New NYPD Chief Is Named as Mayor Calls for Respect

Calling on citizens and police to treat each other with more dignity and respect, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani on Saturday named Bernard Kerik, the city’s corrections commissioner, to take over the helm of the troubled New York Police Department.

Kerik, 44, succeeds Commissioner Howard Safir, a close mayoral ally whose four-year tenure was marked by plunging crime rates as well as increased tensions with New York’s minority communities.

Giuliani praised Kerik’s record in running the Corrections Department, which has 12,400 employees and is in charge of an estimated 130,000 inmates yearly at New York’s 16 jails and 15 court holding pens. “The violence [in city-run jails] has been reduced by numbers that are staggering, and the morale of the department has been lifted,” said the mayor at a City Hall news conference. “Relationships with minority groups have also been improved dramatically. Bernie brings a quality of leadership to this important post.”

Kerik’s appointment marks the third time that Giuliani has gone outside the 40,000-member police department to appoint its commissioner. Previously he appointed to the post William Bratton, Boston’s chief of police, and Safir, New York’s fire commissioner. Typically, the mayor has appointed close allies from his inner circle to many of the city’s top positions.

Currently the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating the New York Police Department to determine whether it has displayed a pattern of brutality in its dealings with minorities.

Giuliani, who has staunchly defended the NYPD against the criticisms of minority leaders, tried a more conciliatory note Saturday, suggesting that the road to improving police relationships in the city’s diverse communities “is not a one-way street” and that “the problem of perception in police relations has to be solved on both sides.”

Still, the mayor lashed out at familiar targets--his political enemies and the media--saying “it is time to put aside some of the political rhetoric that influences people. . . . It is time to put aside the way that the media covers the police department [and] blocks out the thousands of times that police officers put themselves at risk.”

During Giuliani’s tenure, minority groups have bitterly protested the 1999 death of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed West African peddler who was shot 41 times by four white police officers, and the 1997 brutalization of Abner Louima, a Haitian man who was assaulted by officers with a stick in a Brooklyn precinct house. More recently, the city was shaken by protests over the March shooting death of Patrick Dorismond, an unarmed, off-duty security guard who was shot by undercover officers in a drug bust gone bad.

Although the new police commissioner offered little in the way of new policies or direction, Kerik pledged to run a fair, open department.

He also said he had worked well with Corrections Department employees, who are 76% minority. “We work well, we have a good working relationship. . . . They let me know their concerns, and accountability is foremost,” he said.

“Some people make and create racial tensions for no reason, but if there are valid concerns I want them addressed. The same thing has to happen with the police department.”

Kerik, a New Jersey native who was appointed by Giuliani to run the Corrections Department in 1998, previously served eight years as a New York police officer, spending the bulk of his time as a narcotics detective. A high school dropout who earned an equivalency diploma, Kerik needed a City Hall waiver to win the post because he does not have a college degree. He is close, however, to earning a bachelor’s degree at Empire State College.

In a related action, Giuliani named Chief of Department Joseph Dunne--who was runner-up for the top police job--as first deputy commissioner, the department’s second in command.

Safir is leaving to become the chief of security for an Atlanta-based firm.