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NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch is Turning New York City into a Surveillance Colony

By Matt Wolfson | The Libertarian Institute | October 29, 2025

In a recent report for the Libertarian Institute, I investigated Zionists’ role in creating the crisis point at which New York City now finds itself: caught between a colonial elite which has commandeered government and a progressive-socialist backlash to that elite which proposes to expand government. In this report, I will trace how, in response to the progressive-socialist threat to their power, Zionists and their allies are expanding government in new and frightening directions. The leading player in this operation, like in all good intelligence ops, is not a colorful or charismatic character. But she has all of the subtler qualities—connections, management prowess, presentational understatement—that the city’s minders look for in those who hold actual power.

Jessica Tisch, the New York Police Department Commissioner since 2024 who will definitely stay on if either Zohran Mamdani or Andrew Cuomo wins the mayoralty according to public statements made by both men, is the third generation of the billionaire Zionist family that has had prominent roles in shaping the city since the 1980s. Her grandfather, Laurence Tisch, bought CBS in the 1980s not long before his brother Robert bought the New York Giants, establishing the family, which had started in hotels and movie theaters, as the owner of two of the city’s landmark organizations. In the 1990s, Laurence Tisch was a member of The Study Group, the informal philanthropic Zionist gathering co-founded by Leslie Wexner and Charles Bronfman, which led directly and indirectly to the foundation of Taglit Birthright, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and various other projects for Zionist continuity. Laurence’s son and Jessica’s father, James Tisch, is the chairman of the Board of Leows Corporation, the family’s flagship business. James’ wife and Jessica’s mother, Merryl, was the chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents, responsible for supervising all educational activities in the state; and is the chair of the State University of New York Board of Trustees, responsible for supervising the state university system.

Within this context of a family involved in media, finance, philanthropy, and part-time politics, Jessica Tisch, who is now 44, charted her own specific path: from security to administration to the cusp of politics with the backing of money. She started in the NYPD in the decade of the September 11 attacks; continued in the department in the 2010s; moved in the first half of the 2020s to the Sanitation Department, arguably New York’s most important after police and fire. She has returned in the mid-2020s to the NYPD as its commissioner, while also widely being considered a potential future mayor. Like Mamdani, Tisch is a product, this time a direct one, of the decades of Zionist influence that preceded her rise. Like Mamdani, rewinding Tisch’s career shows how she is the capstone to a project of military policing that began in the 1990s and 2000s but that has sharpened under pressure into a full-blown project of social control.

That project began when crime rose in New York in the 1980s and 1990s in response to displacement and homelessness facilitated by WASPs, Zionists, and their allies co-opting city government to the benefit of finance and real estate. In response, Eric Breindel, the neoconservative Zionist editor of the New York Post who had extensive connections to Wall Street, arranged for the Post to back the then-longshot Rudolph W. Guiliani as a tough-on-crime candidate, delivering him Staten Island and so the city.

At the same time, Michael Steinhardt, the Zionist financier who was integral in the reinvention of Wall Street in the 1980s, became the major donor for the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which in turn was the major backer of President Bill Clinton, who shepherded to passage in Congress as his main legislative priority the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. This act provided newly elected Mayor Giuliani and his police commissioner William Bratton federal funds for law enforcement, with certain conditions attached that increased local spending on policing as well as the size of the NYPD. The NYPD’s budget increased from $1.7 billion to $3.1 billion between 1993 and 2000, also leading to increased city spending, since, under the terms of the Clinton crime legislation, to receive federal funds the city had to spend funds of its own.

During this period, “crime”—defined as everything from murder to unlicensed street vending—fell in response to across-the-board enforcement. After 2001, Raymond Kelly, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s police commissioner, pushed this practice to its limit with the aggressive practice of “stop and frisk” in minority neighborhoods: a daily distillation of the broader disenfranchisement the black and Latino communities of New York had been experiencing since the 1970s.

Kelly also made sure that the NYPD would benefit from post-9/11 funding of counter-terrorism measures, measures which hinged heavily on techniques for surveillance. And it was by channeling this new priority for social control that Jessica Tisch made her career beginning in 2000s. Fresh out of Harvard, she took “an analyst position available in what was then the counterterrorism bureau” of the NYPD. According to a recent profile in The New York Times:

“Kelly…did not normally meet with applicants for such entry-level jobs, but he ended up interviewing her. ‘Probably because she was a Tisch,’ he said, adding that he had been impressed with her three Harvard degrees.”

“Probably because she was a Tisch” seems like a fair assessment of why the supervisor of 55,000 employees took the time to meet a twenty-something about an entry-level position. But Kelly and Tisch also shared the promising ground of a professional focus: Kelly was committed to surveillance-as-policing, and Tisch’s main interest was data and surveillance. At the NYPD, she began “developing the Domain Awareness System, one of the world’s largest networks of security cameras, including handling contracts to build and expand it.” According to a description of this work in a recent profile of Tisch in New York Magazine, she was Domain’s driving force and Domain her career-maker:

“… Tisch, 27, was tasked with figuring out what to do with more than $100 million in unspent grant money from the federal Department of Homeland Security, which had just built a surveillance network to prevent another terror attack downtown. What if, she asked, the Domain Awareness System went citywide? And what if, instead of trying to stop a suicide bomber, the system tried to spot all kinds of crooks? What if it included the NYPD’s trove of arrest reports and criminal histories? When Tisch sent the privacy guidelines for the system to the lawyers at the New York Civil Liberties Union, they retched…The bosses had the opposite reaction: ‘No, you’ve made it. Congratulations,’ the former colleague recalls them saying.”

Based on an initial grant of $350 million from the Department of Homeland Security and developed with Microsoft technology, the System consists today of “a surveillance network of more than 18,000 interconnected cameras—including those in the private sector—as well as law-enforcement databases.” The system, in one description, “assimilates data from several surveillance tools—license plate readers, closed-circuit television streams, facial recognition software and phone call histories—and uses it to identify people.” As these descriptions suggest, private corporations and nonprofits, for example Rockefeller University in Midtown East Manhattan, can buy in: providing their own cameras then linking them to the surveillance system run out of the NYPD. “And,” according to one report, “when Microsoft turns around and sells the technology to other cities, New York gets a cut.”

Tisch was not only one of the developers, if not the developer, of the system; she also so impressed Kelly with her tenacity dealing with the various technology sub-vendors put in play by the project that he moved her up through the ranks. (She also may have impressed Kelly with her access to funds; the nonprofit the New York Police Foundation, which her uncle chaired and where two of her family members still sit on the board, provided some of the early contributions for testing her surveillance system.) Within a decade, “she became the city’s first information technology commissioner… and within months she was in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, struggling to create a contact tracing system and then a vaccine distribution system.” Throughout this time, Tisch was working with at least one like-minded colleague from a similar background. This was fellow Harvard graduate Rebecca Ulam Weiner, the granddaughter of the Zionist nuclear scientist Stanislav Ulam of the Manhattan Project, whose view of her grandfather’s work is instructive:

“As someone whose job it is to keep secrets, I often wonder whether such an experiment [as the Manhattan Project] would be possible today, scientifically or socially.”

Fast forward to November 2024, and an embattled Mayor Eric Adams, whose allies in the black community have increasingly moved away from him even as powerful Zionists have edged closer, appointed Tisch Commissioner. He did this despite vocal concerns from civil liberties advocates that, in the words of one, “It’s really alarming to see a commissioner who built her career on the infrastructure of mass surveillance.” Weiner is Tisch’s deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism, and has let it be known that her department “relies on a mind-boggling suite of assets that Americans might otherwise assume are controlled by the CIA, FBI, DHS, Secret Service, or other agencies.” These include:

“… a legion of intelligence analysts, counterassault and dignitary-protection teams, a flotilla of boats…surveillance aircraft, the nation’s biggest bomb squad, a counter-drone unit, a remote contingent of NYPD detectives… and a network of multilingual undercover operatives…”

Among this “remote contingent” is NYPD Detective Charlie Benaim, “[whose] office could be any squad room in Brooklyn, but for years [has been] an Israeli police station near Tel Aviv,” where “Benaim’s been feeding an endless stream of information, in real time, to his bosses back at One Police Plaza.” According to Weiner, Benaim’s function is “asking the New York question, when something is happening, what would it look like it if it were to happen in New York City, and more importantly than that, how do you prevent it?” A new model for Benaim in answering these questions, apparently, is the Hamas uprising of October 7. This suggests either that the NYPD expects a coordinated attack from foreign operators; or that New York’s security leaders see the city as potentially under siege by its own displaced and ghettoized underclass and plan to respond accordingly.

Telling in this regard is the fact that Tisch’s top priority as commissioner is “doubling down on data-driven policing and surveillance,” an aim which has “sparked fierce criticism from watchdog groups that New Yorkers are living in a surveillance state.” According to New York Magazine, Tisch’s proposed reforms fall along four lines. First, she wants to expand actual surveillance capacities by expanding the city’s camera network “to include more privately owned cameras.” Second, she wants to extend the contract of one of Domain’s less reliable components, “the ShotSpotter gunshot-detection system” which “may result in confirmed shootings only less than 15 percent of the time, according to the comptroller’s office,” a fact which Tisch dismisses, “arguing that something is better than nothing.” Third, she wants to use data collected “to surge police resources down to a single block,” allowing for the department to deploy overwhelming force to tackle individual incidents in small areas. (This means essentially treating city policing as counterinsurgency warfare, and it’s not too different than the LAPD tactics that led to the abuse of Rodney King and the fallout that followed.) Finally, “perhaps the biggest change is that she wants to use those same systems and processes to fight ‘chaos,’ not just crime,” meaning that minor noise disturbances or unusual behavior could qualify for police enforcement via surveillance and surges. (Again, this is a retread of the 1990s: “Giuliani-style crackdowns, only with better gear.”)

More instructively still, she feels this way despite at least one recent controversy suggesting that her policies have adverse effects on the very communities historically at the blunt end of militarized policing. According to The New York Times, in an August report, the NYPD used Domain Awareness System’s facial recognition software to identify and arrest for indecent exposure in April a 230 pound 6-foot-2 black man, Trevis Williams. The arrest was made even though a witness said that the offender was about 160 pounds and 5-foot-6 and even though “location data from [Williams’s] phone put him about 12 miles away at the time.” According to the Times, the fact that “a facial recognition program plucked his image from an array of mug shots and the woman identified him as the flasher was enough to land Williams in jail.” This is despite the fact that “other police departments… require investigators to gather more facts before putting a suspect identified by facial recognition into a photo lineup,” and despite advocacy from groups like the American Civil Liberties Union to “ban… the use of facial recognition by the police because of the risk of misidentification.”

“In the blink of an eye, your whole life could change,” Williams told the Times about his experience, adding that he still gets panic attacks since his April arrest and subsequent imprisonment. The Times investigation did not report asking for a comment from the NYPD or its Commissioner. Nor did it report that, as early as 2019, 11,000 cases per year were being investigated by the NYPD with the help of facial recognition software.

Despite collateral damage from her policies, positive media profiles of “Commish Tisch” and her subordinates have been plentiful since her accession. In an April 2025 report in The News section of The New York Times, the paper had the following to say about her: She has “an unlikely and remarkable career”; is “the daughter and granddaughter of two strong women, neither of whom came from money”; “learned hard work by example”; is “talkative and purposeful, but circumspect”; is a “no-nonsense technocrat” and “incredibly competent”; commands “a huge amount of respect”; is “very businesslike,” “[takes] no guff,” and should run for mayor. New York Magazine, the city’s go-to venue for fashion and culture commentary, had run an equally complimentary profile in March of 2025 that included the same political prediction.

And, the month before New York Magazine’s profile of Tisch, Vanity Fair ran a profile of Tisch’s deputy Weiner titled “NYPD Confidential.” Headed by a black-and-white photo of Weiner flanked by members of her squad that seemed ripped from a promotional poster of Captain America, the article’s text gave its subject an equally marquee treatment, describing her as “laser focused,” “unfazed,” “poised, cultivated, pin-sharp, convivial, boundlessly curious, charmingly profane,” and “a lightning-quick study” who had “a wicked sense of humor.” All three of these profiles also emphasized, as The New York Times’ editorial board regularly emphasizes, a recent rise in crime in the city without honing in on its obvious causes: financialization, gentrification, and displacement.

The Times is owned by the Sulzberger Family, whose members are ambivalent about Zionism but who have deep connections to Zionists. (Their executive editor, Joseph Kahn, is the son of a committed Zionist corporatist and runs in the billionaire Zionist milieu; their editorial page is dominated by Jewish Zionists of all political persuasions; and the former head of the Sulzberger family wealth office now heads Bill Ackman’s.) Vanity Fair is still owned by the Newhouse Family, which, as I reported in my recent investigation on the rise of Zionist power in New York, was vital to that project thanks to its ownership of Conde Nast. New York Magazine is dependent for its scoops on access to the city’s financial and philanthropic elite, many of them Zionists—its recent profile subjects include not just Jessica Tisch but Barry Diller and Diane Von Furstenberg and Bill Ackman. The message from these media venues seems clear: the Zionist financial powers of New York are squarely behind Jessica Tisch, and want their readers to know it.

It is not, in this context, a coincidence that the Times ran an article soon after Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic mayoral primary citing anonymous sources to report that Mamdani was being urged to keep Tisch on if he wins the mayoralty as a “steady pair of hands.” It is also not a coincidence that this story came during a period when Dan Loeb and Bill Ackman, younger Zionist financial-philanthropic operators, were attacking Mamdani as soft-on-crime almost daily and shifting their funding focus to Mamdani’s Independent mayoral competitor, Mayor Eric Adams, to the point of personally vetting Adams’s campaign manager before the position was filled. What this suggested at the time was a pincer movement, in which attacks by Loeb and Ackman pressured Mamdani into keeping Tisch on as a sign of faith in the establishment and détente with Zionism.

And, in late October, with Mamdani still attacked by connected Zionist players for purportedly making Jews feel unsafe despite the fact that he has attracted significant Jewish support, this is exactly what occurred. On October 22, Mamdani announced, four days after Andrew Cuomo had announced the same, that he would ask Tisch to stay on should he win the election. The reported terms on which this “ask” was made are not encouraging when it comes to Mamdani’s leverage over Tisch if he is elected mayor. Details in The New York Times painted a scenario in which Mamdani had publicly (and factually erroneously) made Tisch the poster child for safety in the city without extracting any concessions from her camp in return. According to the Times,

“… Mr. Mamdani confirmed his decision during the final televised debate before the Nov. 4 election. ‘Commissioner Tisch took on a broken status quo, started to deliver accountability, rooting out corruption and reducing crime across the five boroughs,’ Mr. Mamdani said at the debate. “I’ve said time and again that my litmus test for that position will be excellence’… Ms. Tisch’s allies have signaled for months that she would want to stay in the job regardless of the election’s outcome. [Mamdani] campaign officials declined to detail any conversations between the candidate and the commissioner, but said they were confident she would accept. Delaney Kempner, a spokeswoman for Ms. Tisch, referred a reporter back to an earlier statement from the commissioner stressing that ‘it is not appropriate for the police commissioner to be directly involved or to seem to be involved in electoral politics.’”

Tisch’s strategic mix of aggressive behind-the-scenes lobbying and Olympian public detachment sends a message: as New York Magazine put it less than twenty-four hours after Mamdani made the announcement, she is “the Heiress Who Could Make or Break the Socialist Mayor.” Not long after this article ran, Hakeem Jeffries, the New York Democratic leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, ended five months of ostentatious non-endorsement of Mamdani with a statement endorsing Mamdani—specifically praising his willingness to keep on Tisch. Already, then, thanks to a series of private maneuvers and public feints, Tisch has been placed in the driver’s seat: the establishment’s cooperation with Mamdani is clearly conditioned on Mamdani’s continued acceptance of her.

One difficulty of critiquing moves like these is that the conflation of “Jewish power” and New York is an old trope, in part because New York has been since the early twentieth century a Jewish city. So it should be emphasized, as I have emphasized in my previous report on this topic, that New York’s problem is not a problem of Jewish power. It is a problem of government-tied financialization at the hands of a small number of WASPs and then a small number of Zionists, and it has come at the expense of the people who live in the city, among them many Jews. Now, with a direct threat to Zionists’ influence in the person of Zohran Mamdani, the operation is out front. Zionist financiers have sent one of their own to occupy the most powerful security position in the city, and they are intent on keeping her there. If they fail to install their ally Andrew Cuomo in the mayoralty, which will give Tisch carte blanche, the prospect of them working to sabotage a Mamdani mayoralty in the lead-up to a Tisch For Mayor campaign in 2029 is a very real one.

They will likely do this much like they managed the securance of Jessica Tisch’s job: with media attacks meant to maximize pressure on Mamdani; followed by private assurances to Mamdani that the attacks will stop if concessions follow. These public-private feints, in turn, will push Mamdani into concessions which will make him lose face with his base, isolating him between an unfriendly establishment and a disillusioned electorate. (This trend is already occurring, albeit at the edges, after Mamdani’s public commitment to keeping Tisch, whom many Mamdani voters see as a threat to civil liberties.) Tisch’s allies will manage these plays with the help of The New York Times and other organs of influence (the Conde Nast publications, New York Magazine, the New York Post) which by their own admission are pining for technocratic government predicated on what they call “effective management.”

But there is another equally bad outcome that could accrue should Mamdani win the mayoralty and Tisch stay on as police commissioner. This is the fusion of the most dangerous potential aspect of socialism, total government direction of the economy, with the most dangerous potential aspect of Zionism: total techno-military colonial control. It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to see how, under a de facto power-sharing agreement between Mamdani and Tisch (Mamdani in charge of domestic welfare, Tisch in charge of security) the worst impulses of both systems will merge to create a city government which is totalistically involved in every aspect of its citizens’ lives, Singapore transfused with Sweden. This outcome for a city which for a century has been read as a triumph of American individualism would be, to understate the case, a seismic shift.

October 30, 2025 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Human rights, New York Times, NYPD, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment