New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, under fire on various issues, fought beck yesterday at the City Council, the New York Times reports. He suggested that critical council members were at a loss to offer any ideas on how to stop violence among young minority men. “What I haven’t heard is any solution to the violence problems in these communities,” he said. “”People are upset about being stopped, yet what is the answer?”
Kelly asserted that violence among minority youth is “something that the government has an obligation to try to solve.” The Times called Kelly’s “pugnacious assault of the Council [ ] unusually expansive and rare,” saying that he normally aggressively defends his department and leaves it at that. The department conducted a record high 684,330 stops last year, 87 percent of which were of blacks or Hispanics. The department maintains that those stops protect that same group of people. Kelly said “people of color” were 96 percent of shooting victims in the city.