Kelly Discusses Recent Violence, Defends Stop-And-Frisk On ICH
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In an interview with Inside City Hall’s Errol Louis, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly discussed the recent spate of violence while defending the police department’s controversial stop-and-frisk policy. NY1's Josh Robin filed the following report.On "Inside City Hall" Wednesday, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said that elected officials are inadequately responsive to the bloodshed in their own neighborhoods while simultaneously all too eager to criticize a department trying to staunch it.
"I think they're concerned about it, but I think they're also somewhat myopic," he said.
In an interview with Inside City Hall’s Errol Louis, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly discussed the recent spate of violence while defending the police department’s controversial stop-and-frisk policy. Watch the full interview here.
Kelly did offer one qualifier Wednesday. Clergy and community leaders, he said, are helping. But politicians?
"They're not out there talking about the problem," he said. "They're not out there talking about 'hey, we have a lot of young men of color shooting each other.' You don't hear that spoken about openly. You do hear unhappiness with the tactics that we use."
Chief among those tactics is stop-and-frisk, which is now the subject of increasing court challenges.
Kelly says the department is modifying the procedure, which swoops up a large number of innocent New Yorkers.
But he says the apparent increase in stop-and-frisks is due to better record keeping, not necessarily more actions.
Kelly also gave no indication he was backing away from deploying it.
"The population of the city has gone up, yet during the 10 Bloomberg years, I'll call them, we've had 5,628 fewer murders than we had in the previous decade," he said.
Kelly also talked about other topics, including charges under his watch the NYPD inflated the number of terror plots it stopped.
"What we have said, and I've said you can check all of my speeches on this issue, that there have been 14 plots against the city," he said. "And as a result of a combination of luck, sheer luck, good work on the part of the NYPD, good work on the part of our federal partners, they have been thwarted. They have been averted."