Violent Crime Will Go Up' If Stop and Frisk Abandoned, NYC Police Commissioner Says

NEW YORK (TheBlaze/AP) — Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly told a Sunday news show that if his department's practice of stop and frisk were abandoned, "no question about it—violent crime will go up."

(Credit: NBC via YouTube)

Kelly made his statement Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," but he also appeared on two other Sunday news shows, calling a federal judge's finding of racial discrimination and demand for changes to stop and frisk as faulty and defending the New York Police Department's practice as legal and life-saving.

Kelly also raised questions about the judge's call to try outfitting officers with tiny video cameras.

"The losers in this, if this case is allowed to stand, are people who live in minority communities," he said on CBS' "Face the Nation." Kelly noted that 97 percent of shooting victims are black or Hispanic and reasoned that similar demographics apply if a stop deters a killing, adding that there have been more than 7,300 fewer killings in the 11 full years of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's tenure so far than in the 11 years before.

"Things are going right here in New York. And this decision certainly has the potential of overturning it," Kelly said on ABC News' "This Week with George Stephanopoulos."

The controversial policy employed by the New York Police Department in high-crime neighborhoods known as stop and frisk, has been given a severe rebuke by a federal judge. (Credit: Getty Images)

Over the past decade, police have stopped, questioned and sometimes patted down about 5 million people; 87 percent were black or Hispanic, groups that make up 54 percent of the city population. About 10 percent of the stops spur an arrest or summons. Police find weapons a fraction of the time.

U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin declared Monday that at least 200,000 stops were made without reasonable suspicion and that the NYPD's practice is intentionally racially biased. The city plans to appeal.

Kelly said Sunday that Scheindlin's ruling rested on mistaken logic: The racial and ethnic makeup of those stopped should be compared to and reliably mirrors that of crime suspects, not the population at large, Kelly said. The judge called that approach wrong "because the stopped population is overwhelmingly innocent — not criminal."

Kelly and Bloomberg have made the same point before, and civil rights and minority advocates have deplored it, particularly after Bloomberg said in June that "we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little."

Kelly's remarks Sunday brought a rebuke from NAACP President Benjamin Jealous.

"Just because there are more murders in our community doesn't mean that you can treat all of us like we are guilty," Jealous said on "Meet the Press." ''... He's just way off base."

A New York Police Department (NYPD) car sits parked in Times Square. The controversial policy employed by the NYPD in high-crime neighborhoods known as stop and frisk has been given a severe rebuke by a federal judge. (Credit: Getty Images)

Scheindlin appointed a monitor to oversee various changes, including a one-year test that could put video cameras in more than 1,000 officers' lapels or eyeglasses.

Kelly suggested Sunday the cameras could be problematic when police respond to domestic arguments or when someone wants to provide confidential information.

Here's Kelly defending the stop-and-frisk practice on "Meet the Press":

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