“She’s the lady for the job,” Adams declared as he appeared with Sewell at a information convention in her native NY city borough of Queens.
“She carried together with her all through her profession a sledgehammer and he or she crushed each glass ceiling that was put in her approach,” Adams mentioned. “At the moment, she has crashed and destroyed the ultimate one we want in New York Metropolis.”
Sewell, who serves because the Nassau County Police Chief of Detectives, would be the third Black individual to function New York Police Division commissioner. The 49-year-old will exchange Dermot Shea. She’ll start when Adams takes workplace January 1.
Adams praised Sewell for her “emotional intelligence,” describing her as “calm, collected, assured” and somebody who had risen by the ranks.
It has been many years since a Black individual ran the NYPD, with Benjamin Ward and Lee Brown, who served within the Nineteen Eighties and Nineties, previous Sewell. She is going to inherit a police division in flux. The NYPD has struggled to maintain crime down a couple of years after reaching file lows.
The rise, significantly in shootings and killings, is a part of a nationwide pattern within the wake of the pandemic.
Sewell mentioned she shall be “laser-focused on violent crime,” with a selected emphasis on gun crimes.
“We’re in a pivotal second in New York as our metropolis faces the dual problem of public security and police accountability. They don’t seem to be mutually unique,” Sewell mentioned earlier right now.
Adams, the cofounder of 100 Blacks in Legislation Enforcement Who Care, an advocacy group that sought prison justice reform and spoke out in opposition to police brutality, has pledged new methods to battle crime, together with the return of foot patrols.
He has pushed again in opposition to progressive calls to defund the police and has defended the controversial stop-and-frisk police technique as a useful gizmo that has been abused. He has additionally pledged to diversify the NYPD’s ranks.
Amongst about 35,000 uniformed members of the division, about 45% are white, 30% are Hispanic, 15% are Black and 10% are Asian.
Sewell was named Nassau’s Chief of Detectives in September 2020 overseeing a workers of about 350 folks. The NYPD has about 35,000 officers.
