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The Devil in the Detail
January 11, 2016 | 12:15 AM
Top police officials have pointed to a chief who headed Ray Kelly’s security detail as the source of his comments that NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton deliberately distorted shooting statistics to make the city appear safer that it actually is.
Although Kelly has said his information was “supplied by active members of the department themselves,” these officials say the chief is retired and that he “reached back” inside the department, as one of them put it, to contact current officers for his information.
Police sources say Bratton’s transition team was aware of the chief’s relationship to Kelly but that Bratton’s civilian consultant, Robert Wasserman, provided him what one source termed a "soft landing” within the detective bureau with full access to crime data after Bratton took over as commissioner.
Department spokesman Steve Davis said, “We are much more interested in whether former commissioner Kelly has specific facts about shootings that he will share with us than in learning who might have told him that.”
Because there is no definitive proof the chief was Kelly's source and because these officials would not identify him on the record, NYPD Confidential is not naming him at this time. He did not return a phone call from this reporter at his job in the private sector.
He said in a telephone call to this reporter Monday morning after reading the article: "It is complete bull. I never made a phone call to anyone in the department. I never spoke to Ray Kelly [about the statistics.] I want nothing but the best for the department. I have nothing but respect for Bill Bratton. All I want is for the department to succeed."
Those who know the retired chief describe him as smart and personable with numerous relatives on the job. As the head of Kelly’s security detail he proved successful in stopping the bleeding of detectives assigned to protect Kelly who were leaving the detail in droves.
While the P.C.’s detail, as it is known, is considered among the most coveted of NYPD assignments, with a lock on overtime and grade promotions, by 2005, Kelly’s third year as commissioner, 16 detectives and supervisors had left, reflecting the difficulties that most law enforcement people have in working for him.
The exodus began with Kelly’s dismissal of his longtime aide, Sgt. Manny Lopez, who had served in Kelly’s detail under David Dinkins a decade before. In 2004, after the midnight shooting in Brooklyn of Timothy Stansbury, a black teenager, by Richard Neri, a white cop, Kelly blamed Lopez for not alerting him immediately and instead waiting until the next morning. Kelly forced Lopez out of the detail and, when Lopez then filed for retirement, Kelly had him investigated for overtime abuse. None was found. [See NYPD Confidential Nov. 25, 2005.]
Six years later, Lopez pleaded guilty to several misdemeanors of aggravated harassment, which consisted of his making two dozen prank phone calls to top police and elected officials, including former mayor Rudy Giuliani, in which he claimed to be the head of Kelly’s detail. [See NYPD Confidential, May 16, 2011.]
Like the retired chief, Lopez went to work in the private sector. He was the driver for the retired chief’s boss but left after the chief arrived.
HITTING THE TRIFECTA. True, the settlement of two civil rights lawsuits over the NYPD’s over-the-top spying on Muslim communities during the reign of Ray Kelly is more symbolic than substantive. True, too, that the NYPD has admitted no wrongdoing.
But, with the appointment of an attorney outside the department to monitor the NYPD’s Intelligence Division, Kelly has hit the trifecta. His legacy now includes three outside monitors. Besides the Intel monitor, there is a federal monitor and an inspector general, both created in the wake of his overreach of stop-and-frisk.
It’s not often that NYPD Confidential finds itself agreeing with the New York Post. But that’s the case when it comes to another point in the settlement: the removal from the department’s website of its 2007 report on “homegrown” terrorists.
Granted the report by the department’s logorrheic former civilian analyst, Mitchell Silber, goes on and on and on for 92 pages and in places paints with too broad a brush. But the threat of homegrown terrorism — from the San Bernardino shootings to last week’s attack on a Philadelphia cop by a homegrown ISIS follower — is all too real.
