It’s going to be quite an event on Dec. 27 at Madison Square Garden. That’s when Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly will swear in his last class of cadets from the Police Academy. It will cap more than 50 years of public service — and at a time when the NYPD is fighting in federal court for its reputation.
The event will be all the more dramatic given that no homage was paid to Kelly when it was announced that William Bratton would be brought in to succeed him. The mayor-elect didn’t say anything. Neither did Bratton. So a lot of people will be eager to hear what, if anything, Mayor Bloomberg might say at the Garden.
Some 1,200 cadets will be sworn as officers after nearly half a year at the Police Academy. They’ll be out on patrol by New Year’s Eve, joining a force two-thirds of whose officers — 22,000 out of 34,000 — were sworn in by Kelly.
To what has he sworn them? That, at least to me, is a central question. It happens their oath is required by a Constitution that was written by — among others — George Washington, James Madison and the founder of this newspaper, Alexander Hamilton.
The Constitution requires every officer under the United States — federal and state — to be “bound by oath” to “support this Constitution.” Our GIs, from the lowliest private to the joint chiefs, swear the same oath. Kelly has been swearing the constitutional oath since he entered the Marines.
So just to be clear, what Judge Shira Scheindlin has found is that Kelly and thousands of officers of the NYPD have been violating an oath they’ve been required to swear by George Washington himself. This is what it means when she relies on statistical patterns to infer that the NYPD stop-question-and-frisk tactics violate the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution.
The city on Tuesday filed its latest brief challenging Scheindlin’s ruling. She is off the case, having been cashiered by the appeals court for failing to maintain an appearance of impartiality. The city’s latest filing confronts the libel of the NYPD head on, including the charge of bias by Kelly himself.
That charge against Kelly, accepted by Judge Scheindlin, was made by state Sen. Eric Adams. The city’s filing this week summarizes him as saying that “Kelly twice openly stated that the NYPD targets young black and Hispanic males for stops, to ‘instill in them a fear’ that they could be searched for weapons at a moment’s notice.”
“It simply strains credulity that Kelly made such statements endorsing racial profiling,” is the way the city has just put it. Why, it asks, weren’t they exposed by others at the same meetings Adams described? No proof, the city points out, was offered that Kelly’s alleged statement “was communicated down the ranks.”
Those ranks, incidentally, have emerged during Kelly’s commissionership as a kaleidoscope of New York’s glorious mosaic. The force is now “plurality minority,” meaning that 48 percent of officers are members of minority groups. They were born in 106 countries, and they parley most known languages. It’s an incredible testament.
Yet the thing that gets me about the NYPD — its brass and its beat cops — is how much attention they actually have to pay to the Constitution and the law. They are briefed on the constitutional precedents, on the particulars of the Fourth and Fourteen Amendments. A light lunch with Kelly is like a semester at law school.
The latest filing from the city reminds that the stop-and-frisk lawsuit was originally against Bloomberg “in his official capacity and individually” and Kelly “in his individual and official capacity.” Technically, I’m told, the city is now the only defendant. Still, it’s hard to see why — especially if de Blasio drops the city’s appeal — they wouldn’t have a “case and controversy” that gives them standing to clear their good names.
What a moment it would be for Mayor Bloomberg to stand up in Madison Square Garden and declare that he intends to do just that. What a signal it would send to Kelly at the last major function of his career. And to the NYPD, to next mayor, to the next commissioner and to 1,200 new officers and thousands already sworn.
Lipsky@nysun.com