Former New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly isn’t holding his tongue about how he feels about law enforcement in the city since he left the NYPD. Kelly believes the city would be safer if stop-and-frisk were to return.
In a recent New Yorker magazine article interview, Kelly said that Mayor Bill de Blasio and current Commissioner Bill Bratton are going about keeping the city safe all wrong. The former top cop contends that de Blasio was able to woo voters by attacking him.
“He ran an anti-police campaign,” Kelly said in the article. “He parsed the electorate. He did it very skillfully. He aimed at the fringes.”
Bratton has said in reports that his job is a little bit harder in the aftermath of Kelly’s policies that he believes soured the relations between police and the community. Bratton, however, continues to come under fire for his own handling of cases, including the Eric Garner police killing.
“I rely on what my eyes show me,” Bratton said about his broken windows theory in the same New Yorker magazine article.
Kelly has written a new book, and he is already receiving criticism from his successor. The book, titled “Vigilance: My Life Serving America and Protecting Its Empire City,” is scheduled for release Sept. 8 and sells for $18.59.
According to Amazon.com, the book is an autobiography of sorts that also touches on Kelly’s term as police commissioner and “addresses criticisms and controversies like the so-called stop-question-and-frisk program.”
“It’s sad that former Commissioner Kelly resorted to cheap politics attacks to try and sell books,” City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito said in a statement. “The truth is Commissioner Kelly knew that stop-and-frisk as it was applied was corrosive, which is why under his command the number of stops started to plummet following pressure from communities who knew the tactic was harmful.”
During a recent interview with the MSNBC program “Morning Joe,” Bratton praised the infamous Moynihan report (by the late U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York), which detailed the problems that Black families face in America.
“Talk about being prescient about what was going to happen in Black society … [Moynihan] was right on the money,” said Bratton. “The disintegration of family, the disintegration of values.”
The police reform advocacy group Communities United for Police Reform called Bratton’s comments an insult to the community.
“Police Commissioner Bratton has now once again promoted regressive and racist views that seek to place blame for crime and other societal challenges on the ‘values’ of Black families and those of other New Yorkers of color,” stated Veronica Bayetti Flores of Communities United for Police Reform. “It’s insulting and troubling for these extreme comments to be made by a top member of city government, and his comfort in doing so speaks to the challenges our city and country still face with racism.”
Moynihan’s reported, titled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” was written by the late senator when he was assistant secretary for policy planning and research at the Labor Department, under both Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. The report concluded that the biggest hinderance to equality and Black economic progress was the lack of value of the nuclear family (where the mother and father are present) and traced the roots of Black poverty and unemployment to this conclusion as well.
Flores believes Bratton’s embrace of the report can have a negative effect on how communities are policed.
“While the rhetoric alone is unacceptable, it has real implications in how the officers under Bratton’s command perceive and treat Black and Brown New Yorkers,” said Flores. “It’s time for officials of our city government to stop this rhetoric that debases families and communities, and instead focus on addressing and repairing the damage from the decades of harmful public policy.”
Communities United for Police Reform spokesperson Joo-Hyun Kang denounced Kelly’s comments, stating that the effectiveness of stop-and-frisk doesn’t have a basis in fact.
“Ray Kelly is entitled to his own opinion,” said Kang in a statement, “but facts are facts—our communities and a majority of New Yorkers were fed up with the abusive and discriminatory stop-and-frisk practices that were counterproductive to public safety. Comparing the NYPD’s own data on the number of stops and shooting victims during the Bloomberg administration showed that its stop-and-frisk policy did not impact gun violence in any consistent and positive way, and recent data from the current administration shows that crime has only continued to go down.”
Kang also said Kelly’s comments were nothing more than a tool to help sell his new book and called his service under Mayor Michael Bloomberg “tarnished from being on the wrong side of civil rights history.”