Ray Kelly

L.G.: There's been a lot of talk lately that with Wall Street obviously in a terrible bear market, the economy going into the dumper, that has an impact on crime, particularly here in New York. During depressions and recessions, crime rates tend to rise. What's your sense?

R.K.: My primary concern is that this economic environment we find ourselves in will impact on the resources that we have available to police in this city. The mayor has some pretty difficult choices to make. We have to balance our budget every year. We're not like the federal government where you print money. The budget has to be balanced.

L.G.: And your budget is, what, close to $4 billion?

R.K.: Yes, and 94 percent of our budget is personal services, salaries, so to have any meaningful reductions in the police department, it has to affect our head count in some way, shape, or form. I don't know what they will be. What decisions we'll make haven't been made yet, but that's obviously my concern. So I see that as a bigger issue. I don't see former Lehman Brothers employees going out and sticking up 7-Elevens. I don't think that's the outcome of what we'll have here. The larger picture is the reduction we've done. I think we have transformed this department since September 11th, and we have made it not only a conventional crime-fighting organization, but a counterterrorism entity that I think, in terms of a municipality, is second to none. We have no guarantees, but we have done more to protect this city than any other city has, to the best of my knowledge, in the world.

L.G.: Right. But you also have the normal workaday police work.

R.K.: Absolutely, and we've been able to reduce crime 30 percent since this administration came in, in 2002, with 5,000 fewer officers than we had in 2001. We have about 36,000, but we had 41,000. In the middle of this administration, we had a horrific arbitrary decision of lowering the starting salary to $25,000 from what it was-$40,000-so we went back to the starting salary of 1986. That's another challenge. We've lost 5,000 officers, we've got additional obligations of protecting the city form a terrorist attack, and, oh, by the way, we lowered your starting salary almost 40 percent. Make it work. So we have be able to make it work. Crime is down 30 percent, as I say. Last year we had the lowest number of homicides that we've ever had since we've began to record them accurately in 1962.

L.G.: What was that?

R.K.: 496. Now, if you look at the homicide rate in the city-murder rate-not all homicides are murders, but if you look at the murder rate compared to other cities, New York is by far the safest big city in America. It's the safest out of the top 10, the safest out of the top 25. Now, if you look at New Orleans, New Orleans has a murder rate of 95 per 100,000 population, Baltimore has a murder rate of 45 per 100,000, Philadelphia, I believe is 27 per 100,000, Los Angeles is 10 per 100,000. And we're 6 per 100,000. This is, in my business, a remarkable number.

L.G.: Well, the New York City police department obviously has a reputation for management and crime reduction theory that works. And I gather you've lost a lot of your people to run other police departments. Why is it that other police departments, such as Baton Rouge, want to get New York-style management of their police?

R.K.: I can't criticize other departments, I don't know what's going on in other places. I will tell you this: In most cities, police officers are the most expensive civil service, so cities will come here and are looking for the magic formula, looking for a bit of a gimmick-CompStat or whatever. Now, all these things work, but there's no substitute for boots on the ground. You need the bodies to do it, and we've been able to do it with 5,000 fewer officers. But there's difficulty in other cities paying for the police services, and most cities have a formula that gives you roughly enough police officers to respond to 911 calls and some investigative ability. You need more than that, in my judgment, to aggressively attack crime problems. Not every city has crime problems, but in the cities that do, I think you have to, if at all possible, try to find the resources to provide an adequate number of police officers on the street. Most cities have a formula, about 2.1, 2.2 police officers per 1,000 population. We have about 4. Washington, D.C., has about 6-so it's not a panacea.

L.G.: You use CompStat [a hardheaded and occasionally severe management tool that relies on comparative statistics in individual precincts to evaluate performance, often harshly], right? And under Mayor [David] Dinkins, you developed community policing, so-called, and CompStat, I guess, is credited to Bill Bratton [Kelly's sometime rival who was Mayor Rudy Giuliani's police commissioner].

R.K.: CompStat is a system that we have in place here, on a borough basis, where commanders would come in and the borough commander would question what's going on in their precinct. What they did is simply take the system and put it on a citywide basis. We're doing something else here. We have a real-time crime center-did anyone talk to you about this? It really doesn't exist anywhere else in the country. What we have done is create a data warehouse here. When this administration came in here in 2002, we were still one of the world's biggest users of Wite-Out and carbon paper.

L.G.: And now you're so high-tech that when you read books, you do it on a Kindle?

R.K.: Yep, it's amazing. You can download it, you buy it for under $10, and it downloads in 30 seconds, I get the New York Times on it every day, automatically it shows up, and you can carry 50 books in it.

L.G.: So you're state of the art-no carbon paper and Wite-Out for you, man.

R.K.: We did lead the league, though-55 million drums of Wite-Out. And we have changed it significantly, brought in 12,000 computers, brought in the C.I.O. [chief information officer] from outside, and I got a recommendation from Lou Gerstner.

L.G.: The former I.B.M. chief executive.

R.K.: Right, and Jim Onalfo is our C.I.O. He was the C.I.O. of Kraft Foods and Stanley Works [the tool manufacturer]. But we had put in place this idea to create this data warehouse, we opened this in 2005, so we are pushing out real-time information when a crime happens, okay? CompStat is a retrospective look at what you did, for commanders to handle your crime problems. It's an auditing process.

L.G.: And it's a rather rough one.

R.K.: Well, it's direct, but it's lost a lot of that reputation.

L.G.: It's no longer like an EST session-people locked in a room and screamed at?

R.K.: No, no. So this is the other side of the coin. This is after the crime happens to push information to investigators in the field. I was just out at a shooting scene. We had six people shot, and we had one of them killed.