NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch has a reputation as a supremely competent manager. It's why she was hired by Mayor Eric Adams, who needed to burnish his credibility amid multiple scandals and federal corruption charges. And it's a big reason why Mayor Zohran Mamdani has kept her in charge of the police department. Tisch is supposed to be restoring professionalism and accountability to the force after years of excess, using, in her words, "precision policing—a data-driven, scalpel approach that focuses efforts where they matter most."
But despite her image as a diligent reformer, Tisch has continued to allow Adams-era jump-out squads—officially known as Community Response Teams—to routinely violate the constitutional rights of Black and brown New Yorkers. And she has continued to assign and promote cops who have long and disturbing histories of alleged and substantiated misconduct that have resulted in millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded settlements.
Take Officer Brian Ramirez, who was assigned to the Manhattan North CRT in February of 2025, shortly after Tisch became commissioner. This was just a few months after Tisch's predecessor, Thomas Donlon, signed disciplinary papers concluding that Ramirez had stopped and frisked someone without a legal basis, pulled a gun on them without justification, and then lied about the episode to investigators. In addition to nine substantiated CCRB allegations, Ramirez had been named as a defendant in 14 lawsuits over his policework at the time of the appointment—lawsuits that ended up costing the City a total of $1,342,501 in settlement costs. One of them alleged that Ramirez was part of a group of officers who violently arrested a man in Harlem in 2012, breaking the bones in his face, merely because the man had happened to observe the officers assaulting two other civilians.
Ramirez's assignment—along with seven other CRT officers with some combination of police misconduct lawsuits and CCRB complaints that Hell Gate identified through public records—happened when Eric Adams was mayor, and could conceivably be explained away as inertia from Tisch's predecessors or the influence of Adams and his loyalists in the department. But a slew of other CRT assignments since Mayor Mamdani took office show that Tisch has continued to put questionable cops onto CRTs.
When Sergeant Paul Kelly was assigned to the Bronx South CRT last month, he'd been named in seven different lawsuits, including one that the City paid $250,000 to settle in which Kelly was alleged to have stopped and searched a vehicle on the pretense that its license plate light was out, though that wasn't the case. The City paid another $60,000 to settle a different suit alleging unlawful search and malicious arrest, and paid another $17,500 to settle a third suit alleging that Kelly was among a group of officers who pointed their guns at a Bronx man, arrested him without cause, and interrogated him without reading him his rights. As a sergeant, Kelly is tasked with supervising other officers in the CRT.
Community Response Teams began as a single secretive unit under Mayor Adams in 2022. By May of 2024, they had expanded from the original citywide unit to include each of the department's eight Patrol Boroughs, with 165 cops assigned to CRT teams across the city, according to a 2024 report by the Department of Investigation that faulted the unit's lack of guidance and accountability.
Jessica Tisch became Adams's fourth and final police commissioner just as the DOI report was released. Last year, an NYPD spokesperson told ProPublica Tisch was making changes to the units, transferring officers out and ordering the units to curtail the reckless vehicle chases for which they'd become known. The spokesperson said that Tisch "will continue to review the department, including CRT, and make any changes necessary to ensure accountability and strengthen our ability to fight crime."
But a Hell Gate analysis of public CCRB records, legal settlements, and officer histories shows that the commissioner has assigned at least 17 officers with troubling histories to CRTs, promoted at least 13 officers with significant histories within the units, and retained at least 10 officers with significant misconduct histories in leadership positions within the CRTs.