By Brett Gillin
New York City mayor Bill de Blasio is under fire yet again, this time with former police commissioner Ray Kelly taking aim at his and current commissioner Bill Bratton’s policing policies. According to Kelly, who would know a thing or two about being the police commissioner since he was the longest serving commissioner in history, the current regime’s policies are overly reactive and will lead to an increase in crime.
Kelly’s major point covers how New York police officers, along with many other departments throughout the nation, are being asked (or at least they are receiving signals) to drop any kind of proactive policing policies in the wake of the police protests that have gripped the nation this year. Instead, they are being told to wait for the crime to actually occur before responding to any situations. This is especially true in New York City, where the controversial “stop and frisk” policy has been all but eliminated by the current leadership, according to the New York Post.
Kelly went on the record with Maria Bartiromo on the Fox Business channel to state his case for the reimplementation of proactive policing policies. “A lot of the signals that’ve been given to police officers, certainly here [in New York] and in the other cities, is, ‘Don’t engage in proactive policing. Be reactive. Wait for that 911 call to come in.’”
Earlier this month, Mayor de Blasio held a Q&A in which he addressed the crime trends in New York, and specifically the spike in murders since he took office. As you can read from the full transcript on NYC.gov, de Blasio claims that this increase in killings “has occurred in a small number of precincts, and has been primarily because of gang and crew-related [shootings].”
“For people to say ‘Oh, they’re only gang members,’ you know, I thought all lives matter. That was a very strange signal from this administration, here in this city and to say, ‘Well it’s only in 10 precincts,’ and ‘You don’t have to worry your pretty little head about it,’” Kelly explained.
Kelly, and many other, point to a direct correlation between the reduction in ‘stop and frisk’ and other proactive policies and the increase in violent deaths. After all, if police are using their own intuition and stopping suspected gang members to see if they have weapons, it stands to reason that these crimes could be, at least partially, prevented.
“I think you see a certain hesitancy on the part of police to engage in what I call, what a lot of people call, proactive policing. For over two decades, New York City has been made safer as a result of proactive policing, police using their own initiative,” Kelly told Fox.
When Kelly was asked how to curb the increasing crime rates, his answer was simple: go back to the ways that worked. “Going back to the Bloomberg administration, where we had a record low number of murders in our last year, record low number of shootings.”
