EARLY EVERY MORNING, Jessica Tisch starts getting a series of emails she says she “lives or dies” by. They detail for the police commissioner how many murders and rapes, robberies and felony assaults, were recorded over the past day—how many shooters, how many guns, how many victims, and where it all took place. The slashing on the F train, the Wingstop robbed on Edson Avenue, the elderly man from Williamsburg gone missing, the body found floating near Pier 1 in Brooklyn Heights. In the reports are the running tallies of protests around the city, the street encampments cleared, the unlicensed scooters seized, the cops who were recently disciplined. These are the figures and facts by which she and the more than 50,000 employees of the world’s largest police department will be judged. And if that were all the role entailed, it would be the sort of big-as-the-city challenge she has always chased.

But doing it all under Eric Adams as his administration cracks beneath scandal has made her whole job particularly complicated. One morning a few weeks ago, his lawyers filed a motion to have his federal bribery indictment tossed; those same lawyers had promised the Justice Department that Adams would use his “political muscle” to make Tisch’s department comply with the Trump administration’s immigration agenda once the case is dismissed. Minutes later, she went to midtown to announce new recruiting initiatives to replace the thousands of cops who left under the previous three police chiefs, two of whom are under federal investigation. It’s diabolically difficult to balance her duties to the NYPD with a need to keep close to the mayor. He shares her views on public safety but also considers the NYPD his “baby” and himself its “overbearing dad.”