What a remarkable vote of confidence for New York City’s police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, has just been brought in by the Quinnipiac University poll released today. The headline, in the Quinipiac’s own press release, is that, in the wake of the attempted car-bombing in Times Square, voters in the city are “split on whether the city is prepared for attack.” Some 69% of voters are “very worried” or “somewhat worried” about another terrorist attack in the city, the poll reports, but they are split, 49% to 45%, on whether the city is prepared for another attack. What they’re not split on, what they agree on, is the police commissioner and the police. They get astonishingly high approval ratings.

This strikes us as newsworthy given all the controversy that is being reported, in the Times and elsewhere, over, among other things, the police stop and frisk program. The fact is that the Quinnipiac finds that 70% of New Yorkers approve of how Mr. Kelly is handling his job, and this approval cuts across political, borough and racial lines, with some 77% of whites voters, 68% of black voters, and 62% of Hispanic voters giving Mr. Kelly the vote of confidence. If the question is narrowed as to how the police department is handling terrorism, the approval soars to 85%, and among black and white voters the approval rate is 90%.

The newsworthiness of the poll lies in the context in which it comes — continuing signs that the city is being targeted for attack and a long campaign by the New York Civil Liberties Union over a number of police tactics, particularly stop and frisk. The sample is not of a population that lacks concern for civil liberties. On the contrary, the poll found that 65% of those sampled would prefer the government not take steps to prevent additional acts of terrorism if those steps would violate the respondent’s basic civil liberties. Even against those concerns the New York Police Department and Commissioner Kelly receive an extraordinary vote of confidence.