NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell marks first busy year at the helm of country's largest police department

New York City's first female police commissioner closed out her first year at the helm of the country's largest police department the same way she began her tenure: under the glare of the media outlets' bright lights when emergencies suddenly strike.

The city was less than two hours from ringing in 2023 when a man armed with a machete wounded three New York City police officers in what authorities later said was an attack designed by the suspect — who traveled from Maine to Manhattan — to kill uniformed officers.

“Unprovoked," Keechant Sewell said of the attack that occurred at 10:11 p.m. at the corner of West 52nd Street and Eighth Avenue — outside the security zone for the Times Square ball-drop gathering.

The New Year's Eve attack capped a year in which Sewell confronted situations that forced her to learn the ropes quickly. In terms of policing and politics, the 50-year-old Valley Stream resident found that the demands of her new job vastly surpassed what she had to face in her prior post as chief of detectives at the Nassau County Police Department. There, she oversaw more than 300 detectives, as opposed to the 34,000 cops that comprise the NYPD.

Sewell will continue to face the same challenges she dealt with in 2022: violent crime that has been on the rise after the pandemic began to abate, officers leaving the department in large numbers, and struggles the city's administration blames on bail reform.

Tumultuous first months

Her on-the-job training began on Jan. 9, 2022, when a high-rise fire in the Bronx took 19 lives. Just a week later, NYPD officers Jason Rivera and Wilbert Mora were shot and killed by an assailant in East Harlem.

Then, as the weeks and months passed, an increase in homicides and shootings the city had not seen in years, which the new administration of New York City Mayor Eric Adams made a priority, continued unabated. By the end of the year, the city had made progress cutting down some of the crime and the mayor praised his commissioner, particularly for drops in homicides and shootings, which dipped 13% and 17%, respectively, from 2021.

During 2022, Sewell had commanders increase patrols in the subways and certain high-crime precincts, through adding more cops into the subways and increasing overtime. The strategy was also used to seize guns through special neighborhood units. 

"I cannot thank Commissioner Sewell enough for taking on this awesome responsibility," Adams told Newsday in a statement. "Commissioner Sewell came in, she put together a real plan of operation and she built a team around it."

Given the pressures facing the NYPD, with shortages of personnel and the demands of crime fighting, particularly in the subways, former NYPD Commissioner William Bratton believes Sewell’s tenure under Adams is a “work in progress.”

“They have done a very good job with the limited resources prioritizing,” Bratton said. "But significant problems remain. … Where they're still struggling, both in the subway system and in the streets, is dealing with those historic increases in crime."

For the NYPD, retirements rose nearly 40% through Oct. 31, 2022 over the same period in 2021, to a total of 1,972 officers, department data showed. To confront subway crime, Sewell placed more than 1,000 cops on extended tours and reassignments to stations and trains.

Along the way, Sewell has had to fight the perception that she often has to stand in the shadow of Adams, himself a former cop who has made crime fighting one of his top priorities.

“She is perfectly capable of running the department,” said former NYPD sergeant Joseph Giacalone, an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “But I don’t think she was given that opportunity. I just think the mayor has made himself de facto police commissioner."

In response to Giacalone, Adams noted that Sewell reports directly to the mayor — with no intermediaries — on the City Hall organization chart.

"Leading the nation's largest police force is the single toughest job in policing and Commissioner Sewell not only accepted that challenge, she has excelled at it," the mayor said in a statement.

Jillian Snider, a former NYPD officer who is part of R Street, a public policy institute in Washington, D.C., and also is an adjunct professor at John Jay, said Sewell has not been in the public eye as much as some of her predecessors.

“We do see her often at press conferences, we see her when a tragedy occurs, we see her when there's allegations of misconduct against an officer," Snider said. “But I often think that she's sort of on the sideline."

Compared with past police commissioners, like Ray Kelly and Bratton, who achieved celebrity status when they were top cops, Sewell appears shy and cautious about the media.

Newsday made repeated attempts to speak to Sewell for months, but the department did not make her available for interviews. She has held comparatively few news conferences and unlike her immediate predecessor, Dermot Shea, has not made a practice of appearing weekly on television morning news programs. 

”We rarely see her at all and when we do, it is a photo op like on the [subway] train," Giacalone said.

Building trust

Sewell has shown officers a warmth in her private interactions with them, a factor that has helped in her popularity with the rank and file. 

Coming from a detective background in Nassau County, Sewell also has built good relationships with the NYPD gumshoes because she understands the nature of the job they do, said Paul DiGiacomo, head of the Detective Endowment Association, the union representing thousands of detectives.

About two weeks ago, Sewell visited a dying NYPD detective and his family to show her respect, said DiGiacomo, who was present for the visit. The detective has since died.

"I describe her in two words, sincere and genuine," DiGiacomo said.

In prior media interviews, Sewell related that she grew up in Queens, where she was mentored by former NYPD detective John Wesley Pierce, a grandfatherly figure she called “Pop Pop."

Sewell’s official NYPD biography indicates that she graduated from the FBI National Academy in Quantico, Virginia, where she was picked as class spokesperson for the commencement address.

Sewell’s reluctance to push her media presence in the nation’s largest city seems at odds with her oratorical skills. When she has had to speak publicly, listeners come away impressed with her poise, command and directness. She often speaks without the aid of notes.

Sewell’s leadership in tough spots has been on display as the city also has faced some high-profile cases, notably the subway shooting, in which admitted shooter Frank James wounded 10 commuters in Brooklyn in April and within 24 hours was arrested on terrorism charges.

Brutal homicides, including the stabbing of FDNY paramedic Alison Russo of Huntington, and the drowning of three young children in Coney Island -- allegedly by their mother -- were solved within hours by NYPD detectives and precinct officers.

Crime stats remain high

The persistent increases in serious felonies all have contributed to a sense that the city is unsafe and out of control.

Adams and Sewell vowed to make things better. By the end of February last year, serious crimes, including robbery, burglary, felonious assault and grand larceny, were up nearly 50% over 2021, despite drops in homicides and shootings.

Serious crime has steadily come down since last winter to about 25% over the previous year. The city ended the year with a crime increase of 22.4% over the end of 2021, according to statistics city and police officials unveiled recently.

The problem, Sewell said during a recent news conference about crime statistics, is a high recidivism rate. No sooner are suspects arrested for many types of crimes — including robbery, grand larceny and burglary — than they get released under the new bail reform requirements, she said.

The state's laws, passed in 2019 and amended in 2020, took certain nonviolent crimes out of the category of offenses requiring cash bail and called for judges to take into account only the conditions that would compel a return to court.

While some pundits, citing state court data, maintain that bail reform hasn’t been responsible for a large number of rearrests, police statisticians challenge that notion, claiming the numbers don’t count the multiple times each suspect has been rearrested. 

”We held press conferences, stood at podiums, put out data, citing cases of recidivists, about what we are facing … I don’t know how much more we can demonstrate in terms of who we are re-arresting as drivers of crimes,” Sewell said at a briefing.

At a Jan. 25 breakfast on the state of the NYPD, Sewell said the department saw an increase in teens under 18 involved in shootings and also being victims of that violence. The department is strategizing to find a solution. Police data showed that through Sept. 1, teens under 18 were responsible for 12.7% of shootings, compared with 9.2% in 2017.

"In the violence we continue to see against our teenagers every day, we must continue to ask ourselves, are the road signs to the off ramp to criminality not well lit, are the letters too small, is the view obstructed, are the instructions too vague or is the path too narrow?" Sewell said at the breakfast.

Departures and reassignments

City Hall’s close involvement on policing matters is something that adds to the palace intrigue of the NYPD hierarchy. Some of Sewell’s high-ranked aides have been leaving, setting of fresh speculation about the musical chairs among the top personnel. 

The latest is her former chief of department, Kenneth Corey, considered by some inside the NYPD to be one of the smartest crime strategists in its headquarters. 

Corey, 53, who had years to go before he hit the mandatory retirement age of 63, left on Nov. 29 and was replaced by Jeffrey Maddrey, the former chief of patrol.

The department also has seen large numbers of cops leaving or retiring in recent years. Early in 2022, Sewell announced a number of redeployments of officers to high-crime precincts to plug some holes left by departing officers.

Some 658 officers were switched from nonenforcement duties to street patrols. Strategic Response Group officers also were shifted to problem precincts, and last month Sewell said 1,000 cops would have extra mandatory overtime to deal with crimes in the subway system.

But at a time when police strength is at the lowest level in three years, currently 34,455, critics believe the overtime for subway policing will only stress out already overworked officers, pushing more to retire or quit.

“We have a police department that is in a constant state of crisis," said Police Benevolent Association president Patrick Lynch, who heads the largest police union. “Cops on the street are well at their breaking point.”

It is a notion former commissioner Bratton agrees with.

“The biggest issue is there are not enough cops,” said Bratton, who estimated that the city needed to have 3,000 more officers to handle the demands of policing and to keep cops from getting burned out. By comparison, the city had 41,000 officers on Sept. 11. “As you wear out cops, they are not as aggressive,” Bratton cautioned.

Lynch said police are retiring at rates not seen in 20 years.

The demands only increased with the latest efforts to deal with subway crime, including the use of mandatory overtime to effectively increase by 1,000 the number of cops in the underground. 

For Bratton, part of what he sees as a “gathering storm” for policing in New York and elsewhere is the increase in the number of resignations before retirement, in which cops call it quits well short of their normal retirement age.

An additional factor prompting police retirements and resignations is a feeling among officers that elected leaders don’t have their backs and have made their jobs more difficult with new laws, Bratton said. 

One area in which Sewell has differed from her predecessors is in relationships with police unions. Sewell’s approach has been one of outreach to the union officials in an effort to have a more collaborative approach, something Lynch called “refreshing” after decades of acrimony with past administrations. At a time when the city needs the cooperation of police, such a labor strategy may work to Sewell’s and the city’s advantage.

Sewell also has shown that she has the backs of cops after two years of anti-police demonstrations and rhetoric, as well as difficult legislation in Albany and the City Council, Lynch said.

“She speaks up and explains to the public what police officers are going through,” said Lynch, whose rank-and-file are still working without a contract.

The future

Giacalone said he hopes Sewell stays the course into this new year.

"She has got to keep this department together. … I think they need a leader that will keep the cohesive group together, to try to push them through 2023," Giancalone said.

Sewell said the NYPD will continue to attack crime in 2023.

“We knew we wouldn’t turn this city around on a dime," Sewell said during the first crime briefing in early January. "We did not stumble to these decreases. They were not happenstance. We strategized, we planned, deployed, recalibrated when necessary, and relentlessly followed up.

“The NYPD is confident in the future of this department, and the city, we will never stop holding those accountable who continue to prey on the people and businesses in New York City.”

By Anthony M. DeStefano

tony.destefano@newsday.comtonynewsday

Anthony M. DeStefano has been a reporter for Newsday since 1986 and covers law enforcement, criminal justice and legal affairs from its New York City offices.