New York
On Thursday, April 28, former New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly addressed the second annual “Disinvitation Dinner” at the Plaza in New York. The event is hosted by the William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale and was inaugurated last year by George Will, who was invited to speak at Scripps College and then “disinvited” when students reported feeling victimized by a piece he wrote in the Washington Post asserting that colleges were making victimhood a coveted status and that self-appointed victims would proliferate.
The Disinvitation Dinner is dedicated to removing the need for its own existence, but is made necessary by college students who refuse to listen to people who disagree with them (people who may conceivably know even more than college sophomores) and by cowardly faculties that are afraid to stand up to their students and insist they learn something.
Ray Kelly was invited to speak at Brown in 2013 about his policing policies and their results. Students decided that New York’s “Stop, Question and Frisk” policy was the second rising of Nazi Germany: posters of Kelly were defaced with swastikas and the university refused to remove them for fear of infringing freedom of speech. But this fear did not extend to ensuring Kelly would be allowed to speak, and after a half-hour of students shouting Kelly down at the podium, Brown canceled the event. The professor who invited him apologized to his students for hurting their feelings and beseechingly asked them to submit a list of people whom they wanted not to be invited to Brown, so he would never again accidentally trespass on their idea-free safe-spaces.
Kelly is a veteran of the Marine Corps with a tour of duty in Vietnam. He is the longest-serving Commissioner in New York history, and, during his tenure, violent crime fell 40 percent, and the murder rate was halved. He went on to Interpol and in 2006 received the Legion d’Honneur from France.
Mr. Kelly is 74 and might be in his fifties. He retains a military haircut and bearing, and he spoke directly about “pleecing” (not “po-licing”) with a friendly and unmistakable New York accent. He gave the speech that Brown’s students refused to hear: the “stop” is part of a policeman’s tool kit—like a plumber’s wrench or a reporter’s notebook. When policemen stop people who behave suspiciously and—if they suspect the presence of an illegal weapon—conduct a pat-down, they can prevent crimes from happening, rather than just react to crimes that have already happened. The “Stop, Question and Frisk” policy was a tremendous success and resulted in a safer city and the confiscation of thousands of illegal knives and guns. The reduction in crime was most noticeable in—and most beneficial to—heavily minority areas. (And Mr. Kelly points out that, with officers born in 106 different countries, the NYPD is the most diverse police force in the world.) Kelly acknowledges that policing exists at the difficult “nexus of liberty and security” and asks that he be judged on the results—and not only the results to the crime rate: Kelly retired with a 65 percent approval rating among blacks and a 75 percent approval rating overall. Those numbers would make any public official’s mouth water.
But District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled in 2013 that the program was unconstitutional because a disproportionately high number of blacks and Latinos were stopped. (Should the police be forced to select women for 50 percent of its stops, asks Kelly, when men are responsible for 90 percent of violent crime?) Kelly views the ruling as faulty, and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals seemed to agree—it blocked Scheindlin’s order and removed her from the case. But then Bill de Blasio became mayor and withdrew the city’s appeal. Kelly understandably regards this as a cowardly abandonment of the police force.
This story was too upsetting for the sensitive students of Brown to hear, so the Disinvitation Dinner heard it instead, and the students continue to know exactly as little as they knew before. The Brownites and their colleagues at Scripps and Yale and elsewhere have their own agenda—the conversion of liberties into limitations: Freedom of religion into freedom from religion, freedom of speech into freedom from speech. Their ultimate success will be freedom from thought. They may have made it already. But the grownups know that all these ingenuous students need is a swift kick in the pants. Professors, lace up your boots.
