Ex-NYPD chief promotes tougher police policies under Trump

Former New York Police Department Commissioner Ray Kelly says he favors tougher police tactics on tracking and monitoring immigrants who come into the country as supported by President-elect Donald Trump.

“I think we need some deeper vetting, deeper examination of people who are coming in,” Kelly said in an interview with John Catsimatidis on AM 970 in New York on Sunday.

“I think it is necessary in this day and age,” Kelly continued. “Certainly I think the public wants a higher degree of comfort as to who’s coming in at this time, and I think we are going to have to devote additional resources to examining the backgrounds of individuals coming in, where they live, where their relatives are.”

“I think it’s absolutely necessary to do a much deeper dive on people’s backgrounds.”

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During his interview, Kelly also pushed back on a New York Times op-ed that blasted the police tracking program in New York City under Kelly.

The op-ed criticized the “proposal to crack down on the civil liberties of law-abiding American Muslims” after Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) met with Trump and told reporters he “suggested a program similar to what Commissioner Kelly did here in New York.”

“[T]he program never generated any leads, or led to a single terrorism-related investigation,” the op-ed read.

Kelly pushed back at the accusations, arguing the program was never secret and was never intended to generate leads.

“The problem is that the article was critical of what was done in New York City and I think we had a very effective program. It makes a false allegation that our demographic unit was 1) a secret operation, and 2) that it didn’t develop any leads,” he said.

“First of all, the program was done in the open there wasn’t anything secretive … and its purpose was not to develop case leads but, indeed, to gather information about the citizens and the neighborhoods to determine where people might go who came to New York, came to our city, to do us harm,” he added.