In the Media

Former New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly isn’t holding his tongue about how he feels about law enforcement in the city since he left the NYPD. Kelly believes the city would be safer if stop-and-frisk were to return.

In a recent New Yorker magazine article interview, Kelly said that Mayor Bill de Blasio and current Commissioner Bill Bratton are going about keeping the city safe all wrong. The former top cop contends that de Blasio was able to woo voters by attacking him.

It has been a long, hot summer in the city, but not on the streets. While some high-profile shootings and murders have grabbed headlines, Police Commissioner William Bratton says crime has taken something of a holiday. NY1's Dean Meminger filed this report.

"June to the end of August, we closed our crime numbers yesterday. This was the safest summer we've had in 25 years, in terms of shootings and murders," Bratton said on MSNBC Tuesday.

On a bitterly cold night in February, William Bratton, New York City’s police commissioner, joined several hundred uniformed officers for an informal memorial service at the corner of 107th Avenue and Inwood Street, in Jamaica, Queens. It was past midnight, and everyone was waiting for Mayor Bill de Blasio, who was due to speak. Twenty-seven years earlier, on February 26, 1988, a twenty-two-year-old officer named Edward Byrne was shot and killed on that corner, on orders from a drug dealer, as he sat in his patrol car guarding the home of a witness.

This week, members of the United Nations brought up the issue of increasing homelessness in New York. At about the same time, at a rally at City Hall Tuesday, Communities United for Police Reform, elected officials and a diverse group of homeless and anti-poverty advocates united to call for an end to the recent public dialogue in New York City that has, in effect, sought to demonize and shame homeless and poor New Yorkers.