NEW YORK • New York City’s new mayor says he picked Keechant Sewell as the city’s first female police commissioner partly because of her poise in handling a mock crisis he threw at her in the interview process.

Within hours of her Jan. 1 swearing-in, Sewell was confronted with a real one: an officer shot outside a police station while sleeping in his car between shifts.

“It was a whirlwind weekend, quite busy,” Sewell, 49, said in one of her first interviews as the leader of the nation’s largest police force, a department grappling with a recent rise in violent crime and continued fallout from a reckoning on police misconduct.

Sewell rushed to the hospital where Officer Keith Wagenhauser was in surgery to remove bullet fragments from his head. She told reporters the officer was lucky to be alive. In the mock scenario a few weeks earlier, she’d been asked to hold a news conference about a hypothetical police shooting.

Introducing Sewell as his choice last month, Mayor Eric Adams said the longtime Long Island police official was “calm, collected, confident” and had the “emotional intelligence needed to lead at this challenging and hopeful time in our city.”

“I think leadership prepares you to be able to tackle anything that comes your way,” Sewell told the AP. “I look forward to what I can learn from the NYPD and being able to bring what I already have to the table.”

Sewell’s baptism by fire continued with a Monday briefing at police headquarters on a planned gang takedown the next day — the first big arrest operation of her tenure — and a news conference Tuesday with Adams and the Brooklyn district attorney.

On Thursday, she and Adams were together again, joining Gov. Kathy Hochul to discuss putting more police in the subways. Adams, a former police captain, has given outsize attention to his old department in his first week on the job, accompanying Sewell to events and addressing officers one morning at roll call.

Sewell spent her entire policing career in suburban Nassau County before becoming the NYPD’s first outside leader in more than two decades. She is also the third Black person to lead the department. Sewell said she brings “a fresh perspective” to the job while also acknowledging the department’s “incredible sense of tradition.”

Sewell said she spent the weeks leading up to her swearing-in speaking with everyone from street level officers to former top brass. She also named two NYPD veterans as her top deputies: Edward Caban, the new first deputy commissioner and Kenneth Corey, the new chief of department.

Sitting in the NYPD’s Theodore Roosevelt Room, with a bust of the former president and police commissioner to her right and portraits of him lining the walls, Sewell spoke about her priorities and the challenges of policing a city of 8.8 million people.

“First and foremost, I want the city to be safer,” Sewell said. “I want there to be a better quality of life. I want the police department to collaborate with the community, because they’re part of the community.”

Sewell started with the Nassau County Police Department as a patrol officer in 1997, then became a precinct commander, head of major cases, a top hostage negotiator and finally chief of detectives, where she oversaw a staff of about 350 — about 1% the size of the NYPD’s unformed ranks.

Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell speaks after a gang bust in the Brooklyn borough of New York this week. Sewell spent her entire policing career in suburban Long Island before recently becoming New York City’s first police commissioner from outside the department in over two decades.

the associated press