Forgive Ray Kelly if he’s feeling a little under attack lately. After President Obama suggested the NYPD Commissioner would make a good candidate for Secretary of Homeland Security, people have been coming out of the woodwork in protest–there have been demonstrations, editorials in major newspapers, and criticism from mayoral candidates.
Now, Kelly is striking back with a Wall Street Journal op-ed defending the police department’s record on stop-and-frisk and spying on the Muslim community. All boilerplate Kelly, until you get to this part:
Racial profiling is a disingenuous charge at best and an incendiary one at worst, particularly in the wake of the tragic death of Trayvon Martin. The effect is to obscure the rock-solid legal and constitutional foundation underpinning the police department’s tactics and the painstaking analysis that determines how we employ them.
We shouldn’t criticize the NYPD for racial profiling because a kid was killed, possibly in an incident of…racial profiling? And what exactly does Martin’s death have to do with criticism of the NYPD’s race problem, which has been voiced since long before that tragic night in Sanford?
Kelly has harsh words for those who would dare question the department’s dealings with New York’s terrorist Muslim community as well.
In a similar vein, our detractors contend that the NYPD engages in widespread, unwarranted spying on Muslim New Yorkers. Again, this is a sensational charge belied by the facts.
In 2012, a 19-year-old New Yorker named Shamiur Rahman detailed how he’d been paid $1,000 a month by the NYPD to “bait” Muslims whom he had no reason to believe were potentially criminal into saying things about jihad and terrorism, record the results, and hand them over to the cops. Those are facts, as reported by the Associated Press. Show me a person, who, had such a thing happened to them or their loved ones, wouldn’t regard it as “unwarranted spying.”
