I. Introduction: A New Mayor, an Old Architecture
Every incoming mayor inherits two things from their predecessors: a budget and an architecture. The budget is debated, amended, and voted on in public. The architecture is not. It consists of personnel networks, informal understandings, unwritten rules, and operational habits that outlast any individual administration. Nowhere is that architecture more entrenched than in New York City’s policing structure.
Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani will take office at a moment when the NYPD’s internal discipline and accountability systems have finally been described with unusual clarity in the Yates Discipline Report. That report does not depict a system struggling to keep up with complexity. It depicts a system that has made a deliberate choice to avoid disciplining misconduct, to insulate supervisors, and to treat unconstitutional conduct as an internal management issue rather than a legal one. It confirms, in formal language, what affected officers, whistleblowers, and civil-rights litigants have experienced for years.
Against that backdrop, personnel decisions are not symbolic. They are substantive. The decision whether to retain “Savior” Jessica S. Tisch as Police Commissioner is not about continuity for its own sake; it is about whether the incoming administration intends to preserve or dismantle an architecture built over successive commissionships—from Raymond W. Kelly, through William J. Bratton’s second term, James P. O’Neill, Dermot F. Shea, Keechant L. Sewell, Edward A. Caban, the brief acting tenure of Thomas A. Donlon, and into the present.
Across those administrations, the details have shifted—crime waves, political rhetoric, mayoral branding—but several constants have remained: discipline is discretionary and opaque, oversight is fragmented and often performative, and internal dissent is treated as a threat to be managed rather than a signal that something is structurally wrong. The Yates Report puts that continuity into the record. The question for a new mayor is whether to break with it.
Commissioner Tisch has been presented to the public as a modernizer: a technocrat capable of rationalizing systems, deploying technology, and “fixing” operational problems. But modernization, in practice, can serve two very different purposes. It can be used to expose and correct longstanding misconduct, or it can be used to make that misconduct more efficient, less visible, and harder to challenge. When we examine the treatment of its personnel such as Salvatore A. Greco, Quathisha Epps, Terrell M. Anderson, Frankie F. Palaguachi, Winston M. Faison, Jaenice Smith, Gabrielle J. Walls, and others similarly situated, and we place those cases alongside the findings in the Yates Discipline Report, it becomes difficult to argue that modernization has meant reform.
As Mayor-elect Mamdani signals a willingness to include familiar figures from prior administrations in his own, the risk is not abstract. Retaining Jessica S. Tisch would not simply be keeping a sitting commissioner in place. It would be an affirmative decision to carry forward an institutional model of bad-faith policing tactics and personnel strategies that has been refined across the Kelly, Bratton, O’Neill, Shea, Sewell, Caban, and Donlon eras, and now operates with the added credibility of a “data-driven” label.
This thought piece proceeds from a simple premise: the Yates Discipline Report, the historical record of recent commissioners, and the lived experience of ongoing cases all point in the same direction. They describe a department whose internal systems are structured to avoid accountability and to retaliate against those who challenge that structure. In that context, the decision whether to retain Commissioner Tisch is not a routine administrative choice. It is the first clear indicator of whether the incoming administration intends to confront that architecture or govern around it.
II. The Lineage of Control: From the Dutch Rattle Watch to the Modern Puppet Masters
To understand why Deputy Chief Winston Faison became a target, it is necessary to understand what New York City policing has always been: a system built not on democratic accountability, but on the preservation of power. The NYPD’s culture did not suddenly warp into selective enforcement. It was born that way—its origins trace back to the Dutch Rattle Watchers, the city’s first organized night patrol in the 1600s. These watchmen were not chosen for competence or service; they were selected by the colonial elite to maintain order for the ruling class, protect property, and enforce racial and economic boundaries. From the beginning, policing in New York was a privilege extended to insiders and a tool imposed on everyone else.
When the British seized control, they did not dismantle this structure—they professionalized it. The earliest forms of municipal policing continued to operate as a political instrument, reinforcing hierarchy, protecting commercial interests, and ensuring that those in power retained the exclusive right to define “order.” By the 19th century, this colonial lineage matured into the Tammany Hall spoils system, where police appointments were awarded not for merit, but for political loyalty, campaign contributions, and ethnic allegiance. Reformers later claimed the spoils era ended, but the truth is more cynical: patronage merely changed form, from overt political favoritism to bureaucratized managerialism.
The Knapp Commission gave the public vocabulary for a reality that had existed since the Rattle Watch. Its “Grass Eaters” and “Meat Eaters” were not anomalies of the 1970s—they were modern labels for centuries-old patterns. The NYPD had always relied on insiders who quietly enabled misconduct and others who exploited it more aggressively. What made the NYPD unique was that both types were protected so long as their actions reinforced the institution’s political value.
This is the culture that Raymond W. Kelly and William J. Bratton inherited—and then perfected.
Kelly’s second tenure beginning in 2002 transformed the NYPD into a closed intelligence fortress, defined by centralized power, informational opacity, and near-total insulation from external oversight. His model elevated the political police commissioner—part strategist, part propagandist, part political operative—while marginalizing internal dissent. Data, discipline, and public messaging flowed through a centralized command structure designed not for transparency, but for control.
Bratton’s second appointment in 2014 built on Kelly’s foundation but added a different kind of weaponry: pseudo-scientific managerialism. Under Bratton, the NYPD embraced RIAH hair testing—a racially discriminatory, scientifically indefensible method of detecting drug use—because it gave leadership an efficient, unreviewable mechanism to eliminate officers and applicants without meaningful oversight. Bratton did not need the science to be valid. He needed the tool to be effective at reinforcing hierarchy.
And he got it.
Even after Bratton departed, his testing regime lived on. O’Neill, Shea, Sewell, and Caban all inherited a system in which scientific validity mattered less than managerial utility. Instead of dismantling it, they preserved it. When RIAH collapsed under scrutiny, the Department simply switched to EIA under Jessica S. Tisch—different name, same purpose, same discriminatory outcomes.
Tisch is not a reformer. She is the culmination of the Bratton–Kelly governance philosophy: centralized control, politicized discipline, weaponized messaging, and a deep institutional hostility toward transparency. She inherited their networks, their personnel, their testing tools, and their managerial habits—then expanded them. Her NYPD is not a break from the past. It is the past perfected.
This lineage matters because it explains why today’s whistleblowers—from Greco to Epps, Anderson to Palaguachi, Smith to Walls, and now Faison—face retaliation with such speed and ferocity. They are not threatening misconduct; they are threatening a system that has been meticulously built over decades to protect insiders, punish dissent, and ensure that the political class—not the public—controls policing in New York City.
It also explains why Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani cannot retain Jessica S. Tisch without undermining his own reform agenda. Tisch is not merely adjacent to Bratton and Kelly; she is their administrative descendant, the inheritor of their networks, and the executor of their most controversial governance tools. Keeping her would signal continuity with a policing lineage defined by patronage, secrecy, and selective enforcement.
If Mamdani intends to break the cycle, he must start where the cycle reaches its peak: by ending the Bratton–Kelly–Tisch era once and for all.
III. The Modern Architecture: How the Kelly–Bratton Model Evolved Into Today’s Disciplinary Regime
If Sections I and II explain the roots, Section III explains the machinery — the operational architecture that converts history into modern institutional practice. The idea that NYPD leadership eras are distinct, siloed chapters is a comforting myth. The truth is that these eras are strands of a single rope: interlocked, mutually reinforcing, and designed to shape not just policy, but the culture of discipline, retaliation, and informational control.
The transition from Kelly to Bratton’s second tenure did not mark a reform moment. It marked a merger — the consolidation of two governance styles into a hardened managerial doctrine that every subsequent commissioner inherited.
Kelly built the enforcement architecture: centralized intelligence, message control, command-level insulation, and a discipline system defined not by law, but by political value. His NYPD institutionalized what the Yates Discipline Report now describes with forensic precision: unconstitutional conduct treated as administrative noise, supervisory failures treated as unavoidable, and internal dissent treated as contamination.
Bratton returned in 2014 and added the operating system. He introduced managerial pseudo-science as a mechanism of control — the most extreme example being the adoption of RIAH hair testing, an unvalidated, racially skewed, legally ambiguous tool presented to the public as innovation while functioning internally as an unreviewable method for weeding out disfavored personnel. The science did not matter. Due process did not matter. What mattered was that the test created the appearance of rigor while expanding the commissioner’s discretionary power.
This was Bratton’s genius and his legacy: the transformation of debunked science into bureaucratic legitimacy.
And it worked.
When RIAH collapsed under legal and scientific scrutiny, the Department did not abandon the tactic — it simply rebranded it. Under Jessica S. Tisch, the NYPD embraced EIA hair testing, another immunoassay system with the same DNA: unreliable, unregulated, racially disparate, and perfectly suited to a discipline model that rewards “tools,” not truth.
In policing, methods change. The purpose does not.
From there, the commissioner lineage becomes easy to understand not as separate eras, but as a single, uninterrupted chain of custody:
O’Neill inherited Bratton’s scientific machinery and Kelly’s disciplinary logic, packaging both in the softer rhetoric of “neighborhood policing” while maintaining an internal regime where supervisors almost never faced consequences.
Shea hardened the political dimension, enforcing loyalty structures and strengthening executive silos that prevented pattern recognition and shielded misconduct from outside scrutiny.
Sewell, despite the public hope surrounding her appointment, was not empowered to break the lineage; she functioned within it, constrained by the very networks she nominally commanded.
Caban accelerated the politicization of senior leadership, elevating personalities who shaped discipline through messaging, not law.
Donlon, though brief, represented continuity — the maintenance of the system until a more permanent steward could continue it.
And that steward became Tisch, the commissioner whose tenure is often described as technologically forward but structurally backward. Tisch did not build the architecture. She operates it. She inherited Kelly’s centralized authority, Bratton’s pseudo-scientific enforcement tools, O’Neill’s managerial tone, Shea’s political enforcement, Sewell’s constrained oversight environment, and Caban’s communications-driven discipline model.
She fused these elements into a modernized version of the same old system: data-driven when convenient, opaque when necessary, and relentlessly hostile to internal dissent.
This continuity matters because it reveals something most analyses overlook:
The modern NYPD discipline system did not emerge by accident. It is the product of a lineage — engineered, refined, and deliberately passed down.
That lineage explains why:
unconstitutional stops are treated as good-faith errors,
supervisor misconduct never triggers consequences,
internal data cannot be meaningfully aggregated,
whistleblowers face retaliation while violators face insulation,
pseudo-scientific tests are deployed without regulation,
and “modernization” is used to obscure practices that predate the city’s own charter.
It also explains why Commissioner Tisch, despite her branding as an innovator, governs from within this inherited DNA rather than against it.
Mayor-elect Mamdani is not choosing whether to keep a commissioner. He is choosing whether to keep this architecture.
Appointing a new commissioner may not guarantee reform — but keeping Tisch guarantees continuity. She is not a break from the Kelly–Bratton lineage. She is its administratively polished descendant. Her tenure is not a post-script to the last 20 years; it is the refinement of them.
Section III is where that through-line becomes undeniable:
The NYPD under Tisch is not a new system. It is the fully evolved form of the Kelly–Bratton model — and no mayor promising structural reform can carry that lineage into a new administration.
IV. The Yates Discipline Report: The Modern Blueprint of an Institution Engineered to Avoid Accountability
The Yates Discipline Report does not read like a diagnostic audit. It reads like a coroners’ report — a clinical, documented confirmation that the NYPD’s disciplinary body did not die of sudden trauma but of long-term, deliberate design. It is the first official document in decades to describe, with bureaucratic restraint, what frontline officers, litigants, and internal whistleblowers have known since the Kelly era: the NYPD’s disciplinary machinery is not malfunctioning. It is functioning exactly as intended.
The report identifies five structural failures. Each aligns perfectly with the policing architecture developed under Kelly, professionalized under Bratton, normalized under O’Neill and Shea, politically hardened under Sewell and Caban, and technologically shielded under Tisch. In this sense, the Yates Report is not simply an account of present dysfunction; it is the culmination of a two-decade lineage.
1. Unconstitutional Stops Reframed as “Good-Faith Mistakes”
The Yates team documented a pattern that borders on Orwellian: unlawful stops — lacking reasonable suspicion, based on hunches, or justified by retroactive narrative-building — are sanitized into “good-faith mistakes.” The language is revealing. In most American jurisdictions, the question is whether an officer’s conduct meets constitutional standards. In the NYPD, the question is whether the violation can be linguistically reframed to avoid discipline.
This is Kelly’s CompStat legacy:
data-driven justification first, legal compliance second.
Bratton’s managerial culture added a second layer:
numbers can be corrected; misconduct can be narrated.
Under Tisch, the practice has evolved into a communications strategy. Unconstitutional conduct is not addressed — it is described. The report shows that language, not law, now determines outcomes.
2. Supervisory Impunity Is Not a Bug; It Is the Command Philosophy
The Yates Report identifies what it euphemistically calls a “systematic failure to impose supervisory accountability.” But that phrasing obscures the truth. Supervisory failure is not overlooked because of administrative backlog; it is protected because supervisory loyalty is the currency of NYPD governance.
Kelly built the model:
Commanders were insulated because they were essential nodes in the information hierarchy.
Bratton refined it:
Supervisory misconduct was reframed as “leadership discretion.”
O’Neill normalized it:
Internal culture absorbed this as common sense.
Shea and Caban politicized it:
“Inner circle” commanders became untouchable, their public messaging aligning with mayoral narratives.
Under Tisch, the impunity becomes structural. Supervisors can ignore unconstitutional stops, mismanage units, or rewrite narratives, and no disciplinary consequence follows — because the system is designed to preserve command structure, not public integrity.
3. The Commissioner’s “Unfettered Authority” Is Not Administrative Flexibility — It Is the Mechanism of Control
The most damning finding in the Yates Report concerns the commissioner’s near-absolute power to override disciplinary recommendations without explanation. This is not new. It is the untouched heirloom of every commissioner since Kelly.
But what the Yates Report exposes is the degree to which this power has been weaponized.
Recommendations from the Civilian Complaint Review Board [CCRB], Department Advocate’s Officer [DAO], Deputy Commissioner Trials [DCT] or any other mechanism within the department can be discarded by a single signature. Video evidence can be reinterpreted. Findings can be reframed. Patterns can be erased. And none of this requires public justification.
This is why pseudo-science such as RIAH and EIA thrived.
It is why retaliatory discipline — in cases like Greco, Epps, Anderson, Palaguachi, Smith, Walls, and countless others — became predictable.
It is why the internal discipline process feels, to litigants and officers alike, like a black box with political circuitry.
The commissioner’s power is not excessive by accident. It is excessive because the architecture requires a singular point of narrative control.
4. Data Siloing Is Intentional — It Prevents Pattern Recognition
The Yates Report’s analysis of data systems is devastating. It documents how the Internal Affairs Bureau [IAB], CCRB, DAO, and other oversight bodies operate in parallel silos with no unified visibility. Misconduct that would be obvious in an integrated system appears isolated when data is fragmented.
This fragmentation did not arise from outdated technology. It persists despite Tisch’s modernization efforts — and that is the tell. If modernization were intended to improve transparency, these silos would be the first systems to dissolve. Instead, they remain intact.
Why?
Because silos protect the institution. They prevent anyone — internal or external — from identifying patterns that might expose misconduct not as isolated incidents but as departmental practice.
The Yates Report confirms it:
The NYPD is engineered to prevent anyone from seeing too much.
5. Misconduct Is Reframed as Administrative Error — Not Constitutional Wrongdoing
The Yates Report identifies what may be the NYPD’s most corrosive practice: treating constitutional violations as administrative issues. Stops without legal basis are reframed as “training opportunities.” Excessive force becomes “tactical misjudgment.” Supervisory failures become “administrative oversights.”
This reframing is not linguistic convenience — it is legal strategy.
If the misconduct is “administrative,” it is not a civil-rights violation.
If it is not a civil-rights violation, it is not a liability.
If it is not a liability, it is not a problem.
If it is not a problem, it is not a pattern.
If it is not a pattern, it cannot be reformed.
This is the Kelly model weaponized by Bratton, normalized by his successors, and now institutionalized under Tisch through the rhetoric of modernization.
The Yates Report Does More Than Diagnose — It Validates the Lineage
The report is not an indictment of individual failings.
It is an x-ray of a system designed to:
Shield supervisors
Reinterpret misconduct
Suppress pattern visibility
Centralize narrative control
Punish dissent
And operationalize constitutional violations as bureaucratic inconveniences
It is proof that the NYPD’s disciplinary failures are not episodic, not bureaucratic, and not accidental. They are architectural. They are inherited. They are intentional.
And because Tisch operates that architecture rather than challenging it, the Yates Report confirms the central argument of this thought piece:
Retaining Tisch is not continuity.
It is complicity.
V. The Human Cost: The Cases That Prove the Architecture Is Real
Policy failures only become undeniable when they have names attached to them. The Yates Discipline Report outlines the structural mechanics of NYPD impunity — but those mechanics are not theoretical. They reveal themselves most clearly in the lives and careers of officers who attempted to navigate the NYPD’s discipline system in good faith and were met not with fairness, but with retaliation, distortion, and managerial cruelty.
These cases are not outliers. They are expressions of the very architecture Yates describes — the Kelly-Bratton lineage made visible in individual lives.
1. Salvatore A. Greco — The Prototype of Selective Discipline
The case of former NYPD Police Officer Salvatore J. Greco is one of the clearest examples of how the Department weaponizes disciplinary authority to police political identity rather than misconduct. Greco was not terminated for violating law, oath, or departmental rules. He was terminated because his personal relationships and political beliefs made him inconvenient. His case demonstrates how the NYPD—across multiple administrations—uses its vast investigative machinery to target officers whose viewpoints fall outside the preferred ideological boundaries of One Police Plaza.
Greco’s alleged “offense” was not an act but an association. His personal, constitutionally protected relationships with political strategist Roger Stone and Kristin Davis, and his personal support for the “Make America Great Again” political paradigm, became grounds for suspicion—not because of any evidence of criminal conduct, but because of the NYPD’s discomfort with his viewpoint. An anonymous letter—political in tone, speculative in substance, and unsupported by any verifiable fact—triggered a full-scale Internal Affairs investigation designed not to uncover wrongdoing, but to produce it.
For months, NYPD investigators combed through Greco’s private life: his phone records, social media, personal communications, and affiliations. None of it yielded evidence of criminal activity, conspiracy, or professional misconduct. Nonetheless, the Department escalated the matter through administrative subpoenas and criminal-designated case logs, attempting to transform political association into criminal suspicion. When no evidence materialized, the Department reframed the allegation entirely: not that Greco engaged in wrongdoing, but that he associated with individuals the Department found politically objectionable.
This is precisely the selective enforcement structure the Yates Report identifies. When the Department wants a result, it manipulates classification, exaggerates threat narratives, and retrofits discipline to ideology rather than evidence. Greco’s case shows how the Department treats constitutionally protected political expression as a disciplinary vulnerability. His associations became a pretext for removal because they fell outside the NYPD’s internal ideological comfort zone.
Greco’s trial outcome reveals the internal logic: no finding of criminal association, no finding of extremist membership, no evidence of subversive activity. Yet termination was still recommended on the grounds that his continued employment was “corrosive to the mission and values of the Department.” That phrase is telling. It has nothing to do with misconduct. It has everything to do with political narrative. The NYPD used discipline to sanitize its own image by purging someone whose political leanings it found objectionable, even though the law protects those very leanings.
His case exposes a department that mistakes political homogeneity for integrity, and treats dissenting viewpoints—not misconduct—as threats. This is not discipline. This is viewpoint discrimination dressed in the language of professionalism. Greco’s punishment was not about safety, ethics, or operational readiness. It was a warning: political diversity will be policed internally, and those who step outside accepted boundaries will be removed under the guise of “integrity.”
In that sense, Greco’s case sits squarely within the same ecosystem as Epps, Anderson, Palaguachi, Smith, Walls, and others. Each case reveals a different facet of the same architecture: a disciplinary system that preserves institutional comfort, punishes ideological deviation, and redefines constitutional rights as administrative infractions. Greco is not an outlier. He is proof that the NYPD’s disciplinary machine is not neutral—it is political.
2. Lieutenant Quathisha Epps — A Case Study in Institutional Misogyny
Lieutenant Quathisha Epps represents the most brutal and unvarnished example of how the NYPD weaponizes internal systems to punish Black women who speak the truth about sexual exploitation and abuse of power. Her case is not about a private “office dispute” or a payroll disagreement. It is a case study in institutional retaliation, where a woman who reported rape, coercion, sexual harassment, and forced economic exploitation found herself transformed—from victim to suspect—through a machinery designed to protect the institution and destroy her credibility.
Her harassment was not subtle. It was direct, coercive, and tied to the power of senior command. She was pressured into unwanted sexual acts, manipulated through the exploitation of her trauma history, and told implicitly and explicitly that her professional stability depended on submitting to demands she did not want and did not consent to. She was instructed to facilitate access to other vulnerable women, pressured to support predatory conduct masquerading as mentorship, and pulled into a world where the lines between professional authority and personal exploitation were deliberately erased.
When she began resisting, the retaliation moved with surgical precision.
Her overtime — approved, processed, and paid under standard NYPD systems for more than a year — was suddenly reframed as “irregular.” Her integrity was publicly smeared through strategically leaked documents. Her protected disclosures were met not with investigation, but with suspension. And when she finally prepared to retire to protect herself from escalating abuse, she was confronted with a shocking ultimatum: the promise of institutional protection in exchange for a coerced sexual act.
This is the textbook definition of quid pro quo harassment under federal, state, and local law. It is also the precise scenario the United States Supreme Court envisioned when it held in Ellerth and Faragher that employers are strictly liable when supervisors misuse institutional power for sexual coercion. But instead of protecting her, the NYPD operationalized its internal machinery to punish her for speaking.
The retaliation escalated when the Department orchestrated an unprecedented and illegal wage and pension clawback — the only clawback of its kind in modern NYPD history. Payroll systems long known to be riddled with managerial errors and inconsistent documentation were suddenly treated as sacrosanct — but only in her case. Under black-letter labor law, employers bear the duty to maintain accurate records. Yet the NYPD attempted to reverse this obligation, manufacturing a $231,896 “debt” based on records she did not control and could not access.
At the same time, physical and digital evidence related to her allegations disappeared. Devices, drives, notebooks, and even the physical workspace where part of the abuse occurred were removed or destroyed. In any functioning accountability system, this would be recognized as deliberate spoliation — an obstruction of justice. In the NYPD’s system, it was treated as routine housekeeping.
And while she was subjected to retaliatory investigations, multiple overtime earners with far higher totals — thousands of them — continued without scrutiny. The Department’s own payroll supervisors testified under oath that reconstruction, correction, and replacement of overtime slips had been standard practice for more than a decade. Yet only one person was targeted: a Black woman whistleblower whose allegations threatened the Department’s top leadership.
In this sense, Epps is not merely an individual case. She is a historical reenactment of a pattern stretching from the earliest days of American policing: Black women who report sexual violence are disbelieved, discredited, and punished. The tactics have evolved — from lynch mobs and courthouse refusals to retaliatory transfers, public smears, selective audits, and weaponized payroll systems — but the underlying logic remains the same.
Her ordeal mirrors every structural flaw named in the Yates Discipline Report:
• Supervisors shielded, never held accountable
• Victims treated as administrative threats
• Evidence lost or destroyed to preserve institutional reputation
• Investigations inverted to target the complainant
• Retaliatory discipline disguised as oversight
• Internal processes manipulated to deter future whistleblowers
Epps’s case exposes the NYPD’s deepest truth: the Department does not fear misconduct — it fears exposure. Sexual harassment by those in power is tolerable. A woman who documents it is not.
Her retaliation was not an accident. It was structural.
Her clawback was not an error. It was strategic.
And her treatment was not exceptional. It was inevitable inside a disciplinary system intentionally built to protect powerful men and punish vulnerable women whose truth threatens them.
This is the culture Tisch not only inherited — she amplified it. This is the system that will continue unless the next mayor breaks with the lineage that created it. And this is why Epps’s ordeal must be understood not as a scandal, but as an indictment of the NYPD’s architecture of impunity.
If New York City is to end this cycle, it begins with acknowledging what the Department did to her — and refusing to let the next administration inherit the machinery that made it possible.
3. Terrell M. Anderson — The Weaponization of Psychological Evaluation
Inspector Terrell Anderson’s story is not about a single “bad manager” cutting corners in the hiring process. It is about how the Adams–Tisch administration weaponized one man’s name to launder an institutional failure, purge a vulnerable class of probationary officers, and rewrite NYPD history in real time. Publicly, City Hall and Tisch framed Anderson as the “rogue” architect of a hiring scandal—someone who allegedly pushed through unqualified candidates, forcing the Department to clean up his mess. Privately, they knew every one of those officers had passed through the City’s own multi-layered pipeline: DCAS certification, background checks, medical and psychological screening, academy graduation, field training, and deployment under NYPD command.
Anderson did not secretly sneak these officers in through a side door. They were vetted, processed, sworn, armed, assigned to precincts, and ordered to exercise police authority in the City’s name. Many are Black, Latino, Asian, immigrant, or military reservists—precisely the officers the Department publicly claims it wants in its ranks. When the political cost of prior hiring decisions became inconvenient, leadership did not admit institutional error. It manufactured a villain. Anderson was removed from his post and recast as the source of a “rogue hiring scandal,” while the same command structure that signed off on every step of those hires declared the officers themselves retroactively illegitimate.
The purge that followed was as revealing as it was ruthless. Dozens of probationary officers were stripped of badges and guns, escorted out of commands, and told—without hearings, written charges, or meaningful explanation—that they should “never have been hired.” Their service has been erased, their records stigmatized, their future employment poisoned. Under Codd v. Velger and Segal v. City of New York, that kind of public stigmatization triggers a liberty interest and a right to a name-clearing hearing, even for probationary employees. Yet the Adams–Tisch operation has proceeded as if constitutional due process were optional when the targets are junior officers of color and the narrative serves top brass.
Anderson’s role in this saga exposes the core dynamic Yates describes: power flowing upward, blame flowing downward. The same leadership class that ignored or ratified flawed systems for years now presents itself as the cure, using Anderson as the administrative scapegoat and the purged officers as collateral damage. His “rogue” label is not a finding—it is a political device. It allows Commissioner Tisch to posture as a reformer while preserving the architecture that produced the problem: opaque decision-making, racialized impact, and a discipline system that protects the institution first, truth and people last.
4. Frankie F. Palaguachi — The Scientific Fraud That Became Policy
Frankie F. Palaguachi’s case is the clearest proof that under the Kelly–Bratton–Tisch lineage, “science” inside the NYPD is never neutral—it is engineered, selected, and weaponized to serve institutional convenience. Palaguachi was not some marginal employee caught in a technicality. He was a frontline officer whose career, reputation, and livelihood were destroyed by a drug-testing regime the Department knew—or should have known—was scientifically indefensible.
Under Bratton’s second term, the NYPD embraced RIAH hair testing through Psychemedics, dressing it up as an advanced, objective tool to identify drug use. In reality, it was a racially biased, unvalidated method that operated well outside the matrices authorized under federal regulations. When RIAH began to collapse under legal and scientific scrutiny, the Department did not abandon the practice—it rebranded. The technology was repackaged as EIA, but the core remained the same: a chemically fragile, contamination-prone, racially skewed instrument used to mark certain officers and applicants as disposable.
Palaguachi landed in the crosshairs of that system. He became one of the many officers flagged as a “positive” hair test while traditional matrices—urine and other accepted methods—told a different story. Instead of treating the discrepancy as a reason for caution, the NYPD treated the hair result as gospel and everything else as noise. Context, prior service, character, collateral evidence—all of it was subordinated to a single lab output from a for-profit vendor whose business model depended on agencies refusing to question its methodology.
When Palaguachi pushed back—through litigation, through administrative challenges, through a citizen petition to federal regulators—he wasn’t just contesting his own result. He was exposing a system built on regulatory evasion and administrative silence. The Department had adopted a testing platform that did not fit within the FDA’s authorized framework, produced glaring racial disparities, and failed every meaningful standard of scientific validation. Yet year after year, the NYPD continued to rely on those results to terminate officers, disqualify applicants, and brand people as drug users in ways that followed them for life.
That is not science. That is policy in a lab coat.
Palaguachi’s fight lays bare how discipline and “fitness” are constructed under this lineage. The NYPD will cling to a flawed test for years if it provides an efficient mechanism to remove the wrong kind of officer—the one who doesn’t fit the preferred demographic, political, or cultural profile. It will ignore contrary evidence, suppress internal doubt, and resist external oversight because the tool is too useful to surrender. And when the test finally becomes indefensible, the Department will quietly swap acronyms—from RIAH to EIA—while insisting nothing fundamental has changed.
In that sense, Palaguachi is not just a victim of bad science; he is a victim of deliberate design. His case illustrates the exact pattern Yates describes in the disciplinary sphere: opaque decision-making, deference to instrumentality over truth, and a complete unwillingness to admit institutional error. The same mentality that allows unconstitutional stops to be recast as “good faith” mistakes is the mentality that allows junk science to be treated as irrefutable proof—so long as it serves the hierarchy.
Palaguachi’s name sits at the intersection of two realities: an officer stripped of his badge by an unvalidated test, and a department that would rather destroy a career than acknowledge that its chosen tools were never lawful, never neutral, and never truly about public safety.
5. Winston M. Faison — The Retaliation Blueprint in Its Purest Form
Deputy Chief Winston M. Faison’s case is not merely another example of NYPD retaliation—it is the clearest demonstration of how far the department’s upper command structure will go to protect its “In-Crowd” while disciplining integrity as if it were misconduct. Faison did not stumble into controversy. He collided with the invisible architecture that governs the NYPD: an entrenched network of political patrons, insulated executives, and self-protective bureaucrats who function as the modern heirs to the Tammany-era spoils system. In that world, loyalty is currency, dissent is deviance, and anyone outside the favored circle is treated as expendable.
Faison was a threat precisely because he was not a loyalist. He was competent, respected, and independent—but independence is intolerable in a system premised on internal hierarchy, not merit. When he enforced policy, held subordinates accountable, or refused to bend rules for members of the “In-Crowd,” he exposed the quiet bargains and informal privileges the department relies on to maintain internal equilibrium. And in an institution where the rules apply differently depending on who is being judged, that made him dangerous.
The retaliation mechanism came through a familiar and increasingly abused pathway: the New York City Conflicts of Interest Board. COIB is intended as an independent ethics body. Within the NYPD architecture, however, it has been quietly weaponized as a selective enforcement tool—aggressively deployed against disfavored personnel while entirely ignored for those within the protected networks. In Faison’s case, minor, routine conduct that would have been dismissed or informally resolved for favored executives was escalated, formalized, and amplified into a career-threatening probe.
That asymmetry is the tell. COIB enforcement inside the NYPD bears no resemblance to neutral ethics compliance. It is a political instrument—one used to legitimize predetermined outcomes. The same commanders who escape discipline for misconduct with real operational or public implications can rely on internal insulation. But an outsider like Faison, identified as insufficiently compliant with the expectations of the Crumbs Crew of Corruption, becomes a target. The “ethics” label is simply the administrative clothing.
The Yates Discipline Report confirms this dynamic: supervisory protection for insiders, punitive scrutiny for outsiders, and discretion wielded not according to law but according to status. That is exactly what Faison encountered. The charges brought against him were not the product of objective review; they were the product of a managerial caste acting to defend its own interests.
Faison’s case also reveals the deeper continuity from Kelly to Bratton to Shea to Caban to Tisch. Under each commissioner, the NYPD perfected different tools of selective discipline—data manipulation under Kelly, operational amnesia under Bratton, retaliatory command culture under Shea, inner-circle loyalty enforcement under Caban, and now technocratic opacity under Tisch. Each era refined the machinery, and Tisch inherited the full arsenal: strategic silence, siloed data, COIB weaponization, and internal message control. Faison became a casualty not because of what he did, but because he stood at the intersection of that machinery and refused to conform.
And the most revealing part? Those who engineered the campaign against him operated with complete confidence that no one would question the irregularities, the selective scrutiny, or the obvious political motive. That confidence is the product of a culture that believes its internal power is absolute, immune from oversight, and accountable only to itself.
Faison’s experience fits perfectly within the pattern the Yates Report finally articulated for the public record: discipline used as leverage, not law; supervision wielded as retaliation, not accountability; procedural language masking managerial bias; and an internal “In-Crowd” that moves as a coordinated faction to protect its own and eliminate those who threaten its internal order.
Faison was not targeted because he violated policy.
He was targeted because he violated hierarchy.
He is a case study in what happens when a high-ranking Black executive refuses to submit to a lineage of policing culture built on patronage, protectionism, and selective ethics. His case confirms the central thesis of this essay: that under the Tisch administration—just as under her predecessors—discipline is a political act, ethics is a weapon, and integrity is a liability.
In the NYPD’s modern architecture, the punishment of Winston M. Faison was not an aberration.
It was the system functioning exactly as intended.
6. Detective Specialist Jaenice Smith — Retaliation Disguised as Discipline
Detective Specialist Jaenice Smith’s case reveals how the NYPD weaponizes its internal processes against those who rely on their civil-rights protections, particularly Black women managing caregiving responsibilities and disability-related needs. What happened to Smith was not a misunderstanding, not a paperwork error, and not a legitimate disciplinary review. It was a coordinated attempt to punish a lawful accommodation, recast compassion as corruption, and claw back earned income and pension credit under the guise of “integrity.”
Smith was the primary caregiver for her terminally ill mother. She provided medical documentation, disclosed her circumstances to her supervisors, and received a command-level authorization for fully paid leave from Assistant Chief Scott M. Henderson — a discretionary act squarely permitted under federal, state, and city civil-rights law. Under the ADA, the NYSHRL, and the NYCHRL, paid or unpaid leave is a recognized and often required form of reasonable accommodation. Nothing in any statute prohibits an employer from being more generous than the minimum the law requires.
But in the NYPD’s current discipline culture, generosity granted by a Black executive to a Black woman subordinate is treated not as lawful accommodation, but as deviance.
Instead of honoring the accommodation or documenting it properly — an obligation that the law places squarely on the employer — the Department retroactively reframed the authorization as misconduct. Payroll records were altered to create false “Leave Without Pay” entries. The Department attempted an unprecedented clawback of earnings despite the fact that Smith neither requested nor received LWOP. And because her 20-year pension vested during this period, the Department’s actions served a second purpose: financial destruction. That is not discipline. That is retaliation disguised as fiscal enforcement.
The rhetoric used against Smith was even more revealing. The Department Advocate repeatedly characterized the accommodation as a “personal arrangement,” deploying a racially and gender-coded trope long used to delegitimize the professional authority of Black leadership and sexualize Black women’s workplace relationships. Her reliance on her superior’s lawful discretion was mocked, belittled, and reframed as something illicit. Even Assistant Chief Henderson — whose authorization was never proven improper — was stripped of his title in argument and referred to dismissively as “he,” a rhetorical device that mirrored the deeper institutional contempt on display.
Every officer disciplined in connection with this accommodation — Henderson, Witten, Fong, Hunt, and Smith — was a person of color. Every charge pursued was inflated to its most punitive possible interpretation. And at the center of the storm was the lowest-ranking member of the group, the only Black woman, the one whose caregiving needs and disability disclosures triggered the protections the Department chose to ignore.
The Yates Discipline Report describes a system where discipline is selective, retaliation is structural, and facts are malleable in service of a predetermined outcome. Smith’s case is the exemplar. What the Department called “time theft” was federally protected accommodation. What it labeled an “arrangement” was a lawful exercise of command authority. What it pursued as misconduct was, in truth, an act of retaliation timed to coincide with a Black woman officer’s pension vesting date.
Smith’s experience exposes the fault line at the heart of Tisch’s NYPD: discipline is not about standards, fairness, or accountability. It is about control — over narratives, over careers, and over who is permitted to benefit from the civil-rights guarantees the law demands. Under this model, the act of seeking or receiving an accommodation becomes the basis for prosecution. In that world, no officer with caregiving responsibilities is safe, and no Black woman is secure in the protections she is entitled to.
7. Captain Gabrielle J. Walls — Retaliation for Obeying the Law
Captain Gabrielle J. Walls’ case reflects a deeper truth about the NYPD’s disciplinary architecture: when the misconduct involves sexual harassment, the system’s first instinct is not to correct it — but to contain it. Walls, a high-ranking Black female commanding officer, reported repeated sexual harassment by male supervisors and peers who operated with open confidence that their positions shielded them from consequence. Instead of confronting the wrongdoing, the Department redirected its attention toward her, scrutinizing her conduct, isolating her professionally, and repositioning her complaint as a management problem rather than a violation of law and policy.
Her experience reveals the gendered variant of the NYPD’s two-tier system. The Yates findings show how unconstitutional stops, misconduct, and supervisory failures are routinely minimized as “good faith errors.” Walls’ case shows how sexual harassment is subjected to the same dilution: not as a breach of Title VII protections, not as a command-level failure, but as an internal personnel matter best handled through quiet reassignment or reputational erosion. The men involved faced no real accountability, no structural consequence, and no meaningful review. Walls, meanwhile, experienced retaliation cloaked as administrative decision-making — a pattern entirely consistent with the Department’s treatment of women who challenge entrenched power networks.
Her case fits the architecture precisely: when misconduct exposes the culture, the NYPD protects the culture, not the victim. Walls’ ordeal is not peripheral to the systemic critique; it is central to it. She is one of the clearest examples of how the disciplinary system, as described by Yates, is engineered to shield insiders even when the misconduct is gender-based and unlawful.
These Cases Are Not Accidents — They Are Architecture
The Yates Report provides the structure.
These cases provide the proof.
Each one demonstrates:
Supervisory impunity
Centralized narrative control
Retaliatory discipline
Data-driven obfuscation
Pseudo-scientific managerial tools
Gendered, racialized, and political bias
A culture hostile to integrity
Together, they establish a reality New York City can no longer ignore:
Jessica S. Tisch is not the source of the problem — she is the executor of its design. The NYPD under her leadership is not malfunctioning — it is operating exactly as intended.
This is the human cost of the lineage the Yates Report exposes.
And it is why the next section — Section VI: Why Mayor-Elect Mamdani Cannot Retain Jessica S. Tisch — demands absolute clarity.
VI. Why Mayor-Elect Mamdani Cannot Retain Jessica S. Tisch
Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani stands at a crossroads that every reform-minded executive eventually faces: whether to break from the institutional lineage that produced the crisis he is inheriting, or whether to absorb it in the name of political stability. His decision on Jessica S. Tisch will reveal, with more clarity than any policy memo or transition press conference, what kind of mayoralty he intends to run.
Tisch is not simply a commissioner. She is the administrative heir to a governance model shaped by Kelly, perfected under Bratton, and preserved through O’Neill, Shea, Sewell, Caban, and Donlon—a model built on centralized narrative control, discretionary discipline, downward-targeted enforcement, and selective accountability. If the Yates Report places this architecture on the record, the real-world cases of Greco, Epps, Anderson, Palaguachi, Faison, Smith, and Walls reveal how it operates in practice.
Consider the pattern as a whole:
Salvatore Greco was sacrificed to protect the Department’s political branding. His First Amendment rights were not an inconvenience—they were a threat to the NYPD’s desire to curate the political imagery of its membership. His termination was not about misconduct. It was the institutional reflex to purge an officer whose associations disrupted the preferred narrative. That is not discipline. That is ideological gatekeeping.
Lieutenant Quathisha Epps confronted a system that weaponizes silence and punishes disclosure. The retaliatory clawbacks, the manipulated overtime records, the public smearing, and the institutional cover-up following her allegations against senior leadership demonstrate the same calculus Yates describes: protect the hierarchy, regardless of the human cost. Epps’s case shows the intersection of gendered, racialized, and retaliatory enforcement that thrives under Tisch’s regime.
The retroactive purge involving Inspector Terrell Anderson represents another facet of this architecture: the use of psychological, background, and hiring processes as managerial weapons rather than evaluative tools. The NYPD’s attempt to erase officers who had already served the public mirrors the same disregard for constitutional safeguards, procedural fairness, and evidentiary integrity that Yates traces throughout disciplinary operations.
Frankie Palaguachi encountered the Department’s pseudo-scientific machinery—the transition from RIAH to EIA testing—deployed not for public safety but to maintain institutional dominance through unreviewable, racially disparate tools. The collapse of RIAH did not prompt reform; it prompted rebranding. Tisch did not dismantle this apparatus—she expanded it.
Deputy Chief Winston Faison is the embodiment of what happens when a member of the rank challenges fiscal waste, insider favoritism, and the misuse of public resources. COIB was not a neutral entity—it was a delivery system for administrative retaliation. Faison’s case illustrates the NYPD’s doctrine that integrity becomes misconduct once it pierces the political interests of the inner circle.
Detective Specialist Jaenice Smith faced retaliatory discipline after asserting her rights under disability law and demanding reasonable accommodation. Her case exposes the Department’s deep hostility toward officers who invoke legal protections, especially women of color whose medical needs are framed as liabilities rather than obligations. Under Tisch, the laws protecting disabled employees are not applied—they are resented.
Captain Gabrielle Walls confronted a culture where sexual harassment is not an aberration but an administrative irritant, managed not through discipline but through reprisal. Her claims reveal a disciplinary structure that protects serial harassers, buries credible allegations, and punishes complainants through assignment manipulation, retaliatory documentation, and career sabotage.
Taken together, these cases are not disparate scandals. They are the living expression of the very architecture the Yates Report describes. They show how Tisch’s NYPD uses:
narrative control to manage public perception;
data obfuscation to avoid accountability;
retaliatory enforcement to silence internal critics;
politicized discipline to protect favored leadership;
pseudo-science to justify discriminatory outcomes;
managerial discretion to erase careers without due process.
This is not a system Tisch inherited reluctantly. It is a system she operates expertly.
If Mayor-elect Mamdani retains her, he does more than keep a commissioner. He validates the lineage that produced every single one of these failures. He endorses the idea that governance is managed through political optics, not legal obligations. He signals that retaliation, selective enforcement, and administrative opacity are compatible with his vision of public safety.
A mayor cannot reform the NYPD while retaining the commissioner who represents the culmination of its longest-running dysfunction.
Retaining Tisch is not neutrality.
It is alignment.
And it is a choice New York cannot afford.
VII. Conclusion: Reform Requires Breaking the Lineage
New York City stands at a moment of institutional reckoning. The Yates Discipline Report exposes a disciplinary framework engineered to fail, a structure that has perfected the art of protecting misconduct while punishing integrity. The cases of Greco, Epps, Anderson, Palaguachi, Faison, Smith, and Walls prove that this is not a theoretical model—it is the day-to-day lived reality within the nation’s largest police force.
Tisch is not the root cause of this system, nor is she a rogue outlier. She is the executor of a long-standing doctrine—refined under Kelly, expanded under Bratton, preserved under O’Neill and Shea, tolerated under Sewell and Caban, and now masked behind the rhetoric of modernization. Her administration has demonstrated the same hallmarks: centralized control, retaliatory discipline, selective enforcement, and a deep aversion to transparency.
For Mayor-elect Mamdani, the decision is not simply whether to retain a commissioner. It is whether to inherit the system that created this crisis or dismantle it at its apex.
Reform requires more than new policies. It requires breaking the lineage.
If the new administration begins with continuity, it begins with compromise. If it begins with the preservation of Tisch’s authority, it begins with the preservation of the architecture she represents. And if it begins by accepting the narrative that selective enforcement, administrative secrecy, and retaliatory governance are unavoidable, then nothing that follows can be called reform.
The public deserves more. Officers who act with integrity deserve more. Survivors of harassment, victims of retaliation, and communities policed under flawed metrics deserve more.
New York cannot continue to operate a disciplinary system designed to suppress truth and protect power. The first step in dismantling that system is unmistakable:
Mayor-elect Mamdani must not retain Tisch.
To keep her is to preserve the lineage.
To remove her is to break it.
The future of public safety depends on making the right choice.
Read: Report to the Court On Police Misconduct and Discipline – James Yates