Ray Kelly and Eric Adams Have a Public Dick Measuring Contest
Following a week of bloodshed that included the shooting of a three-year-old boy, police commish Ray Kelly and Brooklyn state Senator Eric Adams have decided that the best way to deal with both the shootings and the NYPD’s ever controversial and questionably effective stop-and-frisk policy is by acting like grandstanding blowhards.
The Post reports that Adams, a former member of the NYPD, brought a letter to One Police Plaza inviting Kelly to come to his district and “come into my neighborhood, park your car, leave your security detail, leave your gun and we’ll walk together and meet with grandmothers and young people.” Adams’s district includes Crown Heights and East Flatbush as well as parts of Park Slope and Windsor Terrace. Neither the Post nor Adams specified which neighborhood they wanted Kelly to walk around in.
Kelly, however, was not at One Police Plaza when Adams paid a visit, so Adams was forced to issue the invitation through a group of reporters. When Kelly heard about the invitation, he responded in a reasonable and considered way.
Oh, wait. No.
He continued to be a stubborn dick and defend his stop-and-frisk policy and dismissed the invitation by saying, “I’ve been doing this for over 40 years—I’ve been around…I’ve walked a lot of streets.”
Which, ok, fine. You’ve walked the streets for 40 years, Ray Kelly. But how does that have any bearing on walking the streets today? Especially when you are so vocally condemning these very neighborhoods and communities by saying “the elephant in the room…is the high rate of violence in some of these communities…the political leadership, some of them are willing to attack the Police Department but not willing to take on the big issues, which is crime happening in their own neighborhood.”
So, basically, the high level of violence in these neighborhoods, which I’m sure is in no way exacerbated by the implementation of a policy which almost exclusively targets tens of thousands of men in these very communities, are the neighborhoods own faults? Because the people who live there don’t condemn the violence enough?
And, although there have been protests, if there hadn’t been any, does that mean that these communities deserve to have elevated levels of violence and random, questionably constitutional searches?
Because that’s what it sounds like what Kelly is suggesting.
Suggesting quite clearly, in fact, and to as many media outlets as want to listen.
Maybe he and Adams should consider stepping back from the microphones and, you know, try to accomplish something other than adding to their media scrapbooks.
