With the high-stakes New York mayoral contest hanging in the balance, the largest police department in the country may find itself caught between the promise of reform and the stability that followed a couple of scandal-scarred years.

If Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani wins the election, his choice to lead the NYPD through a period of political transition is already in the job: current Commissioner Jessica Tisch.

While Tisch has managed to earn praise from representatives from both political parties as well as business leaders, her stance on various key issues, from the use of the NYPD’s gang database to the deployment of a specialized unit that responds to protests and major events, stands in opposition to what Mamdani has promised during the campaign.

Despite their stark differences in policing strategies, Mamdani has said each hire he makes for his new administration would be in lock step with his vision for the future. Tisch has declined to publicly address the prospect of staying on as police commissioner, but Mamdani has said he is confident she would accept the position, leaving former police officials and advocates to wonder how both would coexist.

While the New York City police commissioner technically answers to and is appointed by the mayor, a savvy police executive can always carve out some autonomy despite an administration’s reform promises.

“She has leverage over him at the moment, and leverage in the sense of negotiating,” former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton said of Tisch, a former sanitation department commissioner. “I think she would be willing to stay if some of her conditions, whatever they may be, be met.”

Mamdani officially announced his intention to keep Tisch as commissioner from a debate stage on October 22.

“I make the decision to retain Commissioner Tisch not only to build on the results that we’ve seen under her tenure, but also to deliver on the agenda that I’ve been running on,” Mamdani told CNN.

In response, Tisch said she was staying out of the fray.

“As I’ve said many times, it is not appropriate for the Police Commissioner to be directly involved or to seem to be involved in electoral politics,” Tisch said in a statement.

Flashback to over a decade ago

Public safety has been a major issue in the hotly contested mayor’s race that pits Democratic socialist Mamdani against former New York Gov. and independent candidate Andrew Cuomo and the Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa. Cuomo and Sliwa each have said they would keep Tisch as police commissioner.

Judging by the early voting numbers, New Yorkers are already flocking to the polls.

Throughout the course of the campaign, Mamdani has moderated some of his most controversial stances on policing, distancing himself from a previous call to defund the police and apologizing for calling police officers “racist” and “wicked.”

Bratton, an experienced police executive who ran the NYPD twice, was in a similar position in which Tisch may find herself when he came back for the second time during the start of Bill de Blasio’s administration in 2014.

While de Blasio was known as a progressive who rankled many of the rank-and-file, Bratton said they shared the same vision when it came to incorporating neighborhood policing, de-escalation training, more police officers on the street and a robust budget to