious crime — both feels and is less likely to be held accountable, in any way, than they would have been five or ten years ago. It is reasonable to assume that this reduces deterrence, and that this, in turn, leads to more crime.
Whether the social costs of the elevated crime levels we are experiencing are outweighed by the social benefits — and perhaps, over some longer period time, public safety benefits — of less incarceration is the question that anyone engaging in this debate in good faith should be wrestling with. Neither side should get to pretend there are no tradeoffs involved.
But what the Tisch effect should remind us (even if it ends up being less stark than the early data would suggest), is that an analysis of crime and its causes in New York City that ignores the operational efficacy of the NYPD is missing a big piece of the puzzle — and that there’s a lot of leverage in making the Department run well.
This seems obvious, but I believe that the anger at progressive politicians throughout much of the law enforcement community over the last several years caused a kind of willful blindness — or, at least, silence — about what was going on at the Department and how it might be making New Yorkers less safe.
I found, in conversations with more conservative New Yorkers during my campaign last summer, that suggesting there should be operational improvements made at the NYPD — something that is in no way mutually exclusive of changing laws — often elicited a fierce defense of an obviously diminished Department and a suggestion that I was cop-bashing. Any argument that took any pressure off those bums in Albany and on the City Council could not be countenanced. It struck me as ironic that the very same people who were the biggest and most uncritical supporters of the NYPD were arguing, in effect, that nothing the Department did or didn’t do would push crime up or down. It is — also ironically — the same logic deployed by those on the left who argue that the outsize crime reduction in New York City in the 1990s and 2000s was simply part of a national trend and had nothing to do with the NYPD.
Along the same lines, those who should be most vigorously celebrating the new Police Commissioner’s apparent success in bringing down crime, without a single statute being changed, may be at least partly hoping that the Tisch effect is illusory. If it is real, it will be impossible to continue pretending that a reversal of criminal justice reform laws would be a panacea — or that crime reduction cannot be achieved without one. As a result, the public discourse around how to make us safer will be more honest and complete than it has been in years — and we will be that much closer to identifying and implementing the full array of changes and solutions necessary to bring crime down.
All of the stats I use here reflect year-over-year changes, comparing the same periods of time one year apart. This aims to control for seasonal fluctuations in crime. Even when comparing Tisch’s first seven weeks with the seven full weeks before her appointment, using year-over-year data gets at the change in historical levels of crime for the same parts of the calendar, not the change in levels of crime at different points within the same year.
The effect is least clear for felony assault, which is down 3.72% year-over-year under Tisch. That’s about the same decline as during the seven pre-Tisch weeks, though much better than the 5.3% year-over-year increase in the pre-Tisch calendar year.
I have heard — directly and on several occasions — of New Yorkers being discouraged from filing police reports, told that “even if we catch him, he’ll be back on the street in 24 hours.” This likely reflects a broader dynamic in which police officers, unhappy with some of the zeitgeist around criminal justice and the laws that have been enacted in Albany, took their foot off the gas, at least for a time. This may be an understandable human reaction, but when it goes from thoughtful restraint to apathy, or even subversion, it is unacceptable. The job of police officers is to help prevent, respond to, and solve crimes. That is different from the jobs of lawmakers, prosecutors, juries, and judges, and shouldn’t be done or not done depending on whether officers approve of what is happening elsewhere in the criminal justice debate or system. Moreover, the act of arrest, regardless of what happens at arraignment, is an accountability mechanism in and of itself whose import should not be dismissed.
During my time in the Governor’s office, I asked my colleagues to look at arraignments in the quarter immediately before and the quarter immediately after the effectuation of bail reform, and to calculate the percentage of all defendants that were released pretrial. We found that in New York City the total was 87% on both sides of the overhaul of bail, suggesting far less impact than either supporters or opponents of the reforms believed — because judges in New York City are quite liberal and had broad practical discretion to exert their will, both before and after bail reform. (This was different upstate, where a marked increase in release relates suggests that judges there are more naturally inclined to detain defendants.) Studies in the years since have found only limited connections to rates of crime in New York City for specific categories of defendants, and no data nearly as dramatic as the increases in dismissal rates that seem to be a product of discovery reform.