The controversy around New York City’s stop and frisk practices “is a complaint about better recording on our part,” departing Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly tells the Wall Street Journal. In his days as a patrol officer, Kelly said police conducted stops and sometimes frisked people based on reasonable suspicion but rarely recorded them because it wasn’t required. Kelly’s stop-and-frisk program, at its height, resulted in 685,000 stops a year, mostly black and Hispanic men who weren’t charged with anything. In August, U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled that the way the department was conducting stop and frisks created a “policy of indirect racial profiling.” Kelly said people fail to recognize the result of many of the NYPD’s policies: that memories of rampant crime in the city have faded. When he left office at the end of 1993, there were about 600,000 major crimes committed that year. In 2012, there were about 200,000. “One of the unfortunate realities in the world we live in is people tend to take things for granted and want more,” Kelly said. “People don’t fully appreciate the magnitude of this reduction.”