Leonard Levitt, New York Newsday
Let’s start with a visit to Police Commissioner Ray Kelly’s 14th-floor redoubt.
See the digital clocks, showing the time not just in New York but in Los Angeles, London, Paris, Tokyo, Moscow, Tel Aviv, Islamabad and Kabul.
Note the time-zone map, shining on the world’s ever-changing area of daylight. Check out the television screens. One displays CNN, another MSNBC, a third Al-Jazeera. Al-Jazeera?
Yup, the Middle Eastern television station viewed by millions of Muslims and the source of messages from Osama bin Laden. An Arab woman appears on the screen. She appears to be in mourning. But over what? The script beneath her is in Arabic.
Kelly’s spokesman, Michael O’Looney, said Kelly watches Al-Jazeera “to monitor what’s going on in the Arab world.” How Kelly manages to do this without understanding Arabic, O’Looney doesn’t explain. But should Kelly see something on Al-Jazeera he deems important, O’Looney says any of the department’s 30 Arabic speakers can be whisked into One Police Plaza.
Is Kelly’s “monitoring” of Al-Jazeera reflective of his well-publicized attempt to internationalize the NYPD after 9/11?
Some say this is Kelly’s way of making his mark as the department’s 41st commissioner after failing to make one as the city’s 37th. Not that Kelly was unsuccessful then. Citywide crime began to fall under him. It was Kelly who rid the streets of squeegee men.
But Rudolph Giuliani dismissed him and appointed Bill Bratton. Giuliani and Bratton then convinced anyone within shouting distance they had saved the city.
Recently, Kelly dispatched an NYPD detective to Lyons, France, to work with Interpol, the international police force. He has sent another to Toronto and plans to station others in Germany, Britain and Israel.
Neither reporters nor ordinary New Yorkers can expect to spot them because, as Kelly put it, they are performing “liaison” work.
With the city going broke, Kelly has not tried to pay for NYPD Overseas from the department’s budget. Rather, he raised $ 200,000 to cover the cops’ travel and living expenses from the Police Foundation, the fat-cat group that has raised millions of dollars for police commissioners to use at their whim.
Kelly is hardly the first to drink from the waters of the foundation’s largesse. Bratton used the foundation to pay for consultants who touted him. One consultant, George Kelling, wrote a report that compared Bratton to Plato. Kelly’s predecessor, Bernard Kerik, convinced the foundation to spend $ 4,000 for busts of himself. When this column revealed their existence, the foundation had them destroyed.
A side effect of Kelly’s policies has been to bring into the department an eclectic group of top-level civilian advisers. These include retired Marine Gen. Frank Libutti, former CIA bigfoot David Cohen, former Merrill Lynch executive Stephen Hammerman, retired NYPD lieutenant-turned-academic James Fyfe, and Kelly’s longtime courtier Paul Browne. These, rather than any NYPD chief, have become Kelly’s confidantes. So apparently confidential is their advice that none of them speaks to reporters. No one even knows what Browne does.
Kelly seems unconcerned with the message those appointments send. Perhaps he agrees with Giuliani, who in his book “Leadership” explained why he selected Kerik, a third-grade detective with only eight years in the NYPD, as police commissioner over Chief Joe Dunne, a 30-year veteran.
“I saw the years Bernie spent away from the NYPD as an advantage,” Giuliani wrote. “The force can be very insular. It helps to have someone who feels that their loyalty is not just to the department.”
Earlier this month, Kelly appointed two lawyers from outside the department to reassess the police role in the Central Park jogger case. Both report to Hammerman. Thus, except for Kelly, no police official appears to be in the decision-making loop of what, after the Crown Heights riot, could become the most potentially divisive police incident of the past 15 years.
Lastly, let’s turn to Fyfe, the so-called “force-related” expert who testified in the Amadou Diallo trial that the four officers who fired 41 shots at Diallo had followed police procedure. Earlier this month, Kelly took the unprecedented step of asking Fyfe to review the decisions of First Deputy George Grasso, who had recommended penalties short of dismissal for four probationary cops who violated department rules. Sources say Fyfe recommended all their dismissals.
So far, one of the cops has been dismissed. Let’s see whose recommendation Kelly takes for the others.
Enough Already! Giuliani is off to Europe with his police detail. Let’s understand this. Giuliani earns millions. But the department will foot the bill for his protection. With the city going broke, maybe Ray should try his friends at the Police Foundation again.