Bloomberg: There Can Be No Independent Monitor Of The NYPD

Because the king and his army must not be accountable to anybody:

Mayor Bloomberg blasted a plan to create an inspector general to monitor the NYPD as an election year ploy that will be disastrous for public safety.

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn backed the proposal Tuesday, calling for an office within the city Department of Investigation that could subpoena police officials and documents.

Quinn is hoping to secure the mayor’s endorsement in her run for City Hall this year — but Bloomberg called the bill the latest in a pattern of politically-motivated attacks on the NYPD that could plunge New York back into the bad old days.

“We cannot afford to play election year politics with the safety of our city, and we cannot afford to roll back the progress of the past 20 years,” he said. “This bill jeopardizes that progress and will put the lives of New Yorkers and our police officers at risk.”

He said an inspector general with the power to oversee policy would undermine the police commissioner’s authority.

“I don’t think any rational person would say we need two competing police commissioners,” he said. “That kind of breakdown in the chain of command would be disastrous for public safety.”

Actually the point isn't to have two competing commissioners.

 

It's to have the currently unaccountable police commissioner who runs the police department like a paramilitary force and brags about having missiles to shoot down planes in the sky be called to account.

 

As Wayne Barrett pointed out here in 2011, the NYPD has been beset by scandal during Kelly's Reign of Terror:

 

There is now such an avalanche of scandal descending on the NYPD that even Kelly is threatened by it, depicted in a front-page New York Times story last week, and editorial this week, as an institutional captive of the department unable to independently investigate all the terrible things its members do. That recent list includes allegations, some already proven, of drug-planting, ticket-fixing, Muslim-spying, gunrunning, pepper-spraying, and “frying another nigger,” with the Times insisting that many of these revelations were uncovered by everyone but Kelly’s Internal Affairs Bureau, mostly because it’s too internal. In fact, the one scam IAB did help probe, the indictment of 16 cops for killing parking tickets and other favors, was compromised by an IAB lieutenant heard on one tape tipping off the perpetrators.

Barrett doesn't blame Kelly for these messes, he says the NYPD may be "a force unto itself, untamable, as dark sometimes as the streets it patrols...Could anyone do a better job of containing these excesses and outrages than Kelly has?"

 

I don't buy Barrett's argument.

 

If the NYPD is a "force unto itself", barely controllable, untamable, as dark as the streets it patrols - then maybe it's time for somebody outside the department who is independent of the department to police it.

 

Clearly Ray Kelly is not up to the task.  

 

Just ask the families of all the people of color shot by NYPD cops, ask the Occupy protesters bludgeoned by the NYPD whiteshirts, ask the victims of NYPD drug-planting in Queens, ask the people spied upon by Ray Kelly's CIA within the NYPD.

 

If any department in King Bloomberg's government needs an outside independent watchdog, it is certainly the NYPD.

 

No wonder Bloomberg doesn't want one.

 

For Bloomberg, accountability is for the little people, not for the mayor or his police commissioner.