A Profile in Courage

A lady with cojones.  That’s what New York City’s police commissioner Kechant Sewell is. 

She walked right into Mayor Eric Adams office this past week and said, I quit!

Sewell didn’t quit just any ordinary job.  No.  She was the first woman to head up the NYPD in its 176 year history, an African American woman at that.

Being the NYPD commissioner is to be the boss of the most famous and most powerful police force in America.  Thirty-four thousand women and men with guns plus eighteen-thousand civilians.  The next largest police department in the nation is in Chicago, with twelve-thousand cops. 

The NYPD guards sites with worldwide importance like the stock exchanges.  It protects heads of state and other high level diplomats that come to the United Nations.  Its supercomputers can access tons of data bases loaded with license plates, photos, building blueprints and much much more.  It has offices overseas, monitoring terrorists that have New York in their crosshairs.  The NYPD has all the land, sea and air capabilities of a modern army.  

In other words, if you are a law enforcement professional, being the PC is a dream job, and you usually don’t walk away from a dream job just like that.  But after a year and a half as commissioner, the 51-year old Sewell strode into Eric Adams’ office unannounced and quit.

By all accounts, she wasn’t in danger of being fired.  Mayor Adams said she could’ve been commish for as long as she wanted and said her appointment was “probably one of my proudest moments.”  By all accounts, she was a consummate professional.  Even Pat Lynch, the combative head of the patrolmen’s union, heaped praise on her, saying her leadership “will be sorely missed.”

In a short time she earned the respect of the department’s leadership and its rank and file.  No small feat. 

Since her resignation, she’s said precious little.  All she told her former boss in the Nassau County P.D. was that it was time to move on.

But here’s what I’m hearing.  Sewell was fed up with being undermined and undercut by Mayor Adams and his shadow police commissioner, Phil Banks.  Officially known as Deputy Mayor for Public Safety, Banks, an Adams crony, apparently made life for Sewell unbearable. He didn’t let her promote cops to detectives and he didn’t let her get rid of cops that weren’t cutting it.  The mayor, a former NYPD captain, also did his part, enabling underlings to go behind Sewell’s back, undercutting her authority. 

Remember, Adams and Banks are best buddies and came up through the ranks of the NYPD, Sewell was an outsider from Nassau County. 

They nitpicked how she wore her hair, how she dressed, how she spoke publicly.  Sewell should have gotten both those good old boys cancelled.  But she’s not a media hog plus she’s a bigger person than the both of them. 

However, the point of this column is not to get too far into the weeds as to why Sewell quit, or the mayor’s style of management or lack of it, but to give her huge props for quitting, and the lessons we all can learn.

I don’t know about you, but there certainly were times in my career when I wanted to walk into my boss’ office and tell him to take my job and stick it where the sun don’t shine.  I was fed up with the interference, the second guessing, the meddling.  But I had a family.  I had a mortgage.  I couldn’t afford to be unemployed.  So I put up with a lot of stuff and shut my mouth.  Maybe that’s what baby boomers were bred to do.  

On the flip side, I’m sure there were lots of my former employees and colleagues, who at some point were dying to march into my office and tell me that if I didn’t get off their backs I could take their job and shove it. 

When Commissioner Sewell told Adams she was quitting, he should have realized she just reinforced the reason he picked her in the first place, for her forthrightness and fearlessness, and he should have promised her he would dial back the backstabbing,  But he didn’t.  For a guy who prides himself on his keen eye for emotional intelligence, he certainly lacked enough of it to keep Sewell on the job.

Her resignation is a big loss for his administration, the police department and for the people of the City of New York.  

But we all should pay very close attention to what Kechant Sewell, the 45th Commissioner of the NYPD, the first woman and third African American to serve in that exalted role, did this past week.  

She had the courage to walk away from a career job, the job of a lifetime.   She had the courage to say, if you don’t give me the ability to do my job the right way, my way, then I’m leaving.  She had the courage, the confidence, the self-worth, to tell the Mayor of New York City to take a hike.

Commissioner Sewell could’ve been a quiet quitter, going through the motions, letting Adams and Banks call the shots and collecting her yearly paycheck of $243,000.

But she didn’t.  

Kechant Sewell had the guts to say, I quit!  Alas, that made me wish for some do-overs, because sometimes, when enough is enough, you just have to say, see ya!