A former commissioner of the New York Police Department, Raymond Kelly, tells the Sun amid a surge in assaults on city officers and a staffing shortage at the agency that the problems aren’t likely to improve much under current city leadership. 

“It’s not easy to be a New York City cop these days,” Mr. Kelly, who served as commissioner under Mayors Dinkins and Bloomberg, says. “Cops are on their back foot. They are reacting as opposed to being proactive, and that will continue.”

Last year saw a historic number of officers injured on the job. In total, 5,363 officers sustained some kind of injury — up 13 percent from 2022. 

Just in the last quarter of 2023, there were nearly 1,300 NYPD officers assaulted by suspects during confrontations. Mr. Kelly says that number is unlikely to improve under the leadership of Mayor Adams and the more liberal city council. 

He tells the Sun that elected officials at New York and at Albany have decided to placate their “progressive” base for the sake of politics rather than stand up for officers and the communities that lack the protection of officers. 

“The city council … is always willing to jump on the cops. There are fewer cops now. They’re leaving,” he says.

The head of the NYPD union — the Police Benevolent Association — Patrick Hendry told CBS New York in January that Mr. Adams’s budget for an additional 600 police officers is not nearly enough to solve the staffing problems. 

“We have a staffing crisis going on in the NYPD right now,” Mr. Hendry said. “We lost nearly 3,000 police officers last year to just retirements. … We’re losing an average of over 200 police officers a month.”

“Right now, the NYPD, our members are overworked, understaffed, not being able to get days off, barely being able to get meals, being forced to work inhumane amounts of overtime. In precincts across this city where we’d normally turn out six to eight patrol cars, right now we’re turning out two to three patrol cars in those communities,” he said. “Response times continue to rise. … Our city needs to have incentives to do whatever they possibly can to keep our talented, highly trained, highly skilled police officers in the department.”

Mr. Kelly blames Manhattan’s district attorney, Alvin Bragg, in part, for his lax approach to crime. In 2023, the district attorney downgraded 60 percent of felony charges to misdemeanors. 

“District Attorney Bragg in New York County announced that he would not write up a charge of resisting arrest,” Mr. Kelly says. “All of these things are stacked against cops.”

In 2022, the rate of felony crime rocketed to a 15-year high, and while that abated slightly in 2023, the staffing shortages that are accelerating will likely keep crime rates stubbornly high, Mr. Kelly says. Those politicians who pushed for cashless bail and more lenient prosecution, he argues, are unlikely to pay the price. 

“I hope it’s a strong message from voters” this year, he says, “but you know, New York is a blue city. … There are too many special interests. It’s just not that simple to vote against crime.”

The migrant crisis has become a salient issue in New York state and at the city itself, especially after the beating of two NYPD officers by eight migrants at Times Square last month. All of those migrants are Venezuelan nationals, and two of them are members of the notoriously violent gang Tren de Agua, as the Sun reported.

Mr. Kelly served in the NYPD for almost half a century, holding nearly every position possible for an officer in the department. After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the New York Times reported that President Clinton considered him as a candidate to lead the FBI. During President Obama’s tenure, Senator Schumer asked the president to nominate Mr. Kelly as FBI director in 2011 and later pushed for him to be nominated as the secretary of homeland security in 2013. 

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Correction: Mayors Dinkins and Bloomberg are the mayors under whom Ray Kelly served as commissioner. This has been corrected from the bulldog.