DHS secretaryRay Kelly’s DHS candidacy divides opinion
One of the leading candidates to succeed Janet Napolitano as DHS secretary is NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly. New York politicians strongly support his candidacy, and President Obama said he was ‘well qualified.” Civil rights groups object to his nomination, saying that while there is no doubt about his qualifications and dedication, some of the policies he has initiated in New York — for example, suspicionless stop-and-frisk, the mass arrest of protesters during the 2004 Republican Convention, and the surveillance of Muslim communities in the city and neighboring states — have been heavy-handed, perhaps even constitutionally questionable.
NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly considered for DHS secretary // Source: iza.ne.jp
One of the leading candidates to succeed Janet Napolitano as DHS secretary is New York Police Department (NYPD) Commissioner Ray Kelly.
New York politicians strongly support his candidacy.
“There is no doubt Ray Kelly would be a great DHS Secretary, and I have urged the White House to very seriously consider his candidacy,” Senator Charles Schumer (D-New York) said in a statement. “While it would be New York’s loss, Commissioner Kelly’s appointment as the head of DHS would be a great boon for the entire country.”
Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-New York) called Kelly “uniquely qualified” for the job, in the New York Daily News.
President Barack Obama said appeared to suggest his support for Kelly, saying Kelly would be “well qualified” for the post.
Civil rights groups do not agree.
Msnbc quotes Rashad Robinson, executive director of Color of Change, saying that “I think it’s a horrible idea. His history in New York City, particularly with stop-and-frisk, will send a very clear message about the tools that Homeland Security will see as most important.”
Kelly has upset civil rights advocates by pushing the NYPD to increase its stop-and-frisk policy. The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) says that since 2002, there have been more than five million stop-and-frisks, with more than 86 percent of the people stopped being African-Americans or Latinos.
Kelly is a “serious, professional, dedicated law enforcement leader,” NYCLU executive director Donna Lieberman told Msnbc, but he also “plays fast and loose with the Constitution, which is evident in the failure of the police department to respect the Constitutional constraints on stop-and-frisk, and the extraordinary expansion of suspicionless stop-and-frisk that impacts innocent people of color, mainly, under his watch.”
The NYCLU does not take positions on candidates for government positions, but “the NYPD’s failure under Commissioner Kelly to give the Constitution its due would be a serious problem in any government position,” Lieberman added.
The Center for Constitutional Rights is currently representing citizens who have been subject to stop-and-frisks in a federal class action lawsuit, arguing the program is discriminatory and unconstitutional.
Representative Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) on Wednesday said the New York City police commissioner would be a “poor choice” to head Homeland Security. On MSNBC’s “All In with Chris Hayes,” Jeffries said: “He’s been a good administrator, and perhaps I could even support his potential appointment to this position in the absence of the massive aggressive stop-and-frisk program that he’s run, and the unconstitutional Muslim surveillance program, but that’s kind of like saying, I had a good year, if you don’t count the winter, spring, and fall.”
Kelly has defended stop-and-frisk, saying that if anything, African-American New Yorkers are being “under-stopped.”
In addition to the stop-and-frisk issue, Kelly also angered civil rights advocates when it was discovered that the NYPD teamed up with the CIA to spy on Muslin communities in New York City and in neighboring states.
Kelly was also accused for the NYPD’s heavy-handed tactics during the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York, when the NYPD arrested 1,800 protesters, many of them, a judge would later say, without a probable cause.
Kelly has held positions in federal agencies in the past, among them commissioner of the U.S. Customs Service and under-secretary for enforcement at the Treasury Department in the Clinton administrations.
Critics of Schumer’s enthusiastic support of Kelly remind him that in 2004 he issued equally supportive proclamation on behalf of another NYPD police commissioner for the same job: Bernard Kerik. Kerik was nominated by President George W. Bush, but later withdrew his nomination after it as discovered that he had receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in free perks from contractors applying to work for New York City, among other charges.
