New Commissioner Forces at Least Four Top Cops to Retire From N.Y.P.D.

At least four high-ranking New York Police Department officials, all with decades of experience, have been told to retire immediately, according to a senior official and a retired official with knowledge of the decision.

The moves were part of a shake-up of the department’s upper echelon that Commissioner Edward Caban, who ascended to the top job last month, announced on Friday. The commissioner said in his announcement that he had accepted the resignations of several senior executives without providing names or an exact number.

“We owe them our deepest thanks,” Commissioner Caban said in a statement.

The executives, according to the two officials, include James Essig, who has been chief of detectives since 2021; Kim Royster, the chief of transportation; Eugene Whyte, an executive director in the communications unit; and Christopher McCormack, the assistant chief of detectives. The four were told to leave their offices by Monday, the officials said.

Shortly before issuing his announcement, Commissioner Caban sent an email to rank-and-file officers in which he said he would identify the officials who had resigned after their retirements had been formalized.

He described the departures as part of his responsibility “for building the strongest possible team of executives to confront an array of 21st-century challenges.”

The commissioner asked officers to “embrace these changes as we step into a future that is as bright as it is promising.”

“We have the right people, in the right spots, doing the right things and I could not be more proud,” he said.

In his public statement, the commissioner said he had appointed “several executives to key positions” with the help of Tania Kinsella, the first deputy commissioner and Jeffrey B. Maddrey, the chief of department.

“This work will continue in the coming days,” he said in the statement.

As in any large organization, it is common for a new police commissioner to create his own leadership team, even though such a move can mean purging of longtime leaders.

But several of the Police Department executives who were told to resign were well-liked and well-established officials who had held their positions under several commissioners.

Chief Essig, who was appointed to the position by Commissioner Dermot F. Shea and remained in the job under Commissioner Keechant Sewell, is a four-decade veteran of the department who had previously presided as commanding officer of several high-crime precincts.

He was a fixture at news conferences, regularly briefing the media on high-profile cases and, earned praise as an innovative thinker and an early adopter of a policing program that focused on investigating the primary causes of violence in crime-ridden neighborhoods.

Chief Royster was appointed to her position in 2015 by Commissioner William J. Bratton, making her the first Black woman to reach that rank in the department’s history.

A widely respected police executive, she joined the department in 1984 as a civilian and later became an officer. She was put in charge of supervising patrols of the city’s streets and highways in 2020.

Shortly after Ms. Sewell was announced as the commissioner in December 2021 in a move that made her the first woman to hold the job, Chief Royster was asked what it felt like to hear the news.

“It’s amazing. It’s refreshing,” she said during an interview with WPIX. “It’s inspiring. I look forward to us working together.”

Ms. Sewell resigned in June, 18 months after her appointment.