They screwed up.
Accused cop killer Lamont Pride “should not have been out on the streets’’ when he gunned down Officer Peter Figoski, a furious Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said yesterday.
The city’s top cop laid blame on everyone from the Brooklyn judge who freed Pride without bail after a drug bust last month, to North Carolina authorities who issued a federal warrant for him after he allegedly shot a man there in August.
“The request for bail was only $2,500,’’ Kelly said, referring to what Brooklyn prosecutors had asked Judge Evelyn Laporte for the ex-con on Nov. 4 and were denied.
POST LAUNCHES FUND FOR HERO’S GIRLS
Pride caught another break after his November drug arrest when he didn’t show up on Nov. 15 before Judge Shari Ruth Michels in Brooklyn Criminal Court, where he was facing charges for the Nov. 3 drug arrest. The Brooklyn judge allowed an arrest warrant to be put on hold, leaving Pride to walk free.
But even before that, Pride “should have ideally been extradited to North Carolina’’ so he wouldn’t have been around to gun down Figoski, Kelly said.
North Carolina officials pointed the finger right back at Kelly’s department.
They disputed Kelly’s claim that the NYPD had asked that Pride’s non-extradition warrant be revised in order to ship him back to the Tar Heel State the day after his drug bust in Brooklyn on Nov. 3.
North Carolina cops and prosecutors said no one from New York contacted them about Pride until Nov. 8 — the day after he’d already been sprung without bail in Brooklyn. And it was a prosecutor who called.
“We had no reason to believe [Pride] had [even] left the area” before the call, said Susan Danielson, a Greensboro Police spokeswoman.
“Someone notified us on Nov. 8, and we arranged to have [the warrant] changed as soon as New York requested it.”
NYPD spokesman Paul Browne insisted his side wasn’t playing the blame game with North Carolina authorities.
“The person responsible for Officer Figoski’s death is the one who pulled the trigger, not authorities in North Carolina,” Browne said.
Among others being second-guessed was Laporte, a onetime Brooklyn prosecutor.
Pride was busted after being caught with crack and pot in a roach-infested apartment in Gravesend on Nov. 3.
According to a transcript of his arraignment at the time, Laporte knew about the outstanding warrant against him, asking prosecutors, “What happened in North Carolina?”
“Lamont Pride was involved in a shooting,” prosecutor Evan Degrees said.
Minutes later, the judge freed Pride.
New York courts spokesman David Bookstaver yesterday said, “[Pride] had an open warrant in North Carolina — this is not something we had jurisdiction over.”