(Bloomberg) — New York City Mayor-elect Eric Adams named Keechant Sewell police commissioner, marking the first time a woman will lead the NYPD, the U.S.’s largest police department.
Sewell, 49, is the Nassau County Chief of Detectives. The Queens native will replace Dermot Shea, a career NYPD cop who was appointed to the job by Mayor Bill de Blasio in December 2019, according to the Adams transition team.
“I’ve been policing for 25 years, so, I’ve actually got some sort of a grasp on what I think works and doesn’t work,” she said in an interview published Tuesday by the New York Post, which first reported the selection.
Adams has been slow to name key members of his administration, which will take over City Hall on Jan. 1. Just over two weeks away from his inauguration, Adams has announced only one other major appointment: The selection of David Banks, a long time educator, as the city’s next schools commissioner.
The choice of police commissioner is considered one of Adams most important picks. A former police captain who served in the NYPD for 22 years, Adams helped turn the race for New York City mayor into a referendum on public safety a year after nationwide Black Lives Matter protests spurred calls to defund the police.
Safety dominated the race for New York City mayor as high-profile shootings in Time Square, hate crimes and subway attacks during the pandemic created a sense of unease in the city. Overall crime remains lower than in previous decades, but Adams zeroed in on the issue early in his campaign, telling voters that public safety was a prerequisite to economic recovery. He also came out against the defund the police movement, promising to reform the police from within.
Early on, Adams vowed to hire a woman of color for the job.
“We’re going to finally bring the entire city, the largest police department in the country, into the 21st century of women leadership in law enforcement,” Adams said on Bloomberg Television earlier this year.
His selection recalls a move made by former mayor David Dinkins, the city’s first Black mayor. Dinkins selected a Black man from outside of the force to lead the department in 1989, a time when crime was rising, the crack epidemic spiked, and the NYPD was more than 75% White.
Challenges Ahead
Adams was beaten by police as a teenager and went on to become a police officer and founder of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, a group created to improve relationships between cops and the communities they police. Adams has called for the revival of a plainclothes anti-gun unit that was shuttered over complaints of misconduct and more officers on the streets and in transit stations.
He and his police chief will also be charged with repairing the public image of a department that was accused of using excessive force in response to the protests against police brutality after George Floyd’s murder and whose officers book so much overtime it stretches the city budget well beyond its allocation. Adams has vowed to cut overtime pay in half.
The new administration will also have to address concerns by police officers who say that the department has veered off course.
Patrick Lynch, president of the Police Benevolent Association, which represents the department’s rank-and-file officers, said cops welcomed Adams’s selection of Sewell.
“New York City police officers have passed our breaking point,” Lynch said in a statement. “We need to fix that break in order to get our police department and our city back on course. We look forward to working with her to accomplish that goal.”
(Updates throughout)
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2021 Bloomberg L.P.
