Police Commissioner Ray Kelly weighed in on the “perp walk” controversy yesterday, blaming the news media for the outrage over the way former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was paraded past photographers after his arrest.
“We have been walking prisoners out of the front doors of station houses for 150 years in this Police Department,” Kelly told reporters. “This is how we transport people to court.
“There is no back door, no secret way of doing it,” he said at Brooklyn College, where he attended a Police Academy graduation. “So the issue of the so-called perp walk is strictly an issue for the media.”
NYPD policy was under fire after French politicians and commentators blasted what they called the humiliating treatment of DSK following his arrest in May.
Most recently, it was Kelly’s boss, Mayor Bloomberg, who added fuel to the fire.
Bloomberg, who had defended the procedure in May, backtracked Tuesday when he called it “outrageous” and “a circus.”
Kelly said it was news photographers and cameramen who were to blame.
“Making a decision to stake out a location, where someone is brought out of a police station, that is a decision you make, not a decision the Police Department makes,” he said.
“We don’t have any secret way of getting people to court.”
After DSK’s arrest, Bloomberg had no problems with subjecting suspects to the walk. “If you don’t want to do the perp walk, don’t do the crime,” he said then.
But with the sex-assault case in a state of collapse, the mayor whistled a different tune about suspects.
“Even if they’re guilty, they’re not guilty until they’re convicted, and yet we vilify them for the benefit of theater, for the circus,” Bloomberg said.
Kelly insisted, “We handled this arrest as we would handle any other arrest.”
He declined to address Bloomberg’s comments directly.