New
York’s longest serving police commissioner on George Floyd, how the
NYPD made racial progress, and good and bad reform proposals
By Tunku Varadarajan
The Wall Street Journal
June 12, 2020
The
killing of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis led to
an eruption of rage and demands to abolish or defund police forces. Ray
Kelly speaks as bluntly as any activist about Floyd’s death. But he
also has a veteran’s appreciation for the complexity of race, crime and
public order.
Mr.
Kelly, 78, is the longest-serving commissioner in the history of the
New York City Police Department. He retired at the end of 2013, having
run the NYPD for 12 years under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and 16 months,
starting in 1992, under Mayor David Dinkins. There’s little he hasn’t
witnessed in his decades as a policeman, yet the killing of Floyd
sickens him.
“This
is the worst act of police brutality that I’ve seen,” Mr. Kelly says in
a phone interview from his Manhattan apartment. “The reason I say
that,” he continues, “is because of its deliberate nature.” Holding his
knee on Floyd’s neck, Officer Derek Chauvin “was casual. It looks like
he has his hand in his pocket. I’ve never seen anything that bad. Many
times, it’s a rash act, a mistake in judgment, that sort of thing. Not
here.”
Mr.
Chauvin “must have been deranged. Because it makes no sense to have him
do what he’s doing, to be witnessed by the other police officers, and
to have the woman film him.” The bystander with a phone was “right
there, and she’s telling him to get off of Mr. Floyd, who’s saying, ‘I
can’t breathe.’ Why in God’s name would he continue to do that?”
Mr.
Kelly concludes: “You could make a case, because of the length of time
that he stayed in that position,” that the killing “may very well have
been intentional.” That’s a crucial legal question, since Minnesota
Attorney Keith Ellison elevated the charge to second-degree murder,
which under Minnesota law requires prosecutors to prove intent.
Mr.
Kelly tells me that the only comparable “atrocity” that comes to his
mind is the fatal April 2015 shooting of Walter Scott in North
Charleston, S.C. Scott, a 50-year-old black man, had been stopped by an
officer for a broken taillight. Mr. Kelly describes the killing: “Scott
gets out of the car and he begins to run. And the police officer, in
uniform, shoots him in the back.”
A
bystander captured that killing on his phone, ensuring that the cop’s
version of events—that he fired in self-defense—could be challenged.
“That brought home,” Mr. Kelly says, “how important cellphone cameras
are in monitoring police misconduct, and of police officers wearing
cameras. It was incredible. It was a murder in cold blood. And he
probably had a good chance of getting away with it” absent video
evidence.
Yet
Mr. Kelly also believes that the ability of the public to capture
images of the police in action isn’t always a blessing. “We’re in the
age of the cellphone camera, so everybody wants their prize,” he says.
“For a lot of people, it’s having cops overreact. And oftentimes in the
video, they don’t show you the beginning of the event.” Viewers see only
the middle and the end, when the cop is “overreacting—or trying to
defend himself or making an arrest.” There are “no Marquess of
Queensberry rules for making an arrest of people that don’t want to be
arrested.”
The
people protesting peacefully after the killing of Floyd “absolutely
have a point,” Mr. Kelly says. “This is a watershed moment.” But the
former commissioner, who oversaw the policing of “hundreds of protests”
in New York, is also dismayed by the “taunting and goading” of police
officers by demonstrators: “I’m amazed at how blatant it is, and how
nothing has been written about it.” Police are “in the business of
protecting the right to protest,” he says, “but you’d like to have a
compact between protesters and the police, that you don’t try to create
an incident.”
Mr.
Kelly, a New York native, joined the NYPD full-time in 1966, returning
to the city after a three-year stint in the Marine Corps. “I was in
Vietnam. I came back. I policed those antiwar demonstrations. I haven’t
seen crowds this size since then. And it’s important to note that the
demonstrations are in all 50 states, which is incredible.”
Mr.
Kelly sums up the protest message: “Looking at the video, many people
will say, ‘This is suspicions confirmed. This is what cops do all the
time, and if there wasn’t a telephone camera, this individual would have
never been in court.’ ” He says that’s mistaken: “Acts like this are
total aberrations.” But he understands when “the public goes, ‘Aha, this
is almost standard practice.’ Their point is, they want this type of
practice to cease.”
He’s
less sympathetic to politicians who’ve endorsed or pandered to radical
demands to abolish or defund the police. “Look, people are upset,” he
says. “This killing has been universally condemned. But this
recommendation to ‘defund’ the police, if it means the elimination of a
police department—which is the interpretation, apparently, of the
Minneapolis City Council—is a huge mistake.”
Council
President Lisa Bender told CNN last weekend that nine of the body’s 13
members had “committed to dismantling policing as we know it in the city
of Minneapolis and to rebuild with our community a new model of public
safety that actually keeps our community safe.” Mr. Kelly says the
council members have “no plan. They just said, ‘We’re going to eliminate
the department, and yeah, we’ll get something later.’ Lots of luck!” If
the council “asked anybody on the street, chances are there’d be
outrage. ‘Who shows up when I’m in trouble?’ is a question that a lot of
people will ask.”
Minneapolis
Mayor Jacob Frey gave his answer on May 28, three days after Floyd was
killed, by ordering police to evacuate the Third Precinct, which was
under siege by a mob. “The symbolism of a building,” Mr. Frey later
said, “cannot outweigh the importance of life of our officers or the
public.” Mr. Kelly calls this a “low point in public service—he allowed a
police station to be burned down.” It “may very well have set off other
fires in the city, and places throughout the country.”
Some
politicians and commentators have construed “defunding” more
moderately—not as scrapping the police altogether, but “basically taking
money away” and giving it to other agencies. That still would mean
“fewer cops on the street,” Mr. Kelly says. “About 95% of all police
budgets—certainly here in New York—are for personnel costs. So defunding
is going to be a head-count reduction.” And that, he says, “has to be
explained to the public.”
In
New York, the Journal reports, Mayor Bill de Blasio is considering a
plan to cut nearly $1 billion from the NYPD’s $5.6 billion annual budget
by shrinking the allocations for overtime and new hires. There’s no
love lost between Mr. Kelly and the mayor. Running to succeed Mr.
Bloomberg, Mr. de Blasio said in May 2013 that “the rampant overuse and
misuse of stop and frisk has become unmanageable and even dangerous.” He
was referring to the frequent practice of stopping, questioning and
frisking pedestrians thought to be acting suspiciously.
“He ran against me,” Mr.
Kelly says. “He pretended that race relations were broken in this city.
He then pretended to solve them. Race relations were pretty good in
this city during my time. I’m uncertain now.”
Mr.
de Blasio settled a federal civil-rights lawsuit in 2014 and has
curtailed stop and frisk. Mr. Kelly stands by his policies. “It is a
tool that should be in the toolbox,” he says, disputing Mr. de Blasio’s
assertion that its use was rampant. “There was less than one stop per
patrol officer per week,” he says, “and less than one pat-down every two
weeks.”
He
does regret the label. “ ‘Frisk’ is a pejorative term, I understand
that. Nobody wants to be frisked—which by the way, was a limited
pat-down of the exterior clothing to protect the police officer, not a
search.” He’d prefer to call the method “a ‘field stop.’ ”
Mr.
Kelly notes that he had a 75% approval rating among New York City
voters, and 63% among black voters, in a January 2013 Quinnipiac poll.
He attributes his popularity to “a philosophy and an approach to doing
business. I walked down streets in black communities probably once a
week, just with one security person. And people would stop and ask
questions.” Sometimes it would take him an hour to get down “one
street—just one street!—in Harlem. That’s how I was getting direct,
unvarnished feedback.”
He
says proudly that under his tenure the NYPD became “the most diverse
police department in the world. We have police officers born right now
in over 100 countries.” He “even started a cricket league,” he says,
appealing to his interviewer’s sensibilities. “It got a lot of press in
India, but it got nothing over here.”
Yet
Mr. Kelly readily acknowledges there are problems in police-minority
relations in the U.S. He offers a few solutions of his own. First, he’d
want to have “a major educational institution like Johns Hopkins, or
someplace like that” devise a rigorous method of “psychological testing”
for potential recruits. “It’s critical,” he says, “that you not hire
your problems. Right now, I don’t think we’re identifying enough people
who have deep-seated psychological problems.”
Next,
he’d like to “give police executives the ability—when significant
evidence is shown to them—to terminate officers who abuse their
authority either verbally or physically.” Such abusive patterns, he
points out, “develop fairly quickly” in an officer’s career, but “it’s
difficult, very difficult, to terminate someone.” Mr. Kelly says “the
unions certainly play a role” in making it hard to fire bad cops, and
civil-service protections are an even greater obstacle. “Oftentimes,” he
says of his experience in the NYPD, “someone who you’re trying to get
rid of wins the appeal” at the Civil Service Commission.
Mr.
Kelly’s third suggestion is “requiring every officer to have a college
degree.” Currently, the NYPD requires recruits to have a high-school
diploma and 60 college credits. More college graduates in uniform, he
believes, would lead to more racially sensitive policing. “I have made
that argument for many, many years,” he says. One rejoinder is that “it
would impact adversely on minority candidates, but our research showed
no, it wouldn’t.” The college requirement would have to be introduced
“incrementally, of course.” The department would need to find the money
to pay what a college graduate would expect—something that would be
harder if defunding takes hold.
When
Mr. Kelly joined the NYPD, “I was a college boy.” He held a bachelor’s
degree and has since earned two master’s and a law degree. “There
weren’t too many college boys in the police department,” he says, “so
they looked at me askance.” Today, he says, some 30% of the NYPD is made
up of college graduates.
One
reform Mr. Kelly rejects is an end to “qualified immunity” for police
officers, which protects officers from many civil lawsuits. House
Democrats have unveiled a bill that would abolish such immunity, an idea
Mr. Kelly says is a recipe for police inaction: “If you’re personally
liable and in a high-risk business, chances are your risk-taking is
going to be quite a bit less,” Mr. Kelly says. “I would say that’s
probably bad for society.”
Inarguably
good for society, Mr. Kelly says, is the progress police have made in
the nearly six decades since he joined the NYPD. Back then, “there were
racist comments made by cops, in my presence,” he recalls. “It’s just so
embarrassing. It’s 1,000% better now than it was when I became an
officer.”
But
the public’s memory is much shorter. Crime rates in New York steadily
fell for almost 30 years starting around the time of Mr. Kelly’s first
stint as commissioner. But people have “become complacent,” he says.
“They expect low crime.” The population of New York City “turns over
about 40% every 10 years. So you don’t have a great many people who
remember the bad old days of the ’80s and the ’90s.”
