As Sewell leaves, Adams appoints Ally as interim NYPD commissioner

Edward Caban, the first deputy commissioner of the New York Police Department and an ally of Mayor Eric Adams, will become the interim chief of police, the mayor said Friday.

“It’s a natural process for the first deputy commissioner to fall in line until we make a standing announcement as to who the commissioner will be,” Mr. Adams said during a radio appearance on 1010 WINS. “And we will look for a suitable replacement.”

The announcement coincided with the last day in office of Keechant L. Sewell, the department’s first female commissioner, who abruptly announced her resignation two weeks ago after discovering her powers had been curtailed by the mayor and his allies.

Her departure is part of a wave of senior officials leaving the fledgling government. The mayor has also lost or is losing his chief housing officer, Jessica Katz, in the middle of a housing crisis; its social services commissioner, Gary Jenkins, in the midst of a record homelessness crisis; his chief attorney, his communications director, his chief efficiency officer, his buildings commissioner, and his chief of staff.

Mr. Caban will lead the department of 36,000 uniformed officers and 19,000 civilian employees as the mayor conducts a national search for a permanent successor to Ms. Sewell. A spokesman for the mayor declined to give details of the criteria that will determine the mayor’s search. But Mr. Adams, a former police chief, is known to have strong feelings about police work and about the scrupulous management of his departments.

He likes to repeat a saying he says he learned from his mother: “If you don’t inspect what you expect, it’s all suspicious.”

“Some people might call that a micromanager,” he said after Ms Sewell resigned. “I call it being the mayor of a city you love.”

Mr. Caban, a father of two young children whose own father was a detective with the New York City Transit Police Department, began his career in the Bronx in 1991. He was picked for the department’s second-highest job, not by Ms. Sewell, but by Mr. Adams, according to various current and former officials.

His track record is not without blemish. In 1997, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, a city oversight agency, recommended that he be punished after two officers were charged with berating and threatening a woman in front of her young son in Harlem. Mr. Caban, a sergeant at the time, “abused his authority,” the board said, when he refused to give the women their names.

Still, he rose through the ranks. In 2005 he was promoted to captain and in 2006 he became commander of the 25th Precinct, the department said.

That same year, the board again discovered that he had abused his authority as captain when he apprehended a man on a Manhattan street during its robbery investigation. When the man refused to identify himself, Mr. Caban arrested him for disorderly conduct. The man was later released.

When Mr. Caban’s temporary assignment was announced, Mrs. Sewell was spending her final hours at work. She spoke to an auditorium packed with police department personnel receiving promotions, as well as their families and friends, at the police academy in College Point, Queens.

It was probably her last public appearance at the helm of the nation’s largest police department.

During her brief tenure, Ms. Sewell made a strong impression on the police constituency – advocating for renovations of precinct break rooms and proclaiming the successes and challenges of individual officers.

On Friday, she asked the police officers there to think deeply about the legacy they wanted to create.

“What are we giving back?” she asked. “What are we taking away from this calling, this mission, this responsibility? And what positive changes are we leaving behind?”

During the nearly two-hour ceremony on Friday, the audience burst into applause and cheers several times. All the while Mrs. Sewell, a wary and measured personality, sat smiling broadly. By the end, tears were streaming down her cheeks.