In a quiet room on the fourteenth floor of police headquarters in downtown Manhattan, Ray Kelly, the snub-faced and dapperly dressed New York City police commissioner, receives his morning security briefing. Televisions play CNN, Fox News, NY1, and Al Jazeera on mute next to a line of clock faces that show the hours in Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Tel Aviv.
"They used three-wheel motorbikes and rickshaws, like what we have up in Midtown," says David Cohen, formerly the top analyst at the CIA and now the NYPD's deputy commissioner of intelligence. He's referring to the tactics that bombers used to kill 63 people earlier in the week in Jaipur, India.
"So," Kelly asks, in his matter-of-fact way, "who do we think did it?"
Kelly's jurisdiction is the five boroughs of New York, but he surveys criminal activity across a much broader and far-flung swath of territory. Each Molotov cocktail tossed at an embassy, blast in a Middle East bazaar, and black-market purchase of explosive materials is potentially New York's problem — and Kelly's responsibility. For now, he insists, that is plenty for one man to think about, and there is no time to pay attention to polls showing him as the early favorite in the 2009 race for mayor. "We have to continue to improve because the terrorists want to come here," Kelly says.
His office is decorated with the wooden desk that has been passed down to commissioners since Theodore Roosevelt led the department, awards acquired over 30 years on the force (he fondly calls the NYPD a "velvet trap"), and yellowed photos of Kelly as a Marine in Vietnam. In person, the compactly built 67-year-old wears a crooked smile and a mischievous squint. "This is the number-one target in the United States," Kelly, leaning forward, says of New York City. "It gives them everything they want."
Kelly's second stint as the head of the department is the longest, and most successful, of any commissioner since World War II. Murder and other violent crimes keep plummeting to record lows, and what was once ostensibly a local force continues to transform under his leadership into an internationally recognized counterterrorism operation. His vision for a safer city will physically alter the way target-rich areas like Wall Street look, and the way the city looks at its inhabitants, too. (Some civil rights activists are troubled by the thousands of police-controlled surveillance cameras that the city plans to install.) "It is going to be the safest business district in the world," Kelly says, wearing a bespoke Martin Greenfield suit, French cuffs fastened with weighty gold links, and a goldfish-colored Charvet tie. ("My big weakness," he confides, straightening the silk knot.) Kelly maintains that his high thread count in no way reflects an ambition for higher office. "I don't have a plan. I really don't," he says. "Maybe I should have a plan. But this is a total-immersion job."
Still, Kelly's wardrobe and accomplishments have not gone unnoticed by his boss and potential predecessor. "Ray is probably the only member of my administration as comfortable on Savile Row as he is on Sutphin Boulevard," Mayor Michael Bloomberg says. "I am glad to have the largest police force in the country led by someone who dresses and manages the same way — smart."
