Police Commissioner Ray Kelly tonight blasted the Obama administration for recommending a monitor to oversee the NYPD’s stop and frisk program.
“It is disappointing, quite frankly,” Kelly said following a graduation ceremony.
Kelly said he’s known Attorney General Eric Holder for some time and was stunned by his last minute intrusion into a controversial federal court case that could force the NYPD to make sweeping changes to stop and frisk.
“We were not given an opportunity to address the issues that they supposedly had seen,’’ Kelly said at St. Gregory The Great on the Upper West Side, a school he attended as a child.
He called the “11th hour, 59th minute” court filing by the Justice Department “unfair, unnecessary,”
And Kelly noted that the city’s murder rate is at an all-time low.
“We’re at 140 murders. This is the 165th day of the year,” Kelly said.
It was Kelly’s first public comments since Holder put his thumb on the scale in the closely watched case.
Meanwhile, former Police Commissioner Bill Bratton had the NYPD’s back. He defended stop and frisk as “the most basic tool fundamental of policing” and said city Comptroller and mayoral candidate John Liu is “out of his mind” for wanting to scrap it.
”One of the mayoral candidates is campaigning on the idea that he’s going to do away with stop-question-and-frisk. He’s out of his mind,” Bratton said at a conference sponsored by the Manhattan Institute.
“Quite clearly he [Liu] knows nothing about stop-question-and-frisk,” added Bratton.