New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio appointed Jessica Tisch as CIO and Commissioner of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) on Dec. 5.
Tisch most recently served as deputy commissioner of IT for the New York City Police Department (NYPD). de Blasio’s office said in her previous role she “led the department into the 21st century by harnessing the power of technology to best serve police officers and the people of New York City.” She is responsible for deploying the NYPD’s body camera, smartphone, and table programs.
Tisch received rave reviews from NYPD leadership. “Precision policing is the cornerstone of the NYPD’s success in driving down crime to record low levels while also reducing street-stops, criminal summonses and arrests – and technology is indispensable to that success,” said NYPD Police Commissioner Dermot Shea. “Jessica Tisch’s achievements have made New York City safer and helped cops do their jobs better, smarter and more effectively. These are groundbreaking accomplishments that cannot be underestimated. Her legacy at the NYPD will be difficult to replicate, and our loss is the rest of the City’s gain.”
In her new role, Tisch will be tasked with leading the city’s IT services and will be responsible for the city’s IT modernization efforts. “Her deep knowledge of complex technological systems and accomplishments throughout her decade of public service with the City of New York make her well-equipped to lead DoITT into the future,” de Blasio’s office said.
“Over the past six years, the Mayor has given me the rare opportunity to use technology to modernize the greatest police department in the world,” Tisch said. “That modernization did not happen in a vacuum. It was part of a much larger vision that Mayor de Blasio had for how technology can be used to solve problems and serve New Yorkers.”
Tisch replaces Eusebio Formoso, who served as interim commissioner after Samir Saini stepped down from the role in June of this year following an 11-day outage of the city’s wireless network. de Blasio said that Formoso will stay with the city government as the CIO at the Department of Finance.”
In a statement, de Blasio’s office touted Tisch’s accomplishments at the NYPD. In her tenure, Tisch:
- “Managed the development and implementation of the flagship Domain Awareness System, which is at the heart of the NYPD’s crime fighting and counterterrorism operations.
- Equipped every officer with a smartphone that not only gives them access to real-time information in the field, but also improves their accessibility to the public.
- [Led an] interagency effort with the [Metropolitan Transportation Authority] to make NYPD’s radios work in the subways.
- Drove a number of efforts to improve the transparency of the NYPD, including equipping patrol officers with body-worn cameras and making crime statistics, Vision Zero statistics and collision reports available to the public online.”
