It is a peculiar New York talent to be roasted, honored and quietly auditioned for one’s own job in the same evening, in white tie, under the chandeliers of the Waldorf Astoria. On Thursday night, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch managed all three.
“Things got a little hot for me this week … anyone hiring?” Ms. Tisch asked the well-heeled crowd at the 81st Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, according to Politico’s New York Playbook, which reported that the line drew laughs. Seated on the dais a few chairs away, per Politico, was her boss, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who for a week has been fending off demands from his own coalition that he fire her.
It was, in other words, the most interesting job interview in town, conducted in public, before an audience of clergy, chief executives and the governor, and the candidate already has the job.
The Happy Warrior, under fire
The Al Smith Dinner is the city’s great ecumenical act of hypocrisy, and we mean that fondly. Every third Thursday of October, the Archdiocese of New York gathers the people who run the place, raises money for women and children in need and lets them make fun of one another for a few hours before returning to the business of making each other miserable. This year’s host, for the first time, was Archbishop Ronald A. Hicks; Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, now archbishop emeritus, gave the keynote. Ms. Tisch was there to receive the 2026 Happy Warrior Award, an honor whose previous recipients, the archdiocese notes, include Ken Langone, Rob Speyer and Robert Kraft. It is not, historically, a prize for the embattled.
Cardinal Dolan, never one to waste a room, opened with self-deprecation. “I used to be in ‘Who’s Who,’ now I’m ‘Who’s He?’” he said, as quoted by OSV News. “‘Emeritus’ is a Latin word meaning ‘has been.’” He then invoked Smith himself, the Lower East Side boy who became governor: “Al Smith bridged the conflicts of the time – and folks, do we ever need him now.”
Folks, they did. The dais, per OSV News, included Mr. Mamdani and Gov. Kathy Hochul, and the conflict in need of bridging was sitting at the same table.
How we got here
The trouble began a week earlier, uptown. On Thursday, Oct. 8, at least one federal immigration officer fired seven rounds during an enforcement operation in Marble Hill, striking 28-year-old Oscar Belgal in the neck, according to Ms. Tisch’s own late-night briefing as reported by Gothamist. Mr. Belgal, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, was in his car with his 5-year-old son, CBS New York reported. He was treated at NewYork-Presbyterian Allen Hospital and later taken to the Metropolitan Detention Center, Gothamist reported. The Department of Homeland Security has claimed he has ties to the Trinitarios gang, the Bronx Times reported. That claim has not been tested in court.
The NYPD did not fire a shot. But the protests that followed, and the department’s handling of them, turned the episode into a referendum on the commissioner. The New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which Mr. Mamdani has called his political home, issued a statement saying he should fire Ms. Tisch if she did not end what it called the NYPD’s “complicity with ICE,” Politico reported. Council Member Julie Won of Queens went further, saying the mayor “must fire Commissioner Jessica Tisch and disband the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group and Community Response Team to protect our neighbors,” as quoted in Politico’s Friday Playbook.
The mayor has not budged. “Jessica Tisch is the police commissioner. I have no plans to change that,” he said on Tuesday, according to NY1. He credited her, the station reported, with a “record of uprooting corruption from the upper echelons of the NYPD while lowering crime across our city,” and announced a review of the 24 hours surrounding the shooting: the incident, the police response, the protests and ICE’s use of a private parking lot as a staging area.
Jokes as a negotiating position
Which brings us back to the ballroom. Ms. Tisch, a Loews heiress and a political moderate who stayed on from the Adams administration, did not merely make one joke at her own expense. “There’s a lot of talk these days that the mayor’s friends don’t like me,” she said, per Politico. “That is simply not true. President Trump and I get along great.”
Then she reached back to last year, recalling, by her telling, the moment she asked Mr. Mamdani why he had decided to keep her. “Jessie, I ran on taxing the rich, you’re going to need a job,” she said he replied.
It was a good line, and a better piece of politics. In three sentences the commissioner reminded the room that she serves at the pleasure of a socialist; that she is rich enough not to need the work; that she and the mayor have a private rapport his left flank cannot see; and that if she goes, she goes laughing. Politico reported that Mr. Mamdani did not speak at the dinner and that his spokesperson did not comment on the jokes. Silence, at the Waldorf, is also a position.
Not everyone was amused. “Why does this billionaire nepo baby think it’s appropriate to joke about the fact that her NYPD was caught collaborating with ICE?” DREAM for NYC, a pro-Mamdani political organization, wrote on X, Politico reported.
Meanwhile, in the parking lot
The more consequential front may be the least glamorous: the two-story parking lot at the Shops at Marble Hill, home to a Target, overlooking the Harlem River. Residents and local officials had warned for months that ICE was using it as a staging ground, Gothamist reported. Three days before the shooting, Council Member Pierina Sanchez and seven other officials wrote to the center’s owner, Kingsbridge Associates, an affiliate of Washington Square Partners, urging a ban. Target has said it has “no agreement in place with ICE or any other immigration enforcement agencies,” according to spokesperson Lauren Frank, quoted by Gothamist, and that the shooting was not on or adjacent to its property. Kingsbridge told Ms. Sanchez’s office it was unaware of ICE activity there and had no working relationship with the agency, according to the Bronx Times.
On Thursday, Mr. Mamdani sent a letter to more than 1,000 parking lot and garage owners asking them to keep ICE out, City Hall announced. More than 100 Democrats signed it, including Senator Chuck Schumer, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Council Speaker Julie Menin, Comptroller Mark Levine and Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, according to Politico. “Make it known to ICE that it is not authorized to use your garages and lots,” the letter reads.
The same day, a federal judge dismissed the Trump administration’s lawsuit against the city’s sanctuary laws. “There is nothing within federal law that obligates states to participate in federal immigration enforcement or compels states to comply,” U.S. District Judge Ramón E. Reyes Jr. wrote, as quoted by The Guardian. Mr. Mamdani called the ruling “a victory for New Yorkers and a rebuke to ICE’s deportation agenda” in a statement.
What the room understood
So the mayor had, by dinnertime, a court victory, a letter with Chuck Schumer’s name on it and a police commissioner his base wants gone. He sat between all of it and said nothing. His allies on the left will read that as weakness; the room at the Waldorf, one suspects, read it as the opposite. A mayor who keeps a Tisch in the face of the DSA is a mayor who has decided that crime numbers, as Politico put it, make her hard to push out, and who would rather absorb the heat himself.
The question for the weeks ahead, with the governor’s race closing on Nov. 3 and Mr. Mamdani now cutting videos for Ms. Hochul, is how long a joke can carry a commissioner. Al Smith, the son of the Fourth Ward, knew the answer: as long as the person laughing loudest is the one who signs the appointment.
The City Politic has reached out to the Mayor’s Office, the NYPD, NYC-DSA, Council Member Julie Won, DREAM for NYC, Target, Kingsbridge Associates and the Archdiocese of New York for comment and will update this story with any response.
Photo: The Waldorf Astoria on Park Avenue. Epicgenius / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
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