The last mayor to go through three police commissioners in a single term quit in the middle of that term, before the governor could fire him or prosecutors could charge him for all the “beneficences” he’d pocketed. Gentleman Jimmy Walker, Gotham’s charming and corrupt Night Mayor, then sailed to Europe with his showgirl mistress and vowed never again to run for office. Ninety-two years later, Eric Adams is the first sitting New York City mayor to face criminal charges. He’s denied any wrongdoing ahead of his trial in April for alleged bribery and corruption, with his attorney arguing that this was all politics as usual and that first class flights on Turkish Airlines were merely “gratuities” the Supreme Court now lets public officials collect. Voters elected Adams on his promise to make New Yorkers feel safe again. If he’d done that half as well as he’s churned through police commissioners, he wouldn’t have been historically unpopular even before federal law enforcement came for him. Adams vowed as a candidate to appoint a Black woman as police commissioner, only for Keechant Sewell to resign after not even 18 months as it became clear that Adams’ old cop pals — all guys, of course — in the department and elsewhere in the government were really running the show. Her milk-box replacement, Eddie Caban, was there for just 15 months before he resigned, under pressure from Adams, after the FBI raided him and his brother along with others in the mayor’s inner circle. (The feds had already seized Adams’ phones, but are reportedly still locked out of them after he conveniently forgot his new password.) Tom Donlon, the interim commissioner who Adams said would reaffirm the public’s confidence in the police and who vowed to have the department speaking with one voice again, lasted just two months. He was raided by the FBI himself in a separate investigation, and had a public shouting match over a photo op with the Adams crony installed as the commissioner’s chief of staff, evidently against his wishes. He’ll be replaced on Monday by Jessie Tisch, as Adams matches Walker’s dubious record even without counting Donlon. Tisch, who’s been Adams’ sanitation commissioner, has never been a police officer but previously worked in the NYPD for more than a decade. She eventually became the deputy commissioner for information technology, contributing to the department’s spookily impressive Domain Awareness System and less impressively giving every officer a Windows phone — just before Microsoft got out of the phone business. While she’s never walked a beat or made an arrest, Tisch has been fulsomely praised including by former Commissioners Ray Kelly, who first hired her, and Bill Bratton, who put her in charge of tech. She comes from a family of such wealth that the arts school at NYU bears her last name. Her relatives have given generously to Adams’ campaigns and to the Police Foundation that gives the department and its bosses a private account to draw funds from with limited public scrutiny. Tisch is plainly ambitious in her own right, and no pushover. Like every New Yorker who expects the police to help maintain public safety, I’m pulling for her. Some unsolicited advice for the NYPD’s 47th commissioner: The job comes down to restoring public confidence in policing that polling makes clear this administration has squandered citywide. That should start with the commissioner and her brass answering questions from knowledgeable reporters about the crime numbers, month after month, whether those are up or down. And the mayor letting her run the department from inside its ranks and chain of command, leading a team she picks and trusts. No more deputy commissioners and chiefs personally doing whack-a-mole quality of life sweeps because there aren’t enough cops left in precincts to do routine work. No more amp-to-11 enforcement mostly hidden from public records, like with police car chases and the crashes, injuries and casualties that inevitably follow. When the NYPD is trumpeting that arrests are at a 25 year high while mumbling past the fact that felony assaults are, too, something is seriously off. Getting back to basics means knocking off the weird palace intrigues and unhinged public messaging on official NYPD channels from deputies behaving more like little princes competing with each other for camera time and sometimes crumbs while feuding with the press and cutting the commissioner out of the loop to deal directly with the mayor. After three years of getting in his own way, the mayor who appointed Tisch should give her the space to get stuff done. Siegel ([email protected]) is an editor at The City, a host of the FAQ NYC podcast and a columnist for the Daily News.