The Chief
Adams: Robert Tucker can steer department through challenges
BY RICHARD KHAVKINE | August 12, 2024
Robert S. Tucker, an attorney by training who heads a city-based security and investigative services company, was appointed FDNY commissioner by Mayor Eric Adams Monday.
Tucker, 54, succeeds Laura Kavanagh, whose rocky 29-month tenure at the helm of the nation’s largest and busiest fire department concluded Aug. 7.
Like his predecessor, Tucker, the chairman and CEO of T&M Protection Resources, has never been a firefighter. But he nonetheless has close ties to the FDNY, his first dating to 1985 when, as a teenager, he was hired to work in the FDNY’s communications offices, which were then located in Central Park.
Fire and EMS unions welcomed her resignation. At least one was also lukewarm about Tucker’s appointment.
“Someone needs to inform him that he represents the largest ems system in the nation,” Oren Barzilay, the president of FDNY EMS Local 2507, which represents 4,100 FDNY EMTs, paramedics, and fire inspectors, said in an emailed statement.
Barzilay was expressing his annoyance that Tucker did not reference those titles during his Randall’s Island remarks this morning.
“He also needs to be reminded that he represents fire prevention inspectors. He should have given the same praise to them,” Barzilay continued, adding that Tucker gave more props to the NYPD than he did to the inspectors. “Once again, it goes to show that things will never change in the fdny. Ems and FPIs will always be second-class, stepchildren.”