‘Shea’ hello to your new commissioner
Incoming NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea is part new-school thinker, part throwback.
Shea, 50, who has spent more than half of his life with the department, is widely known as a dedicated proponent of CompStat and an analysis-heavy approach to finding and nipping crime trends in the bud.
“One of the things that I’m sure is already being talked about is the way in CompStat sessions he would demand more of everyone with respect . . . believing that this department and this city could do more and more to stop crime before it ever happened,”
Mayor de Blasio said Monday in a briefing revealing Shea’s elevation and Commissioner James O’Neill’s departure.
Shea also hails from a lawenforcement family, a background that has instilled in him the value of old-fashioned shoe-leather police work.
The son of Irish immigrants who settled in Sunnyside, Queens, Shea entered the Police Academy in 1991 alongside his older brother, Jim, and their cousin, Chris, he said in the press briefing.
Jim and Chris Shea have since retired, but Dermot will now lead the department — a development that he said would have surely brought a smile to his late uncle, who was also in law enforcement.
“I can assure you there is a hell of a celebration going on in heaven,” Shea said. “There was probably some Irish whiskey being spilled.”
From his start as a beat cop in the crime-plagued city of the early 1990s, Shea rose through the ranks, eventually leading the 44th and 50th precincts, both in The Bronx.
In 2014, Shea was named chief of crime control strategies and deputy commissioner for operations under then-top cop Bill Bratton, overseeing CompStat.
Last year, Shea was named chief of detectives to succeed the retiring Robert Boyce.
A Manhattan resident, Shea has three children with his wife, Serena, and one grandson.