Jessica S. Tisch, the billionaire heiress who is commissioner of the New York Police Department, had just walked into the dining hall on one of her first days at Harvard when she was accosted with an unmannerly question: How much did she weigh?

She was taken aback, but it turned out that the men’s lightweight crew team was looking for a coxswain, who shouts orders to the rowers. They needed someone both light and commanding. “They described it to me as, ‘You sit in front of the boat and you tell everyone what to do,’” she recalled in a recent interview.

It had definite appeal.

“I ended up being pretty good at it because of my personality,” she said. “I didn’t use my muscles so much. I used my voice and my brain.” In the end, she concluded, it was “quite the foreshadow” of an unlikely and remarkable career.

Commissioner Tisch, 44, is now five months into a job running the nation’s largest police department and telling nearly 50,000 civilian and uniformed employees what to do. Taking command of an agency rocked by scandals and the departure of three commissioners over two years, she has already shaken up the staff and managed her first crisis, the hunt for a man charged with assassinating a United Healthcare executive.

The question is whether a woman with three Harvard degrees, a $12 million Upper East Side duplex and no experience as a uniformed officer can succeed in one of the city’s toughest jobs. Her success will be defined in large part by how well she cleans up the battered department and how much she brings down the crime rate, both tall orders in New York.

Her task is more complicated because she reports to Mayor Eric Adams, a former police captain who until recently was under federal indictment. The mayor, who appointed Commissioner Tisch, is now the beneficiary of the Trump Justice Department, which successfully urged a judge to drop the corruption charges against him.