Police Commissioner Ray Kelly isn’t backing down from criticism when it comes to violence and the NYPD’s controversial practice of “Stop-and-Frisk.”
EXCLUSIVE: White Men Are NYPD’s Biggest Nightmare! by Michael Skolnik
Kelly declared that he “walked a lot of streets’’ as a cop, answering an invitation from state Sen. Eric Adams to tour gritty neighborhoods in his district without his gun or security detail.
Adams showed up at One Police Plaza carrying the letter to Kelly while the top cop was addressing new recruits in Queens.
At a press conference yesterday, Sen. Adams told reporters he dared Kelly:
“Come into my neighborhood, park your car, leave your security detail, leave your gun and we’ll walk together and meet with grandmothers and young people.”
Kelly had no interest in Adams’ antics, saying:
“I’ve been doing this for over 40 years — I’ve been around…I’ve walked a lot of streets.”
Kelly affirmed his stance that leaders in the predominantly minority communities where shootings are on the rise are doing too little to help fix the problem:
“I think there is a lack of response to the violence that occurs in some of our neighborhoods, and you know the main people are willing to criticize the Police Department for a whole variety of issues but not willing to talk about what I said yesterday [about the silence of politicians from minority areas].”
But Adams insisted the Kelly is out of touch with many of the minority communities in his city.
“Why wouldn’t he walk the streets?” said Adams, whose district includes parts of Crown Heights, East Flatbush and Prospect Heights in Brooklyn.
“If it’s not too good for patrol officers, why wouldn’t it be good enough for him?”
Adams, a former cop, continued:
“There should be an outcry that 96 percent of the shooting victims in this city are black and Latino.”
Adams was on the attack, arguing that Kelly was “attempting to divorce himself from failed results” of the NYPD’s “stop-and-frisk” policy, which has primarily affected minorities.
Adams said there were “700,000 innocent people who were stopped last year and we’re still seeing a proliferation of guns on the streets.”
Falling on deaf ears, Kelly doubled down on his criticism yesterday and wouldn’t respond to Adams’ invitation.
