The New York Times is reporting that the Manhattan District Attorney is investigating charges of sexual assault leveled at WNYW (Fox) anchor Greg Kelly. Mr. Kelly, son of New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, allegedly committed the act in October 2011 in Lower Manhattan.
Mr. Kelly issued a denial through his attorney, Andrew Lankler: Read More
The spate of scandals in the New York Police Department is disheartening. Officers have been accused of crimes ranging from gun-smuggling to ticket-fixing. Others have been convicted of planting false evidence—drugs—on suspects to meet arrest quotas that the department insists do not exist.
Clearly something is amiss in the department. But calls for an outside, independent body to monitor the department are overheated and, simply, wrong-headed. True, the department’s own Internal Affairs Bureau clearly has not been doing its job. But the proper response to the department’s institutional flaws should begin with a reform of the institution itself, not with the imposition of an outside entity that very likely would do more harm than good. Read More
New York may well be the world’s safest big city, but that does not, of course, mean the streets are crime free. A recent spate of shootings should remind us that the war on crime remains ongoing, even after the historic successes of the past two decades.
Shootings are up by more than 25 percent over the past four weeks compared with the same period last year. New Yorkers clearly have scandalously easy access to firearms despite the city’s strict gun laws, and far too many of those firearms are in the hands of murderous thugs who think nothing of opening fire in the presence of innocents, including children. A Brooklyn mother of 12, Zurana Horton, was cut down in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn the other day. She died while protecting one of her children from gun violence that remains the curse of so many of the city’s less fortunate neighborhoods.
The New York Police Department, which has been so successful in bringing the city’s murder rate to historic lows, currently faces more than a few challenges, not least of which is maintaining order in downtown Manhattan while demonstrators exercise their constitutional right to protest without end and with no apparent goal in mind. Read More
