Salon.com > Ray Kelly

NYPD’s Ray Kelly: Blacks “understopped” by police

Thu, 02 May 2013 15:07:00 +0000

Echoing what Joan Walsh called Mayor Bloomberg's "ugly" defense of the NYPD's stop-and-frisk practice, police commissioner Ray Kelly asserted Wednesday night that African Americans are "understopped" by police. During an interview with ABC, the commissioner and the policing tactic's greatest defender, said that "African Americans are being understopped in relation to people being described as perpetrators of violent crime."

While Mayor Bloomberg has been mayor, the NYPD has carried out over 5 million stop-and-frisks. Analysis by the ACLU of official police data found that over 86 percent of the stops were of black or Latino individuals. The analysis of police data also revealed that 88 percent of the stops did not result in an arrest or summons (and of course an even smaller proportion ever lead to a prosecution, or conviction). The number of innocent people stopped alone serves as ample riposte to Kelly's suggestion that any demographic is "understopped."

The importance of Keith Ellison

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:45:00 +0000

Progressives loved seeing Rep. Keith Ellison smack down his GOP congressional colleague Peter King on "Meet the Press" Sunday, insisting that profiling Muslims in the wake of the Boston bombing is not only wrong but “ineffective law enforcement.” As Ellison warned: “Once you start saying, we’re going to dragnet or surveil a community, what you do is you ignore dangerous threats that are not in that community, and you go after people who don’t have anything to do with it.”

Of course right-wing bloggers hailed King as the winner in the debate – he wasn’t – and one sad sack even called Ellison “the jihadi Democrat.”

The fact is, we need more Keith Ellisons in Congress. Not just because he’s a great progressive voice, supporting the president but challenging him strongly on his questionable austerity politics, but also because he’s a patriotic American who’s also a Muslim. He's crucial right now.

NYPD’s Ray Kelly wanted to “instill fear” in minority youth

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 11:47:00 +0000

In the latest striking revelation about the internal mechanisms of the NYPD's stop-and-frisk practices, a New York state senator testified that police commissioner Ray Kelly once said he intended to "instill fear" in black and Latino young men with the controversial tactic.

State Sen. Eric Adams, a retired NYPD captain, took the stand Monday in the landmark Floyd vs. City of New York federal trial, which challenges the constitutionality of the racially skewed stop-and-frisk tactic. Adams told the court about a 2010 meeting between Kelly and New York's then-Gov. David Patterson. Adams, also present at the meeting, testified that the commissioner had expressly stated that black and Latino men should be targeted in police stops. Kelly, according to the city's attorney, has flatly denied making such claims.

Ryan Devereaux reported for the Guardian:

Suddenly, NYPD doesn’t love surveillance anymore

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 11:45:00 +0000

The Big Brother theory of surveillance goes something like this: pervasive snooping and monitoring shouldn't frighten innocent people, it should only make lawbreakers nervous because they are the only ones with something to hide. Those who subscribe to this theory additionally argue that the widespread awareness of such surveillance creates a permanent preemptive deterrent to such lawbreaking ever happening in the first place.

I don't personally agree that this logic is a convincing justification for the American Police State, and when I hear such arguments, I inevitably find myself confused by the contradiction of police-state proponents proposing to curtail freedom in order to protect it. But whether or not you subscribe to the police-state tautology, you have to admit there is more than a bit of hypocrisy at work when those who forward the Big Brother logic simultaneously insist such logic shouldn't apply to them or the governmental agencies they oversee.

Forget Bloomberg’s nanny state

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 15:40:00 +0000

I have seen it with my own eyes, and heard the stories of cousins, brothers and friends. Innocent of crime, guilty of no infraction, they are harassed, placed against walls, handcuffed, sometimes released, sometimes incited -- but never respected. For many African-American citizens of New York City, there is an axiomatic truth that the New York Police Department neither serves nor protects them.

This month, NYPD's controversial stop-and-frisk policy -- which entails officers regularly stopping predominantly black and Latino men and frisking them for weapons and drugs -- went on trial in federal Court. The class-action lawsuit, Floyd v. City of New York, challenges the NYPD policy on the basis that it violates the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause, and the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure. According to the Center for Constitutional Rights, the NYPD's own data show hundreds of thousands of unconstitutional stops in the past three years alone, and expert analysis of their data -- controlling for crime, neighborhood and patterns of police deployment -- has found that the mitigating factor in NYPD stops is race.

New York’s finest Islamophobes

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 20:45:00 +0000

Imagine living in a small American community, innocently minding your own business, while constantly worrying that your government is monitoring how you meet with others in your community, speak about your faith, express political views, and dress — for hints that you are a terrorist. As seen by a report released today, such harassment and violations of civil liberties are constant facts of life for American Muslims today.

The new report, Mapping Muslims, analyzes the effects of the New York Police Department (NYPD)’s infiltration into every facet of Muslim communities, from mosques, local shops, college organizations and more. The report -- released by the Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition (MACLC), the Creating Law Enforcement and Accountability Project (CLEAR) and the Asian American Legal Defense Fund (AALDEF) -- interviewed 57 Muslims, mostly living in New York City. The interviewees included high school and college students, community organizers, lawyers, teachers, shopkeepers and others.

Nine terrifying facts about America’s biggest police force

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 13:17:00 +0000

The NYPD is the biggest police force in the country, with over 34,000 uniformed officers patrolling New York's streets, and 51,000 employees overall -- more than the FBI. It has a proposed budget of $4.6 billion for 2013, a figure that represents almost 15 percent of the entire city’s budget.

NYC's population is a little over 8 million. That means that there are 4.18 police officers per 1,000 people. By comparison, Los Angeles, the second largest city in the U.S. with 3.8 million people, has only 9,895 officers--a ratio of 2.6 police per 1,000 people.

Ray Kelly is great, according to profile in friend’s magazine

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 20:20:00 +0000

According to a very thorough and convincing profile in Newsweek, New York police commissioner Ray Kelly is America's best ever terror-fighter, and he personally stops a new 9/11 from happening literally every day. He manages to constantly stop terror plots from destroying the city even though annoying "civil libertarians" and the worthless FBI are constantly getting in his way. It is, clearly, a very fair and unbiased take on the commish, that happens to be written by a guy who has known Kelly for years. And published in a magazine edited by Tina Brown, who has met the commissioner once or twice.

White police officials: “We are the real victims here”

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 19:40:00 +0000

New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and Sanford, Fla., police chief Bill Lee have both "come out" as victims of insidious prejudice. Speaking to New York Daily News sports columnist Mike Lupica, Kelly had a bit of a laugh at how upset people get over his department's policy of constant harassment of black men.

The other day, Kelly started to hear it from City Council members about his department’s aggressive efforts to reduce the ridiculously high numbers of minorities in the city being victimized by gun crimes. You probably know that fight ended quickly when Kelly went back at them asking for their own solutions.

Talking about all of it Sunday, he said, “Sometimes it sounds sometimes like people are more comfortable stereotyping me.”