Ray Kelly Writes the Defense <br>New York’s Finest Deserved <br>In Stop-and-Frisk Case
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
One of the tragedies of the stop-question-and-frisk case is that Police Commissioner Ray Kelly was dropped as a defendant. It would’ve been better for the city if the plaintiffs had really tried to nail his own personal navy-blue hide to the wall.
It’s not that I’m opposed to Kelly. On the contrary, I’m way over on his side of the case, which is covered in two chapters of his new memoir, “Vigilance, My Life Serving America and Protecting Its Empire City.”
The best part of this wonderful book is Kelly’s defense of the NYPD in the stop-question-and-frisk case. Early in the lawsuit, the commissioner — personally — was one of the named defendants. He was in a position to defend New York’s Finest all the way to the US Supreme Court.
Eventually, though, Kelly was dropped as a defendant. Mayor Bloomberg, too, was dropped personally as a defendant. So once Bill de Blasio was elected mayor, there was no one with standing in court to defend the men and women in blue.
There was an effort, by the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association and other unions representing the Finest, to mount a defense. But the Second Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that the unions waited too long and denied their effort to intervene.
Kelly believes (and persuasively argues in this book) that the city and its cops would have won their case had it been heard by the Second Circuit. Three of its savviest sages, after all, removed Judge Shira Scheindlin from the case for failing to maintain the appearance of impartiality.
Scheindlin had beckoned the case to her own courtroom, in effect putting her thumb on the scales of justice. Her mishandling of the case is too little appreciated for the scandal that it was. The judges who removed her spanned the ideological spectrum.
By then, however, the 2013 mayoral race was about to deliver de Blasio into City Hall. Kelly has a devastating chapter on the 2013 mayoral election, in which the Democrat ran not only against the other candidates but, as Kelly puts it, “against the police.”
Kelly calls that “a little strange at first.” He’s given to understatement. Quinnipiac’s poll reckoned the Finest had a 70 percent approval rating; Kelly’s was 75 percent. But de Blasio swept aside the moderates by playing the race card.
De Blasio is “the only one who will end a stop-and-frisk era that unfairly targets people of color,” is the way de Blasio’s son put it in the candidate’s famous ad. All this is galling to Kelly, as is the refusal of Scheindlin to admit into court evidence the NYPD had adduced to defend itself.
“Was it really plausible that the most diverse police department on earth, with officers hailing from 106 different countries and representing every imaginable race, would engage in a massive conspiracy to conduct street stops to deny minorities their Constitutional rights?” Kelly writes.
“How would such a policy be disseminated? How would it be enforced? How could it possibly be kept secret?” he asked. “In fact, we had done exactly what we said we were doing. We went where the crime was, whatever color the perpetrators turned out to be.”
In a way, the chapters on stop-question-and-frisk in this book emerge as the defense of the NYPD that the appeals courts were unable to hear. That it was Ray Kelly who made the effort to sketch the case tells a lot about him as a person.
“I consider myself a civil libertarian,” Kelly writes. “I am wary of governmental power and overreach. I believe citizens should never be subjected to harassment or unlawful invasions of privacy. I cherish the US Constitution.”
Kelly credits his capacity for leadership to the Marines, which taught fourteen points: Justice, judgment, dependability, initiative, decisiveness, tact, integrity, enthusiasm, bearing, unselfishness, courage, knowledge, loyalty and endurance.
He also points out that in every job he’s held in the public arena, from officer of the Marines to commissioner, he’s sworn to “serve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
Kelly, who managed to become a lawyer along the way, writes that he considers the constitutional oath a sacred duty. No wonder that in the course of the stop-question-and-frisk litigation, he himself was dropped as a defendant.
