Ex-Police Commissioner Ray Kelly says Mayor Bill de Blasio "ran against the police" during his mayoral campaign.
Photo: David McGlynn (left), AP
De Blasio swept away stop-and-frisk — a policy police brass instituted in 1990 to let cops search and detain anyone they suspected of committing a crime — as a sop to his core supporters as soon as he took over in City Hall, Kelly says in a scathing critique of the mayor’s law-enforcement policies.
“And who benefited most from our successes?” Kelly writes. “The very people the de Blasio campaign were reportedly speaking for, young minority males especially.”
Kelly chided Manhattan federal Judge Shira Scheindlin for helping de Blasio win the primary thanks to her “disturbing, highly offensive” decision describing stop-and-frisk as unconstitutional and calling for reforms.
“What really burned me up though, one of many things, from a tiny number of incidents, cherry-picked from millions, Judge Scheindlin had pinned the whole police department as a racist institution,” he writes.
He calls the decision “bad science, bad judgement, bad policy, and on a human level personally wrong.”
“This was a product of a transparently cynical collaboration among an agenda-driven academic, a crafty plaintiff’s attorney and a judge who already made up her mind.”
Kelly saved his harshest criticism for de Blasio’s campaign rhetoric.
He excoriated de Blasio for treating cops as “cartoonish villains” and using that rhetoric to eke out a victory with a “narrow slice” of voters.
“I personally resent the implications of de Blasio’s false narrative,” he writes. “I knew the truth — that our policies targeted reported crimes. We didn’t target people based on their skin color.”
“Bill de Blasio didn’t only run against the only candidates in the race to replace Mike Bloomberg,” Kelly adds. “He also ran against the police.”
[. . .]
And he chastised the Ferguson, Mo., police department for mishandling its investigation into Officer Darren Wilson’s shooting of Michael Brown, even though Wilson was cleared of any misconduct.
“They failed to release information in a timely fashion, they had far too many talking to the media, delivering confusing, conflicting reports,” he writes.
And when cops left Brown’s body in the street for hours, they “contributed to the rush to judgment against Darren Wilson,” Kelly says.
But he blasted pols who tolerate lax enforcement of the law.
“If we ease up on the things that made us successful, if we bow too much to the political pressures of the day, we are going to see more young people die and more young lives lost before they have had a chance to live,” Kelly writes.
http://nypost.com/2015/08/30/ray-kelly-blasts-de-blasios-false-narrative-in-new-memoir/
Kelly’s rage: De Blasio’s false narrative about cops endangers NYC
By Aaron Short
New York Post
August 30, 2015 | 6:00am
