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So was Senator Chuck Schumer sincere or mischievous in announcing that he would push Ray Kelly for the job of FBI Director?
Schumer’s idea prompted an immediate disclaimer – not from Kelly but from his boss, Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Schumer called Kelly “the pre-eminent law enforcement person in the country,” and said he’ll “strenuously advocate” for him to run the Bureau, although Schumer acknowledged that he hadn’t spoken to Kelly about it. The job opens up in September when Director Robert Mueller retires, ending his ten-year term.
Bloomberg, however, announced that Kelly wasn’t going anywhere, an indication that Schumer hadn’t spoken to the mayor about it either.
“I for one, would certainly like — I expect — him to stay … the next 1,023 days,” said

In a town where a cop can’t accept a free cup of coffee, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has been eating and drinking for free for the past eight years at the Harvard Club.
Kelly hasn’t paid for his meals or drinks at the exclusive midtown spot on West 44th Street since 2002 when he returned as commissioner.
Nor have his guests.
Kelly also doesn’t pay his club’s dues, which come to about $1,500 a year.
Instead, the non-profit New York City Police Foundation has been picking up Kelly’s tab, says a well-placed source.
Despite this arrangement, which mirrors the kind of freebies that have landed other police commissioners in difficulty, Kelly has snubbed the hand that feeds him. He has refused the requests of foundation board members to name the guests whose food and drink they have been covering.
“There is no disclosure about whom he has taken out,” according to the source.
“There was grumbling by the board at first but they have gone along. They will not take him on. He is now in control of the foundation.”
As Police Foundation Chairman Valerie Salembier, a senior vice president of the Hearst Corporation, has been known to say of Kelly, “I can’t say no to him.”
Neither she nor executive director Greg Roberts returned calls to this reporter.
Kelly’s spokesman Paul Browne did not respond to an email asking about Kelly’s Harvard Club arrangement.
At Kelly’s urging, the foundation has also issued credit cards to the department’s precinct commanders. The stated reason: to ensure they would not be beholden to others either for meals and to reimburse them for out-of-pocket emergency supplies.
In contrast to Kelly, the commanders are limited to $100 a month and have to report their expenditures and how the money was spent to the department.
The foundation was begun in the wake of the 70′s-era Knapp Commission scandal to help the police commissioner cope with the department’s longstanding corruption by funding projects privately to bypass the city’s cumbersome approval process.
In its 39-year existence, Kelly is believed to be the only police commissioner to ask the foundation to pay his dues and expenses at a private club.
His expenditures, said the source, are not identified in foundation filings but are lumped together with “incidental” expenditures.
The Harvard Club, with the notable exception of former Governor Eliot Spitzer, is open to anyone with a Harvard degree.
Kelly earned an MPA, a Masters Degree in Public Administration, from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government while a member of the NYPD.
At the Harvard Club, Kelly can eat in its main dining room for breakfast, lunch or dinner; in its Grill Room, which serves lunch Monday through Friday; or in the Balcony, which, according to the club website “offers a dramatic view of the Main Dining Room” and serves “lighter fare, such as sandwiches, soup and a salad bar” and where a “discrete display of business papers is also permitted.”
Kelly can drink in the club’s Charles River Room, which offers a full-service bar from 4 to 11 p.m. or at the Main Bar, which is decorated with Harvard memorabilia and which, according to the club website, offers “classic cocktails, complimentary snacks and good cheer.”
Kelly’s Harvard freebies appear to contradict department policy, at least as it applies to other police officers, who since the Knapp Commission have been prohibited from accepting even a free hot dog.
The Patrol Guide’s section 203-16 reads: “It is the policy of the Department that members of the service may not accept any reward, gratuity, gift or other compensation for any service performed as a result of or in conjunction with their duties as public servants. … Members of the service also shall not solicit any gift, gratuity, loan, present, fee or reward for personal gain.”
City employees are also prohibited from accepting gifts of $50 or more from a person or a company doing business with the city.
Top police officials, however, have found themselves in trouble for accepting gifts, even when the giver does no city business.
One of the corruption charges that sent former NYPD Commissioner Bernie Kerik to prison for four years, was his failure to report or pay income tax on the free use of an apartment, owned by a person with no known business dealings with the city.
Former First Deputy John Timoney, while chief of the Miami police department, accepted a free leased car from a dealer who did no business with the city. Although Timoney subsequently purchased the car at full price, he was criticized over the incident for the rest of his term.
Former Commissioner Howard Safir ran into trouble with the city’s Conflict of Interest Board for a freebie trip he took to the 1999 Oscars that was paid for by Revlon Corporation CEO George Fellows. Safir and his wife flew free on the company jet and Fellows paid for their stay at a four-star hotel.
Although Revlon did virtually no business with the city, a report from the corporation counsel recommended that Safir reimburse Fellows $7100 for the junket to avoid an appearance of impropriety.
Then there was former NYPD Deputy Commissioner Ed Norris, who while serving as Baltimore’s police commissioner was indicted on charges of stealing thousands of dollars from a secret police department fund. Norris used the money for affairs with women, trips to New York, meals at upscale restaurants and luxury hotels. He served six months in prison.
Kelly, however, is held to a different standard than other police officials.
In part, this is because the city’s billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has provided the perks.
Bloomberg has piloted Kelly to Kelly’s Florida home on Bloomberg’s jet.
Bloomberg also provided Kelly with front row Yankee seats in Bloomberg’s box during last year’s World Series. (A state ethics panel reprimanded Governor Paterson for accepting free tickets to the same World Series.)
At last Tuesday night’s Yankee playoff game against Texas, Kelly was seen sitting in the first row.
At the same time, police sources say that a contingent of Internal Affairs detectives were in place at the stadium to prevent cops from attending the game for free.
Police sources say Kelly was a member of the Harvard Club while serving as First Deputy Commissioner in the 1990s and allowed his boss, then Commissioner Lee Brown, to use his account there, then grumbled that Brown was late in reimbursing him.
“When he returned as police commissioner in 2002, he requested an American Express card from the police foundation but was turned down,” said another source. “The foundation then agreed to his request that it pay his Harvard Club dues and expenses.”
“I am sure his refusal to disclose comes from the same rationale that he justifies to hide his public schedule,” said the source familiar with the arrangement at the Harvard Club. “And it would be wrong for the same reasons. There is no reason he shouldn’t disclose who he takes to lunch or dinner. What message does it send to the troops?
“But there is no accountability regarding the appropriateness of his guests, and the board of the police foundation is afraid to take him on.”
Said a former top police official: “His not disclosing who he took to lunch or dinner may be harmless but it gives the appearance of Kelly’s placing himself above all rules and regulations, making him the sole arbiter or what is correct for himself.
“At the minimum, he should hold himself to the same standards as his commanders.
“Did he [Kelly] go the Harvard Club for Christmas or New Years? Did he take his wife and children? He bristles at any kind of oversight. He gets away with it because no one at City Hall has the courage to stand up to him, including the mayor. Especially the mayor.”
SEVEN SHOTS: An NYPD Raid on a Terrorist Cell and Its Aftermath by Jennifer C. Hunt portrays the best and the worst of the NYPD.
On July 31, 1997, a six-man Emergency Service team raided a Brooklyn apartment, whose inhabitants were just hours away from entering the Atlantic Avenue subway station and detonating bombs during the morning rush hour.
When two officers entered the bedroom, the suspects lunged for one of them, then moved towards a black bag that the officers believed contained the bombs. The officers fired their weapons, critically wounded the would-be bombers. Two bomb squad technicians then dismantled what turned out to be a live bomb.
It was the NYPD at its finest.
But that is just the beginning of the story told by Hunt, a sociologist and police expert, who was granted extraordinary access to the participants in telling her story.
If the raid showed the NYPD at its best, the aftermath, as Hunt chronicles, showed the NYPD at its worst.
Fearing for their safety and that of their families, the officers balked at attending a news conference with Police Commissioner Safir.
Safir took that as a personal insult and retaliated by denying them promotions and by trying to keep them from being honored at the White House.
Meanwhile, writes Hunt, jealous members of the officers’ units blocked their promotions and targeted them for harassment. Men who should have been praised as heroes instead had their careers sabotaged by forces within the department itself.
The country paid an even bigger price. Intent on downgrading the officers’ accomplishments, Safir and then mayor Rudy Giuliani downplayed the incident and failed to adequately alert the public to its significance as a terrorism threat.
Hunt’s fast-paced narrative leaves us with many questions. Perhaps the most important is this: had Safir and Giuliani reacted differently, might we have been better prepared for 9/11?

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

The New York Times has joined the Adrian Schoolcraft-NYPD imbroglio.
By devoting a full-column, front page story Friday to the whistle-blower cop, the Times has legitimized at least the tip of his police corruption charges that until now have appeared in the city’s tabloids, the Village Voice and this column.
Although it may appear to hibernate for part of the year, the Times does awaken and then beware: there is nothing more dangerous to a politician or a police commissioner who harbors political ambitions.
Remember Commissioner Ray Kelly’s stop and frisk databank? It was the Times that put it out of business two months ago, savaging his credibility on that issue with but a few deft strokes.
On the surface, the Times’ Schoolcraft story may seem of minor import: a secretly tape-recorded roll call meeting last April, made by what the Times described as a “police supervisor,” that quoted an 81st precinct captain, saying cops had to fulfill traffic quotas or risk being fired.
Captain Alex Perez, said the Times, “can be heard warning his top commanders that their officers must start writing more summonses or face consequences. … He said each officer on a day tour should write 20 summonses a week: five each for double-parking, parking at a bus stop, driving without a seat belt and driving while using a cell phone.”
The Times, of course, is only at the outer perimeter of the crime statistics scandal that is roiling the department.
What’s at stake is more than traffic quotas at one precinct. The Times hinted at the bigger picture.
It said Perez cited “pressure from top police officials” — indicating that the quota system was countenanced, even encouraged, from on-high.
Its story added that “the recording makes clear that precinct leaders were focused on raising the number of summonses issued — even as the Police Department had already begun an inquiry into whether crime statistics in that precinct were being manipulated.”
Crime statistics being manipulated is the elephant in the room down at One Police Plaza. Downgrading felonies to misdemeanors, to make city-wide crime appear lower than it actually is, is not confined to the 81st precinct but appears to be rampant throughout the department.
As criminologists Eli Silverman and John Eterno, a former NYPD captain, wrote recently in the Village Voice, “The ominous side is that in order to silence dissenters and deny any problems, the NYPD continues to close its doors to any non-sponsored outside scrutiny. Yet the evidence of data manipulation is, at this point, overwhelming.”
Such downgrading has consequences for public safety that go beyond statistics.
As the Voice reported, police in Upper Manhattan downgraded the complaints of rape to misdemeanor assaults, which meant that detectives weren’t aware that a pervert was on the loose until a half-dozen women were attacked.
Frightening in another way was the department’s response to Schoolcraft’s charges. A police posse, led by Deputy Chief Michael Marino, burst into Schoolcraft’s apartment and dragged him against his will to Jamaica Hospital, where he was kept in its psych ward for six days — retaliation for his corruption charges, his lawyer maintains.
When Schoolcraft subsequently fled the city and moved upstate, the department pursued him, treating him like a fugitive. They repeatedly sent cops hundreds of miles to bang on his door and threaten him with reprisals if he did not return.
An official of the local upstate police department confirmed to this reporter that the NYPD had been all over Schoolcraft’s place.
After remaining silent for a day after the Times’ ticket quota story, department spokesman Paul Browne came out with guns blazing, calling the reporting of world’s most respected newspaper “confused” and “absurd.”
Such name-calling is typical NYPD overkill when the department has been caught red-handed.
And what of Schoolcraft’s charge that Browne accompanied the police posse that dragged him in handcuffs to the psyche ward?
So far Browne — who readers of this column know as “Mr. Truth” — has refused to officially respond to that question, although he did tell a sycophantic television reporter — off the record — that he wasn’t there.
So as not to appear confused or absurd, this reporter sent him the following email: “Paul, were you or were you not at Schoolcraft’s apartment when he was brought to Jamaica hospital?’
He did not respond.
Let’s see how he answers when the Times asks.
GARRY’S VICTORY LAP. Former NYPD Deputy Commissioner Garry McCarthy appeared last week before the Citizens Crime Commission and described his struggles and successes since becoming Newark’s police director four years ago.
Respected in the NYPD as both an innovative and hands-on boss, McCarthy cited his use of the “NYPD Playbook” in reducing Newark’s sky-high murder rate and attacking street gangs and narcotics trafficking.
He singled out for thanks two former bosses and NYPD giants: the late Jack Maple and Bill Bratton.
Bratton was in the audience for McCarthy’s talk. Not in attendance: former commissioner Howard Safir, who elevated McCarthy to Deputy Commissioner and current commissioner Kelly, who doesn’t show up when Bratton is expected.
McCarthy has mellowed enough that he was able to discuss dispassionately his past dust-up with the Palisades Parkway police, who ticketed his daughter for parking in a handicapped zone. This escalated into his and his wife’s arrest, and (when he fought the charge against his daughter) into probably the most expensive parking ticket in world history.
“There are things I would have done differently,” McCarthy acknowledged. “I think it’s a renegade agency. And I was railroaded,” he said, by the traffic court judge.
“But I was protecting my daughter from someone I was not sure was a cop and I’d do that again. When you’re right, you’re right.”
CHEAP SHOT? Chief Queens Assistant District attorney Jack Ryan called this column’s suggestion that his office was reluctant to investigate Adrian Schoolcraft’s police-led trip to Jamaica’s hospital psych ward a “cheap shot.”
Ryan pointed out that to begin an investigation into the incident, he needed Schoolcraft’s cooperation. “He said he would produce his medical records and he never produced them. If he produces the records, we will look at his allegations.”
TWO SMALL 9/11 AFTERTHOUGHTS. How much of the resentment over the proposed mosque near Ground Zero stems from the failure of our own leaders — city and state officials and the site’s developer — to construct a memorial to those who died in the nine years since the attack?
What authority, moral, legal, legislative or otherwise, does disgraced former Staten Island Congressman Vito Fossella claim that allows him to lead a group of protesters against the building of the proposed mosque?
With him was Long Island Congressman Peter King, who — despite the discovery of Fossella’s secret second family in Washington D.C. (in addition to his wife and three children in Staten Island) — urged Fossella to run for re-election.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com