Add The New York Post on Google NYPD First Deputy Commissioner Tania Kinsella’s Guyanese mom always told her the “sky’s the limit” – and she was right.
Kinsella, who is No. 2 in the department behind Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, grew up in a strict West Indian home with her mom demanding she hit the books rather than meet up with friends in the Bronx at night, she said.
“Education was very big in my house,” she told The Post as the city prepared for the West Indian Day Parade in Brooklyn on Sept. 7. “While my peers were hanging out, I had to be home.”
Her mom worked extra shifts as a nurse to pay for her to attend Columbia University for a writing program during high school, she said. Later, she graduated from John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
But she never expected to advance as high as she did, she said.
“It’s a huge accomplishment as a person, as a woman, as someone who started as a police officer,” said the 45-year-old, first-generation officer, whose father was from Jamaica. “Never in my wildest dreams.”
But she knew when she joined the NYPD in 2003 and then worked on a foot post in Stapleton, Staten Island, that she wanted to move up, she said.
So she took the sergeant’s test and then the lieutenant’s and then the captain’s tests, passing each one.
When she became a lieutenant, she was transferred to the 13th Precinct in Gramercy Park, Manhattan, for a year and then returned to the 120th Precinct on Staten Island as a community affairs lieutenant.
“I was always a very good cop, very proactive,” she said. “When I became the community affairs lieutenant, it shaped me into a well-rounded detective.”
When she was promoted to captain she became the commanding officer of PSA 1, which is in public housing in the Brooklyn South Patrol Borough, and remained there for over two years.
“It was wonderful because I got to meet a community outside of Staten Island,” she recalled. “It was intimidating to me, at first. But I was just myself. I came in as genuine, authentic and transparent.”
From there, she was transferred back home to become the commander of the 120 in St. George where she had started her career 17 years earlier. She has raised her 11-year-old son and 15-year-old daughter in the same North Shore area.
“Imagine being in charge of public safety in the command where you’re raising your family,” she said. “Unfortunately for the cops, I was never off.”
In 2022, she was appointed executive officer to the NYPD’s Chief of Patrol at police headquarters in Lower Manhattan.
Former Mayor Eric Adams tapped her for her current post the following year.
Kinsella plans to march in the parade that runs 3.5 miles down Eastern Parkway through Crown Heights on Monday with thousands of other New Yorkers.
“I’m a West Indian woman and I’m very proud of that,” she said. “Being a police officer was one of the best decisions I made in my life.”
Her mother, meanwhile, returns to Guyana often to visit family and brags about her daughter, Kinsella said.
“She tells her Guyanese network how proud she is of me,” Kinsella said. “She always told me ‘The sky’s the limit.'”
