People can complain about the NYPD all they want — when it comes to fighting crime and building community ties, Ray Kelly is tops, says his boss, Mayor Bloomberg.
Hizzoner’s high praise for his commissioner during his regular radio appearance with WOR’s John Gambling comes at the end of a week when Kelly took some high heat for saying pols are quick to mouth off about
the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practices
while not outraged enough about street violence in their districts.
“Ray Kelly is right, and he’s also the best police commissioner the city has ever had. I don’t think anyone’s done more to save lives than Ray Kelly. No one has done more to take guns off the streets than Ray Kelly. No one has done more to improve community and police relations than Ray Kelly and it’s working. If you take a look, crime is down 34% compared to 10 years ago,” Bloomberg said, defending
remarks Kelly made after 77 people were shot during a crime wave
.
“We’re the safest big city in the nation. We’re just not going to walk away from what got us there,” he added, per our Tina Moore.
Not to trash Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel or Philadelphia’s Michael Nutter, both of whom Bloomberg gave high marks, but, the mayor continued:
“[Chicago has] have many more murders than we do, and we have three times as many people. We’re on track this year for something like less than 500 murders and we’ve been below 600 murders in every year for the past decade. In recorded history, we’ve never had years that safe. If we had Chicago’s murder rate, this year, instead of 500 we’d have 1,300 murders… If we had Philadelphia’s rate, we would have 1,700 murders.
“We used to be like those cities. We used to be one of the murder capitals of the United States and we just are not going back — at least not while I am here.”
Gambling noted that he had spoken to state Sen. Eric Adams and City Councilman Jumaane Williams, who were both seriously ticked off by Kelly’s remarks at a Harlem PAL event this week (
and we did too, so if you’d like to review their outrage, click here for a refresher
).
Responded Bloomberg, “Look, the statistics are clear: When you have a murder, we can see who’s getting murdered and unfortunately, virtually 90% of all murder victims are young male minority kids. They had lives. Their families are left…
“We have to do something,” Hizzoner continued.
“We just have got to do something about saving and preventing this kind of carnage and the people Williams and Adams are talking about are the very people that need the defense. They live in the communities where there are too many guns and too many shootings. We’ve got to do something about it. And I sympathize with Ray’s frustration. You know, everything the police do is wrong to certain groups of people… I don’t know who wants to take us back to the bad old days, but I can tell you it’s not Ray Kelly and it’s not Michael Bloomberg and we’re not going to do it.”
