When Eric Adams is sworn in as the next Mayor of New York City he will have a lot on his plate to take care of. But one of the earliest and biggest decisions awaiting him is the task of selecting and installing the next NYPD Police Commissioner who will face the challenge of picking up the pieces of what’s left of the city’s police department after eight ruinous years under the thumb of Bill de Blasio. Mayors typically find and appoint commissioners who share their thinking as much as possible or will at least run the operation as if they do. The current commissioner, Dermot Shea, is no exception, and the NYPD has continued to lose officers and morale under his tenure.

As Adams said this weekend, he tends to be “conservative” when it comes to law enforcement. He wants to restore the strength and ability of the police to catch the bad guys and keep them in jail. So he’ll want a commissioner who shares that vision and leads in that fashion. But according to a couple of insiders that CBS New York spoke to, Adams may be preparing to go in a totally different direction. Some of the candidates on his shortlist have never even been cops.

Here’s a provocative thought as Mayor-elect Eric Adams mulls what is arguably one of his most important appointments — could New York City get a civilian police commissioner?

As CBS2’s Marcia Kramer reported Thursday, it at least seems like it’s a possibility.

Adams has narrowed his search for a police commissioner to about six or eight women. Sources told Kramer that the list includes several who have run departments in other cities, a top-ranking NYPD chief, and candidates who do not have policing backgrounds.

Since it will still be weeks before Adams takes office and we don’t know all that much about his style yet, it’s tough to say whether he really has a shortlist ready to go or if he’s just floating trial balloons or looking to stir up the media. Either way, there have only been one or two specific names mentioned thus far, while everything else appears to just be broken down into demographic categories.

Even that’s a bit disturbing, however. Assuming these sources are accurate, Adams is only considering women for the position. I have no problem with a female police commissioner and there are plenty of qualified ones out there. But are you really dedicated to getting the best person for the job if you eliminate 50% (or more) of the potential candidates right out of the gate? Perhaps Adams has been hanging around his new Democratic friends for too long.

The bigger issue I wanted to touch on was the idea of putting someone with no police experience in as the top cop in Gotham. It’s an idea that Andrew Yang floated during his failed bid to become the next mayor. (Following his failed bid to become the next president.) At least in theory I can understand the motivation. It’s an attempt to mimic the separation of power over the military by making the Commander in Chief a civilian. But this really isn’t an exact parallel, is it?

If you’re going to bring in a civilian who’s never walked a beat to be in charge of and give orders to tens of thousands of cops, they will certainly need a lot of indirect experience and familiarity with the responsibilities and challenges that face police officers on a daily basis. They will also need the ability to empathize with the unique needs and pressures that come with a life in law enforcement. Perhaps Adams was giving a nod to that idea when he said the next commissioner “must be really emotionally intelligent and have the empathy and compassion and only should they have worn a gun belt, but if they didn’t, they should understand that we need to boost morale.”

That was a rather confusing sentence to try to parse out, but I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt and interpret it to mean that the candidate would need to have “empathy and compassion” for the police as well as the community. The need to boost morale on the force should be obvious.

The bottom line is that there has been so much focus on “police reform” under de Blasio that nobody seemed to really notice that the police were being driven out of the city and turning in their guns and badges. If a new commissioner is brought in with nothing but a focus on “reforming” the police, we’ll be right back where we are now. And if that’s the case, the new mayor may not have much of a police force around to fulfill his dreams of driving the crime rates back down.