Incoming New York City Mayor Eric Adams is expected to announce on Wednesday that he is appointing a woman to serve as the police commissioner for the first time in the NYPD’s 176-year history.
Keechant Sewell, 49, who currently serves as the Nassau County Chief of Detectives, will also be just the city’s third black police commissioner after Benjamin Ward served from 1984 to 1989 under Mayor Ed Koch, and Lee Brown served from 1990 to 1992 under Mayor David Dinkins.
She is expected to take office on January 1, taking over for outgoing commissioner Dermot Shea, amid an increase in violent crime and low morale amongst police officers after years of outgoing Mayor Bill de Blasio’s anti police reforms.
‘I’m here to meet the moment,’ Sewell told the New York Post, adding: ‘I’m very humbled to even be considered for this and it’s an extraordinary opportunity.
‘And I take it very seriously, the historic nature of this.’
Keechant Sewell, 49, will be the next police commissioner of the NYPD after serving as the Nassau County Chief of Detectives
Sources familiar with incoming mayor Eric Adams’ decision to appoint her to the role say he was impressed by Sewell’s ’emotional intelligence’ she displayed during her interview. Adams is pictured here attending West Side Story on November 29
The decision to appoint Sewell to the top-cop role was a ‘gut choice’ for Adams, sources told the Post, who has vowed for months to appoint a woman to the post.
‘Keechant Sewell is a proven crime fighter with the experience and the emotional intelligence to deliver both the safety New Yorkers need and the justice they deserve,’ Adams said in a statement to the Post.
‘Chief Sewell will wake up every day laser-focused on keeping New Yorkers safe and improving our city,’ he continued, ‘and I am thrilled to have her at the helm of the NYPD.’
Adams’ team searched nationwide for the best candidate, the Post reports, interviewing dozes of female officers, including one-time Police Chief Carmen Best, former Newark Chief Ivonne Roman and Philadelphia Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw.
But sources say Adams was most impressed by Sewell’s ’emotional intelligence’ she displayed during her interview, which capped off with an hours-long press conference about an apparently unarmed black man being shot by a white cop.
People familiar with the interview process told the Post she projected a calm confidence during the fake news conference and was able to connect with the community as she spoke.
Sewell was born in Long Island City, Queens where she lived the first few years of her life in public housing, the Post reports.
She later moved to Corona and Jamaica, Queens, where she found a mentor in a retired NYPD cop named John Wesley Pierce she called ‘Pop Pop.’ Together with her father who was a US Marine, he taught her the meaning of ‘service and honor.’
‘He always took the time to talk to me about what it means to be a person who cared about the communities and those around them,’ she said of Pierce, who retired in 1968 and died in 2017.
In November, Sewell, second from right, was named Nassau County’s Law Enforcement Person of the Year at the 47th Annual Law Enforcement Night
Sewell, right, was among the first Nassau County detectives to achieve First Grade Detective
She is pictured fifth from right being sworn in as Patrol Deputy Chief in 2017
Sewell now lives in Valley Stream, on the border of Nassau County and Queens, and serves in the Nassau County Police Department.
In 2017, she was sworn in as Patrol Deputy Chief, and she helped create and run the police department’s Professional Standards Bureau, which oversaw the agency’s Internal Affairs division.
She was promoted in September 2020 to Chief of Detectives in Nassau County, becoming the first black woman to reach the rank in the county.
In November, she was also named Nassau County’s Law Enforcement Person of the Year at the 47th Annual Law Enforcement Night for her work overseeing 351 uniformed officers.
‘She’s had a meteoric rise,’ Adams’ spokesman Evan Thies told the Post, noting that Sewell trained with the FBI to be the county’s chief hostage negotiator, and received counterterrorism training at the FBI Academy in Quantio, Virginia.
He added that Sewell also serves on the New York-New Jersey Joint Terrorism Task Force.
Sewell will be replacing outgoing NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea, pictured at a press conference at the Macys Thanksgiving Day Parade Balloon Inflation Celebration
Sewell’s appointment comes amid soaring crime rates and an increase in shooting incidents not seen since the mid-2000s
In a sit-down interview with the Post, Sewell said she will be ‘absolutely focused on crime,’ claiming ‘violent crime is the number one priority.’
From November 29 to December 5, NYPD statistics show, murders were up 1.4 percent when compared to last year, and grand larceny from autos was up a whopping 14.1 percent.
A report released by the department just last week also concluded overall crime increased 21.3 percent in November 2021, when compared to November 2020, with robberies increasing 24 percent and felony assaults increasing 11 percent.
It also noted: ‘Shootings have persisted in pockets of the city, increasing both in 2020 through November of 2021 to levels not seen since the mid-2000s.
‘For this past November, citywide shooting incidents have experienced an uptick of 2.6 percent when compared to last year and rose 2 percent year-to-date.’
When asked how she would address the shooting epidemic, Sewell simply said: ‘I want to actually take a look at what’s working in the city and what’s not working,’ adding that she wants a ‘full assessment of what’s happening in the city right now’ to ‘come up with a strategy.’
She said she hopes the assessment can happen ‘very quickly’ through ‘aggressive meetings scheduled both internally with the police department and the community.
‘I’m hoping to kind of hit the ground running beginning January 1,’ Sewell said, noting: ‘I’ve been policing for 25 years so I’ve actually got some sort of grasp on what I think works and what doesn’t work.’
Sewell also defended the use of undercover agents to combat gun and gang violence in her interview with the Post saying ‘plain clothes units work.
‘They are able to be in places where they are not able to be easily recognized and if you use a surgical approach, use well-trained officers and know what their objectives are you can get measurable results.’
Adams has vowed to bring back an anticrime unit after it was disbanded by Police Commissioner Dermot Shea last year.
But she was also reportedly critical of how plain-clothes officers work in the city, telling Adams’ camp ‘they were doing it wrong.’
‘If you start busting heads they [the community] are never going to work with you,’ Sewell said, according to a source familiar with the conversation.
She also said she supports the broken windows theory of policing, which holds that if someone commits a petty offense like smashing a window and nobody fixes it, another person may be tempted to break another window or commit a more serious crime.
‘I think you have to take a look at quality of life crimes because sometimes they lead to something else,’ she said.
‘You have to make sure you’re using the broken window theory, the enforcement of those low-level crimes, in a way that’s not discriminatory, in a way that addresses the problem and doesn’t actually over police it in some respect.’