CRIME – AT 9:05 A.M. ET:   Only yesterday we cautioned that crime might become a major sleeper issue in the 2012 presidential race, reminding us of the 1960s "law and order" campaigns.  There has been a disturbing incidence of violent crime in some large cities this year.  Sadly, there is a racial component, and it is clear that tensions are rising.

Yesterday, New York City's legendary police commissioner, Ray Kelly, one of the key men responsible for the city's low crime rate, spoke out in blunt terms, and created an uproar.  Expect more of this.  Expect Eric Holder and his merry men at the Department of Justice to come down, not on crime, but on Kelly.  From the New York Post:

NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly yesterday ripped into leaders of the predominantly minority communities where shootings are soaring, accusing them of being “shockingly silent” to the rising body count.

His comments — which outraged local leaders — came as the parents of a 3-year-old Brooklyn boy shot by thugs in a playground said they support the top cop’s controversial stop-and-frisk program.

“They need to do it more often,” Tiffiney Monajas said as her toddler son, Isaiah Rivera, recovered in their Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment from the gunshot to his leg Sunday.

Disgusted by crime and excuses, New York pulled off a political revolution two decades ago, ending the almost automatic election of liberal Dems to City Hall, and installing the great Rudy Giuliani.  No Democrat has been elected to the mayor's office since.  But the lefties – and here we really have them – are drooling over next year's election, when Mike Bloomberg and his zillions will not be running.  Dems see a way back to power, and to recreating the New York they love, the New York of the 1960s.  A mugger on every block and a welfare check in every mailbox.  (In the mid-60s, one in eight New City residents was on welfare.)

Kelly griped that while others complain about the policy, “Who will speak out about the elephant in the corner, which is the inordinate level of violence that exists in many of these communities?

“I think there should be an outcry that 96 percent of the shooting victims in this city are black or Latino,’’ he railed after a Police Athletic League event in Harlem, according to the NYPD. “There should be a huge outcry, but there isn’t.

“There doesn’t seem to be any major community response. Or demonstrations. We have not had a demonstration about this 3-year-old child. We haven’t had a demonstration about the level of violence. We’ve had demonstrations about virtually every other issue in this city except the level of violence, particularly in certain communities.

“So, yeah, I’d like to hear some concerns raised about that, because I think, you know, if you don’t hear that in certain communities, [they] almost, in a way, passively accept it as, you know, life.”

Now that is tellin' it like it is.  We eagerly await the charge of "racist."  We didn't have to wait long.

But community leaders — reeling from statistics that show little Isaiah was one of 77 New Yorkers shot last week, a 28 percent jump over the same period in 2011 — screamed foul.

“I believe [Kelly] is using racial undertones to divide this city on who has a passion to deal with the issues of crime,” seethed state Sen. Eric Adams of Brooklyn.

Oh, we know this guy.  He's a former cop who thinks the police are the oppressors.

Ray Kelly has been mentioned as a possible Republican candidate for mayor.  I doubt if he'll run, and statements like this, in New York, would get him considerable flak.

But what he says is accurate.  It's even more accurate in Chicago, which hasn't tackled its crime problem, the way New York has.  As CBS's Scott Pelley pointed out in an interview with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel this week, more Americans are killed in Chicago than in Afghanistan.  Note the deep expressions of anguish by the very same people who went nuts over Trayvon Martin.

A major issue?  It's a growing issue...again.

July 11, 2012