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Handcuffing the NYPD with a new oversight agency could “ultimately make the city unsafe,” Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said yesterday.
“I think there’s a real cause for concern,” Kelly said in his first direct remarks on City Council Speaker and mayoral candidate Christine Quinn’s proposal to create an inspector general to probe police policies such as stop-and-frisk.
“I think putting in another layer of so-called supervision or monitoring can ultimately make this city unsafe.”
Quinn, leading in the polls for the Democratic mayoral nomination, has promised to keep Kelly as commissioner if she becomes mayor.
But when Kelly was asked if he would work for a mayor who wanted an NYPD IG, he responded, “I haven’t made any plans for the future. I have no plans as to what I’ll be doing at the end of the mayor’s term.”
Kelly himself was wooed by the Republican Party to be its standard-bearer for mayor, but he declined the entreaties.
Meanwhile, a police lieutenant who was at Mayor Bloomberg’s Passover Seder wondered “who’s going to have our backs” if the next administration isn’t protective of the NYPD, Hizzoner said.
“He grabbed me and took me aside,” the mayor recalled of the unnamed lieutenant, who is the son of a family friend. “He said we no longer understand — ‘My whole precinct, all we’re talking about is who we’re going to report to, who’s going to protect us, who’s going to have our backs?’ ”
Bloomberg went on, “You cannot have a command that doesn’t have the confidence of the leadership and it can’t have the confidence of the leadership if at the very top — at the mayor’s level — that isn’t somebody that really understands how we’ve gotten to have the safest big city in the country.”
The mayor’s comments came unprompted during a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the new Central Park police precinct, where he was accompanied by Kelly and Chief of Department Joseph Esposito, who was marking his last day on the job.
“I think we’re doing a phenomenal job and our critics still want to take shots at us,” said Esposito. “It just seems like we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t sometimes.”
Jamie McShane, Quinn’s spokesman, insisted an IG wouldn’t limit the NYPD’s ability to fight crime.
“The bill . . . will do nothing — not one thing — to limit the Police Department’s ability to do their job well,” McShane said.
He said the police IG would operate within the city Department of Investigation, and would merely make recommendations for the mayor and NYPD to review, “creating no confusion over who’s in charge.”