NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch showed off her sense of humor at Thursday night’s Al Smith Dinner — leaving New York’s great and good in stitches with a series of well-timed cracks about far-left demands that Mayor Zohran Mamdani remove her as NYC’s top cop.
“There’s a lot of talk these days that the mayor’s friends don’t like me,” Tisch set up an audience that included Hizzoner before zinging: “That’s simply not true – President Trump and I get along great!“
The commissioner briefly turned serious by acknowledging that “things got a little hot for me this week” before asking the high-rolling audience: “Just in case, anybody hiring?”
Elsewhere in her remarks, the third-generation member of the Loews Corporation dynasty claimed that Mamdani had told her last year he was keeping her on as boss of the boys and girls in blue because “Jessie, I ran on taxing the rich, you’re going to need a job.”
Tisch, 45, was honored with the Happy Warrior Award at the annual dinner hosted by the Archdiocese of New York, renowned as a chance for politicians to take off their partisan armor and rib each other in the name of supporting the city’s needy.
“This dinner is an opportunity to set aside our religious and political differences,” she said. “Which is wonderful, because I’m a Jewish police commissioner working for a Muslim mayor, and tonight I’m being honored by the Catholic Church. God Bless America.”
“It’s been delightful sitting next to you today at this dinner,” Archbishop Ronald Hicks, presiding over his first Al Smith Dinner, told Tisch in presenting the award. “You are our Happy Warrior. And I just want to thank you, and also to thank your true service of continuing your family’s legacy of public service. Thank you.”
Hicks’ precedessor, Timothy Cardinal Dolan, thanked the commissioner — whom he referred to as “Wonder Woman” — for giving him the opportunity to serve as NYPD co-chief chaplain and said she was doing “a splendid job.”
Lynda Carter, the actress who originated the “Wonder Woman” role on the classic 1970s TV show, was also among the audience — but not even the DC Comics heroine’s famous Lasso of Truth could get a word out of Mamdani, who did not address the gathering and whose office had no immediate comment on Tisch’s jokes.
Tisch and the NYPD came under fire following the department’s response to anti-ICE protests that broke out over the Oct. 8 shooting by federal agents of illegal migrant and suspected gang member Oscar Belgal in the Marble Hill section of The Bronx.
Allies of Mamdani, like soon-to-be congresswoman Darializa Avila Chevalier, have called for Tisch to step down or be removed as well as for the NYPD’s elite Strategic Response Group to be disbanded — wrongly accusing cops of violating NYC’s sanctuary city laws that bar officers from assisting ICE.
