In Brief

Ray Kelly Thinks Global, Acts Local

New York City Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly has imported new thinking and perspectives into a department known for an insular, paramilitary culture.

By Tom Wailgum

November 01, 2005 — CSO — New York City Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly has imported new thinking and perspectives into a department known for an insular, paramilitary culture. To beef up its counterterrorism and intelligence efforts, Kelly hired two senior officialsone ex-CIA, one ex-State Departmentwith decades of government experience. He also tapped a private-sector IT executive to be the first-ever NYPD CIO. Kelly now has 1,000 full-time officers working counterterrorism (there were around 20 before 9/11), in addition to the 37,000 officers and detectives working their beats.

"The department never reached out to non-law enforcement folks to man high positions," says Kelly, 63, in an interview in his Lower Manhattan office. "But it was clear, certainly post-9/11, that we needed some big-league help."

Kelly, who began his second stint as commissioner in 2002, says he sticks to three goals: Reduce crime; protect New York from terrorist attack; and improve the city's quality of life. It's balancing the needs of the first two that tops Kelly's daily agenda. "I believe New York is at the top of the terrorists' target list," Kelly says matter-of-factly. "They want to come here rather than anyplace else because they've been here twice already, successfully."

Under Kelly, the department has sought to mesh local policing with a global perspective. "What we try to do is have our police officers and personnel aware of the terrorist threat while they're performing their other functions," such as responding to 911 calls, Kelly says.

The NYPD also has reached out to local businesses with NYPD Shield, which aims to keep counterterrorism information flowing between businesses and police. Businesses can tip off police to suspicious activity. And the NYPD offers business owners security assessments, training and information updates in person, via the Web or e-mail.

Technology is also a vital factor. "In this business, we're always going to need boots on the ground," Kelly says. "But to help [police] do their job, there's a tremendous potential to use technology." A $12 million Real Time Crime Center allows detectives to look for connections in incidents and evidence across the city by mining once-disparate databases; it's the kind of analysis that police officials believe will let them see relationships between criminals and potential victims and identify criminal hot spots. The Real Time Crime Center holds giant video screens displaying information on criminals and their victims and maps of criminal activity hot spots. The center is manned 24/7, with 15 analyst workstations and 26 trained staffers. It's work that probably never occurred before, Kelly says.