Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, confirmed that he would ask Jessica Tisch to stay on as the city’s police commissioner if elected, ending longstanding speculation over his plans for a key role in his potential administration.

Tisch, appointed last year by outgoing Mayor Eric Adams, “took on a broken status quo, started to deliver accountability, rooting out corruption and reducing crime across the five boroughs,” Mamdani said at the second and final general election debate on Wednesday evening.

“I have said time and again that my litmus test for that position will be excellence, and the alignment will be of that position,” Mamdani added. “And I am confident that under a Mamdani administration, we would continue to deliver on that same mission.”

Mamdani’s choice could assuage concerns among moderate Democrats and other crime-conscious New Yorkers who had been hopeful that he would choose Tisch, a widely respected technocrat who previously led the Department of Sanitation.

Tisch, 44, who is Jewish, has not said whether she would plan to continue in her position if Mamdani is elected on Nov. 4. 

Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist and Queens state assemblyman, has faced scrutiny over his past comments on law enforcement — including support for defunding the police. He has moderated during his mayoral campaign and says he no longer backs such efforts, even as he has pledged to pursue some goals that could potentially fuel tension, such as launching a Department of Community Safety “to ensure that mental health experts” instead of police “are responding to the mental health crisis,” he said at the debate. 

Mandani’s opponents, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa, also said they would not seek to replace Tisch, though Sliwa, the Republican nominee, said he did not think she would choose to remain in her role if Cuomo or Mamdani is elected. Cuomo, running as an independent, said he did not believe Mamdani would follow through on his promise.

“His position has been to defund, disband the police, she wouldn’t take that,” Cuomo claimed, saying “their philosophies are totally incongruous.”

Elsewhere in the debate Wednesday, Cuomo and Sliwa ramped up their attacks on Mamdani over his strident opposition to Israel and refusal to condemn calls to “globalize the intifada,” continued sources of concern among Jewish voters.

Cuomo, who has recently escalated his criticism of Mamdani to a more personal level, accused him of stoking “the flames of hatred against Jewish people” during a particularly heated moment at the debate — while Sliwa cast the Democratic frontrunner as an “arsonist who fans the flames of antisemitism.”

Mamdani, playing defense on an issue that represents one of his top vulnerabilities, said that there “is room for disagreement on many positions and many policies,” and pushed back against Sliwa’s claim that he supports “global jihad.”

“I’ve heard from New Yorkers about their fears about antisemitism in this city, and what they deserve is a leader who takes it seriously, who roots it out of these five boroughs, not weaponizes it as a means by which to score political points on a debate stage,” Mamdani said.