Moving to stabilize an administration roiled by investigations, resignations and his own indictment, New York City Mayor Eric Adams on Wednesday appointed sanitation chief Jessica Tisch as police commissioner. A city government stalwart and ex-NYPD official, she'll be just the second woman in the high-profile, high-pressure post

The move comes at a critical time for the nation’s largest police department, shoring up its leadership after a tumultuous stretch punctuated by former commissioner Edward Caban's exit in September amid a federal investigation. Days later, his interim replacement, Thomas Donlon, disclosed that he, too, had been searched by the FBI.

Tisch, 43, the Harvard-educated scion of a wealthy New York family, has worked for the city for 16 years, holding leadership roles in several agencies. As sanitation commissioner, she became TikTok famous when she declared in 2022, “The rats don’t run the city, we do.”

Tisch has never walked a beat as a police officer, but she isn’t an outsider, either.

Her first job in city government was in the NYPD’s counterterrorism bureau. As planning and policy director, she helped shape the department’s post-9/11 security infrastructure, deploying mobile radiation detectors and helping develop a digital information-sharing tool with instant access to surveillance cameras and license-plate readers.

As deputy commissioner for information technology, she spearheaded the use of body-worn cameras and smartphones, transformed 911 dispatching, introduced an acoustic gunshot-detection system and worked with the city’s transit agency to make police radios work in the subway.

“Once I started, I never wanted to stop,” Tisch told a Harvard alumni publication last year.