Ray Kelly

L.G.: Today?

R.K.: Just today, in Brooklyn, in the 88th precinct. An off-duty policewoman was shot in the foot. She's in there getting a haircut, but two males chase this individual, shot other people in the process, but shoot him in the head and kill him. So, when a crime like this happens, we dispatch vans from the real-time crime center. A van was out there, they are gathering information, and pushing information out to the investigators who were on the scene. It's kind of a big deal, lots of cops there. One of the classic examples I give is, we always had a tattoo file. Like, I run somebody with a tattoo and it says "Ray" on it, you record that. But we weren't able to easily access it. With the real-time crime center, we access it. Shortly after this center opened, a Sbarro's was robbed on Fifth Avenue. Somebody comes in, he had "sugar" tattooed on his neck, so we go through our real-time crime center, access the tattoo file. Most people arrested with the "sugar" tattoo are women, but we had this guy, picked him out of photo array, showed it to people, and arrested him right away. It's a simple example. We have billions of pieces of information that's available-both proprietary information that we have in-house and external databases that we push out to the field. The notion is that we're dealing with recidivists here, so if we get people who commit crimes off the street more quickly, we're going to reduce crime. It's working.

L.G.: What have you done in terms of increasing the number of cameras in the city?

R.K.: We have put in our own program of 550 cameras. We did that in all five boroughs. The program is finished. We put them in high-crime areas. We had a federal grant to enable us to do that. I would love to put another layer of those cameras in place. Now there's the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, you familiar with this at all? Okay. Lower Manhattan is still the most sensitive area, from Canal Street south, 1.7 square miles. So, we are putting in place a Lower Manhattan Security Initiative that will involve 3,000 cameras-1,000 public-sector cameras, 2,000 private-sector cameras, about 130 license-plate readers-some mobile, most fixed. Also actual physical barriers that can wall off the area in extreme situations, and a coordination center, at 55 Broadway, on the 28th floor. We will bring in public- and private-sector stakeholders, and, again, it's another big-screen operation that will provide an enhanced security with about 600 additional police officers as it's planned now, and encompasses the World Trade Center site, and it has the Goldman Sachs Tower, the World Financial Center, New York Stock Exchange, Bank of New York, Mercantile Exchange, and, of course, everything that's going to be built-the Freedom Tower and other buildings at the World Trade Center site. That is going to be done in conjunction with Securing the Cities, which is a federally financed program. We're going to use state of the art, and we're already distributing state-of-the-art radiation detectors from 50 miles out. It'll be merged with this program. It's the first city in the country to have this, and on the screen we'll be able to see. I've signed a memorandum of understand with at least 22 other jurisdictions, so that we're all in this together. The notion is that if we get a reading on our detectors-

L.G.: Like a dirty bomb?

R.K.: Exactly. Radiation is coming in and it's out in New Jersey, it goes up on the screen, we're all tied in together. So with these radiation detectors, we will have cameras, we will have license-plate readers at all 19 of the entry points into Manhattan. So it'll be a very densely covered area.

L.G.: What do you say to civil libertarians? I guess that's different. If you were just a corporate C.E.O., you'd be doing this and not everybody would be throwing brickbats at you.

R.K.: Well, I don't think everybody's is throwing brickbats.

L.G.: Not everybody, but there are people who are concerned about privacy.

R.K.: You'd be hard-pressed to find them, other than the civil liberties union, the A.C.L.U. That's something they bring up-nobody else brings it up. You go into a department store, your picture is taken 20 times. That's the world we live in, I think post-9/11, people accept that. We are only using cameras in public areas. Nothing private about it. There's no expectation of privacy when you walk down the street. This is the area that we are taking pictures of. We have no intention of archiving this material, for more than, say, 30 days.

L.G.: In other words, you won't do it?

R.K.: We won't do it. There's no purpose in doing it. We want to allay people's concerns about it. It's for real-time security. It will also have predictive software built in, again state of the art. What do I mean by predictive software? Let me give you a simple example. If a truck goes around the block three times, we'll say, that will set off a certain indicator, or there's a package on a certain location, unattended for X period of time, that will also set off an indicator. I believe the Lower Manhattan area will be the most secure, but also open, business district anywhere. It'll be far beyond what's happened in London, and the London authorities certainly agree. They've been helpful with us, but they know that we're moving beyond what they've done. We know that area has to be secure, but we know it has to be open to be commercially viable. So it's a balance, and we certainly attempt to strike that balance.

L.G.: You've also heard from people who were unhappy with the way the New York cops handled the 2004 Republican convention in terms of public protest. You're sometimes criticized as allegedly having less admiration for the right of public assembly than others.

R.K.: [Laughs] That's not the case. I think the Republican National Convention was one of this department's finest hours. We had 800,000 people who came here for a demonstration, and nobody was hurt except one cop who was beaten and kicked. Look what's happened at other conventions, much smaller conventions. Look what happened in Denver, Minneapolis, St. Paul-macing people. None of that happened here. They came here-"they" being certain elements-to shut down the city. You have to remember that this was an incumbent administration having its convention here, all the principals coming here. This wasn't an outgoing administration, this was conceivably an administration that was going to be reelected. So they came here with the intention-and stated openly-of shutting the city down. That didn't happen. What did happen is the criminal justice system was overloaded, and it's understandable that when you arrest that number of people, you're not going to be able to handle them in the way you handle a normal flow of arrests on another day. But I thought the cops did a terrific job. All you have to do is look at the statements of CNN and the New York Times who have praised us liberally for the work that we did during the convention.

L.G.: So basically the New York Times and CNN-those are your metrics?

R.K.: Absolutely, and many others say exactly the same thing. This is New York, this is the litigation capital of the world. We understand that, we accept that as the working environment we have to operate in.

L.G.: I want to get into some of your core management principles, but unlike a business, you also have a lot of crisis events to contend with, just internal situations which are public hot buttons. For instance, you had to deal with this horrible, tragic situation of the Taser incident, where the guy fell and died and then the lieutenant who was reprimanded committed suicide-which is just a horrific thing for you personally to have to deal with. Walk me through what that was like.

R.K.: Well, this was a terrible tragedy for all concerned. I know that we handle about 88,000 calls a year with emotionally disturbed persons, and the overwhelming majority are handled without any problem at all. But each one is different than the other one. We take our emergency service officers and we train them, and they'll have six months of additional training. They're hand-selected, and they are trained to deal with these situations. We're human beings, sometimes we make mistakes, but unfortunately in this business, when you make mistakes, it can cost lives. In the rest of the world, in the private sector, you make a mistake, it costs money. In this business, you make a mistake, it can cost lives. So the ante is much higher in policing when you make a mistake. It's unfortunate that the Taser was used in that situation. Of course, it resulted in a loss of life, but the overwhelming majority of situations that we handle are done well. And we have departments coming from all over the world to see how we handle the emotionally disturbed.