New York, NY – Ray Kelly, the police commissioner who should be the next mayor of New York, seems to show you his best in the city’s worst moments. This he did the other day when he stood at a podium with the department crest in front of him and uniforms behind him, speaking of the murder of an 8-year-old from Brooklyn Leiby Kletzky.
Subscribe to our Daily Roundup Email
Always when something like this happens, this kind of monstrous and unspeakable tragedy, a death in the city feels more like a death in the family.
So here was Kelly asked to stand and speak about it to the city. He is not loved by everyone in his own ranks, but somehow is trusted more than any New York politician we have right now. Here was Kelly talking of blood on a refrigerator door of a man named Levi Aron and cutting boards and Dumpsters.
And even as the commissioner spoke in the clipped language of the squad room, he brought a painful humanity to it all as he spoke of the randomness of the boy being pulled off the street as he walked home from camp, as if a hand reached out from hell.
“It was just happenstance,” he said in a quiet voice, “and a terrible fate for this young boy.”
Theodore Roosevelt was a New York police commissioner who went on to become President. No city police commissioner has ever gone on to be mayor. Kelly ought to be the first, especially when you look at those lining up already to succeed Michael Bloomberg in a couple of years, and when you remember that Anthony Weiner once seemed to be at the front of the line.
Kelly will turn 72 in 2013, but there is an expression from sports that covers that one: He plays younger. And he is a better commissioner now than he was the first time around in the 1990s, in a far more dangerous world.
And while Kelly has given no indication that he’s planning to run, people who care about the city should be telling him to think about it, starting right now.
Roosevelt was police commissioner when he was 36.
Will there be compliments here for the mayor who first appointed Kelly as police commissioner 19 years ago?
we for sure wont be stuck in snow
“Daily News Reporter Says Commissioner Kelly Showed Real Leadership in Leiby’s Search”
So he should; New Yorkers pay enough in their taxes to give him a princely salary, and all the other perks and benefits that he gets.
I smell an endorsement for the next NY mayor…
Where was Bloomberg in this whole story???????????
“Daily News Reporter Says Commissioner Kelly Showed Real Leadership in Leiby’s Search”
*What* leadership? He gave nice speeches?
As we’ve already established, NYPD didn’t do squat UNTIL Shomrim gift-wrapped the case for them.
Its a honor to have him as commissioner!
C’mon now; Kelly took a personal interest; threw in all top brass and resources not usually done.
The fact that Shomrim was instrumental in cracking the case is really to the credit of BenJamie Herbst of the Council for Community Preservation, who urged Yehuda Bernstein of the Auto Leasing Company to put in a CCTV security system, and gave him the equipment which was installed by ProTel (Hershy 718 438-3232).
It was the NYPD and the FBI who were up untill the wee hours to ENHANCE the grainy film. It took the father to identify his son and others to identify the car. So what? That is presicely were the public comes in to look for and report people and cars found on footage. The system worked exactly as it should. A collabarative effort of the Police and the Public.
He did come to the levaya
72 years old??? Many 72 year olds limp around and look 80. He looks two decades younger and runs the largest police department in the world.
It was a joint effort on the part of the NYPD, the FBI, and Shomrim. If any good comes out of this it’s that the perp was apprehended quickly, so we didn’t have a re-run of the JonBenet Ramsey case, where the parents were under suspicion for years because the cops and DA in Boulder botched the investigation. Whoever killed JonBenet was not of the family; that’s now known.
Even now, Shmarya Rosenberg of Failed Messiah is blaming the orthodox community for not reporting this to the cops (which, of course, they did). This is one time in which the orthodox community joined forces with the police, and greatly assisted the cops.