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One of New York’s top black lawmakers yesterday blasted City Council Speaker Chris Quinn’s plan to saddle the NYPD with a new oversight agency.
“An inspector general for the Police Department is over the top . . . It just seems to be political pandering,” said Queens state Sen. Malcolm Smith, chairman of the Independent Democratic Conference and former Democratic Senate majority leader.
Smith said a separate IG unit investigating NYPD policies would undermine successful crime-fighting practices such as stop-and-frisk.
“I firmly believe that an inspector general is not warranted. It would tie the hands of a well-functioning Police Department that already exists in New York,” Smith told The Post.
“We have enough safeguards for the Police Department. Commissioner [Ray] Kelly and the Police Department have done a great job. This is just a step in the wrong direction. At some point you’re not going to allow the agency to function.”
Smith, who flirted with running for mayor with GOP support, represents mostly minority home-owning southeastern Queens neighborhoods that have grappled with gun violence.
And he insisted that some politicians are misinformed or plain wrong when they claim that most minority residents oppose aggressive police practices to attack crime.
“Stop-and-frisk is an effective tool when properly administered by the Police Department,” Smith said.
“I’ve got a number of mothers in my district who lost their sons to random gun violence or gang initiations. A lot of people in my district support stop-and-frisk.”
Quinn’s proposal would create a police inspector general within the city Department of Investigation, a mayoral agency.
Mayor Bloomberg and Kelly have also teed off on the IG plan, claiming it would strip power from the mayor, handcuff the NYPD and imperil lives.
But Quinn has strongly defended the proposal.
“The bill that the speaker supports will do nothing — not one thing — to limit the Police Department’s ability to do their job well. DOI [Department of Investigation] monitoring would include recommendations for the mayor and NYPD to review, creating no confusion over who’s in charge,” said Quinn spokesman Jamie McShane.
He said that after a police inspector general was put in place in Los Angeles, crime there dropped 33 percent.
“Chris knows that we can keep our streets safe streets and improve police-community relations,” McShane said.
Quinn’s IG legislation comes as the Democratic front-runner in the mayoral primary seeks to win over left-leaning, anti-cop voters to seal the nomination.
Critics said the proposal clashes with her prior statements that she wanted to keep Kelly on as police commissioner.
Smith said public safety is too important to be turned into a political football.
“There is no need for a police inspector general. We have more than enough safeguards for the Police Department,” he said, pointing to the NYPD Internal Affairs Bureau, Civilian Complaint Review Board and prosecutors.
The IG plan “assumes that the police officers intend to act illegally and not do their job. They do a good job and we need to allow them to continue to do a good job.”