EX-COMMISSIONER CRITICIZES GIULIANI POLICE EFFORTS

In an extensive public criticism, former Police Commissioner Raymond
Kelly assailed the Giuliani administration's police strategies last
weekend, saying it had abandoned community policing, increased
firepower and fumbled minority hiring in a way that bred mistrust
among many blacks and Latinos.

Mr. Kelly now works as United States customs comissioner under President
Clinton, whose wife is running against Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani in the
Senate campaign. In his speech, Mr. Kelly took a swipe at one of the
Giuliani administration's core success stories, asserting that the decline
in crime was influenced as much by social trends, like the downturn in
crack use, as by heralded innovations in police tactics.

Some of those tactics, Mr. Kelly told a meeting sponsored by the City Bar
Association, especially the expanded use of plainclothes officers in
stop-and-frisk operations, undermined police relations with communities
they were striving to serve.

"A large reservoir of goodwill was under construction when I left the
Police Department in 1994," Mr. Kelly said. "It was called community
policing. But it was quickly abandoned for tough-sounding rhetoric and
dubious stop-and-frisk tactics that sowed new seeds of community mistrust."

Soon after taking office, Mayor Giuliani replaced Mr. Kelly with William J.
Bratton and denigrated the community policing program, which used beat
officers to build community relationships, as an ineffectual policy that
resembled social work.

Police officials characterized Mr. Kelly's speech, which included criticism
of the decision to switch from 10-shot to 16-shot pistols, as unfair. They
denied that they had abandoned community policing and said that, despite
the increase in firepower, the number of shots fired by police officers has
declined in recent years.

"We do assertive policing, not in-our-your face policing," said First
Deputy Commissioner Patrick Kelleher. "You talk about community policing?
Prior to the current administration, we had a lot of officers in uniform
who were forbidden from making drug arrests."

Mr. Kelly said the department had given up too soon on community policing
strategies.