Been there, done that!
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly — declaring that he “walked a lot of streets’’ as a cop — yesterday declined a snarky 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.
He told reporters he dared Kelly to “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.
“I’ve been doing this for over 40 years — I’ve been around,” Kelly said after swearing in the 1,200 rookies at Queens College. “I’ve walked a lot of streets.”
He reiterated his stance that leaders in the predominantly minority communities where shootings are on the rise are doing to 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],” he said.
But Adams insisted the top cop is the one who is out of touch and insisted a trip to the inner city would do him some good.
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“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?” he said.
Adams, a former cop who is black, also took exception to Kelly’s comments that “there should be an outcry that 96 percent of the shooting victims in this city are black and Latino.”
He countered yesterday, “The police commissioner’s comments were disgusting” and “a lie.”
He also argued 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.
“The hidden message is that blacks aren’t doing enough,” Adams said. “We, more than anyone, want the violence to end in our community.”
Kelly doubled down on his criticism yesterday.
“The elephant in the room . . . is the high rate of violence in some of these communities,” Kelly said.
“The political leadership, some of them are willing to attack the Police Department but not willing to take on the big issues, which is crime happening in their own neighborhood.
“One exception I want to point out . . . Rev. [Al] Sharpton has spoken about violence in the community. I’ve credited him with that.”