New York Voices; 523; Top Cop and Murray at MoMA

[Tone} [Host]: Tonight, an interview with police commissioner Ray Kelly. This is the financial communications capital of the world. Terrorists, if they could would ?come back in?. This is only common sense. But this message has not sufficiently resonated in Washington. [Host]: And artist Elizabeth Murray on her retrospective at MoMA. [Kelly]: I love to paint. There's something fantastic about being able to take this inert gushy material. And sh-shloop it and scrape it and brush it onto something that I invented. [Different Speaker]: New York. One voice at a time.

[Different Speaker]: New York Voices. [Different Speaker]: New York Voices is made possible by the members of 13, additional funding provided by Michael T. Martin, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Elise Jaffe and Jeffrey Brown. [Host]: Hello I'm Rafael Pi Roman. On tonight's edition of New York Voices we profile 2 prominent New Yorkers. Later in the program we'll hear from New York artist Elizabeth Murray about her art, the city and the current retrospective of her work at MOMA. But we begin with New York's top cop. You know before Ray Kelly took over as police commissioner in 2002 there were only a handful of New York City cops working the counterterrorism beat. And protecting the city from terrorists, was considered the province of federal law enforcement agencies not local police. That was before September 11th. Today a thousand cops are assigned to counterterrorism and among other things they monitor Internet chat rooms, study Islamic extremism and patrol city landmarks. In

addition, New York City police officers are stationed in nine cities around the world gathering intelligence. It's all part of Ray Kelly's new vision for the NYPD. Ray Kelly is a Vietnam veteran, a former Marine and the first NYPD commissioner to start out as a cadet and rise all the way through the ranks. Kelly was first appointed to the job in 1992 by Mayor David Dinkins. At a time when there were nearly 160,000 violent crimes in New York City. That number declined during his tenure and continued to fall under the Giuliani administration after Kelly left the department in 1994. Since Kelly returned to the job under Mayor Bloomberg in 2002, violent crime has fallen another 20 percent. What accounts for this trend? [Kelly]: I think it's very simple. Resources count. In the early 90s we had - and for instance in 1990 we had I think it was 2245 homicides and Safe Streets Safe City Plan uh- came about as a- as a result and it increased the police force by 30 percent and

enabled the department to do the sort of discretionary things that every police commander would like to do but you need the resources to do it. And so size matters in this business [Host]: Well you actually have a smaller police force than your predecessor and you still reduced it by 20 percent at least on the average. [Kelly]: We focus our resources where they can do the most good. And we certainly still use our CompStat approach where we query and hold the commanders uh- accountable. But what we've been able to do through Operation Impact is to take large portions of our police academy graduating classes, link them up with experienced officers and put them in hot spots. Areas that might see a spike in shootings or homicides, crimes of- crimes of violence uh- we usually identify about 20 of them in every six month period, take those officers and put them in - in significant numbers - in those locations. We've been doing that now for 3 years. As a result crime generally averages uh-

crime reduction averages about 30 percent - 30 to 35 percent in those impact zones. And that's taken crime down throughout the city. [Host]: What I'm sure is uppermost in your mind right now, the killing of 2 New York City police officers in the last 2 weeks, Officer Dillon Stewart and Officer Daniel Enchautegui. How do you respond to these killings these young men dying uh- personally. [Kelly]: Well it's never easy. You don't get used to it. It's always a jolt, it's always shocking- myself and the mayor uh- Mayor Bloomberg have had this uh- experience now on uh- several occasions since the mayor took office in 2002 and as I say you just can never get used to it it's always a gut wrenching experience. [Host]: It was another tragedy that fueled Kelly's desire to return to the NYPD. On September 11th, 2001, Kelly was working as the director of Global Security for the investment bank Bear Stearns. [Kelly]: I live, in essence, a block- a block and a half away from Ground Zero- the World

Trade Center. We were out of our apartment for two months and I know when I brought my wife down to the scene- actually about three weeks after it happened she was just totally emotionally torn up by the scene. Look at that site and realize that almost 3000 people died there was jolting. Four months later Kelly was back in charge of the NYPD and one of his first actions was to create a new counterterrorism unit. Deploying a thousand cops, he pushed the department into areas long considered the turf of federal law enforcement agencies. Jack Cloonan is a retired FBI agent who was based at the bureau's New York City field office in 2001. [Cloonan]: I think even some of the people from the New York Police Department side look to the government with a sense of suspicion about them that frankly maybe the FBI and other elements of the government had information that they did not share for whatever reason or reasons. And if they had shared it perhaps things would have been

different on that day. I think that Ray Kelly felt his responsibility was so big and New York is so diverse and so difficult to cover he cannot rely solely on the FBI for its information base. [Host]: Did the FBI adequately share its information with the NYPD prior to 9/11. [Kelly]: I think the FBI will tell you that uh- you know there were some challenges internally as far as sharing information in- in the agency let alone sharing information outside the bureau. They've come a long way uh- in addressing that issue- they've got a ways to go and they'll tell you that. We need the federal government and we're working more closely with them than- than ever before. But we're looking to add to supplement - as I said we put people overseas to ask the uh- the New York question. New York is in our minds kind of the center of the universe and lots of things can come through here. [Host]: The NYPD now has officers stationed in 9 cities around the world, including Tel Aviv,

London, and Amman, Jordan. What do the NYPD officers do differently in those cities that the FBI or the CIA would do. [Kelly]: Well first of all we work with the police agencies there, it's kind of a cop to cop uh- relationship uh- the federal agencies who have people in the embassies they in fact are working in the U.S. embassy working with federal officials. The day of the London bombings of July 7th of- of this year I was on the phone with our uh- detective who was there who was right in the in the command center getting information as it- as it came in to them as to what happened there. This enabled us to react to adjust our tactics. In Amman, uh- our uh- Sergeant that we have there received a tour of the locations of hotels within an hour of when it happened. In Madrid we sent our officer from Tel Aviv

to Madrid the day of the Madrid bombings. And then we sent another team a follow-on team the next day to get specific information as to what happened, uh- how the bombings were carried out. Now we have the- certainly the largest subway system by far in the United States. We have 600 miles of track here 468 stations. We received that information within a day's time and we adjusted our- our tactics. We still have not received an official report from the federal government as to what happened in Madrid which was March 11th of 2004. [Host]: Cloonan says that Kelly has shifted power dynamics within the intelligence community. [Cloonan]: If you are an assistant director for the FBI you would do your level-best to keep him happy. Because he's perfectly capable of picking up the phone and calling Secretary Chertoff perhaps calling into the White House, or calling the director of the FBI personally.

And believe me his calls will go through. [Host]: In a June report by the Justice Department a special agent from the New York field office said that the NYPD doesn't share its intelligence information with the FBI and that in fact the NYPD even refused to have an FBI official placed in the NYPD's intelligence unit. How do you respond to that? [Kelly]: No, that- that- that's not correct. As a matter of fact we're in the process of having 3 analysts uh- FBI analysts uh- come into the intelligence division. And I think we do share information with the federal government because we have a comprehensive proactive investigative program ourselves. And we want to put the information that we garner into the federal stream. I mean it's going to help us better protect uh- the city. [Host]: But it's struck me that one of the things that you do is that you give what is in effect a graduate course in militant Islam to the thousand or so officers who work in counterterrorism. [Kelly]: Yeah we- we do we also brought in some first class

analysts that enabled us to develop the curriculum to give our uh- our officers. You see young people from some of the top schools in the country. [Cloonan]: You know there's a joke that's going around amongst the circles and that is that if one were to go to what's perceived to be a radical mosque in the New York and- New York City for example and Friday prayer takes place and - perhaps the Imaam says something rather critical about U.S. foreign policy - the question now is what informant in that mosque is going to get to the New York Police Department or to the FBI first? And do we have informants literally bumping into each other exiting Friday prayer? [Host]: In addition to surveillance there is a more visible part of the NYPD's program called Operation Hercules, which consists of sending teams of heavily armed officers to make unannounced visits at locations around the city. [Cloonan]: I sometimes wonder how effective operation Hercules is. I think it makes you feel good. I don't know - and I'm not convinced at this point - that that's really all that

effective. There's only so much manpower that we can deploy in any given day. So with a very target-rich environment the likelihood of us interrupting a plot via a Hercules deployment is very slim. [Kelly]: After 9/11 we thought it was important to have sort of a show of force. Uh- to have heavily armed officers go to sensitive locations because we know that unpredictability is the enemy of uh- the terrorists. They want to be able to look at patterns and we know that reconnaissance is something that they engage in very deliberately for long- long periods of time. So we want to do the unexpected. And we've gotten- I've gotten very positive feedback. And I didn't necessarily- [Host]: From who? [Kelly]: The public like that and it was jolting initially because as I say we didn't do it here in- in this country but uh- people feel reassured by it sheds some- [Host]: So it makes people feel safe. But that's not your purpose. [Kelly]: Well it certainly

is- is an ancillary purpose it's something that is a- I think a positive byproduct of it- but primarily it's there to throw off any reconnaissance that may be going on. [Host]: Mhm. The NYPD has also instituted random bag checks at subway stations. Now there are thousands of subway entrances in the five boroughs, am I wrong? [Kelly]: 468 Well 468 stations yes and stations have multiple entrances, right. [Host]: Realistically how many of these uh- entrances can you place police officers to search bags in. [Kelly]: Well I'm not going to give you a number I can tell you it's a pretty significant number. We have certainly had uh- search protocols, search regiment at every station throughout the system on multiple occasions. We do it. It's also done under a uh- controlled, directed plan. But it's a lot more than uh- you might imagine. [Host]: Isn't it the case that if a terrorist sees one entrance where they're searching bags he'll just go to one there where

They're not searching. [Host]: Maybe, and maybe not. You know we just don't know. Well it could be disconcerting. Maybe go to another entrance where where we're searching as well. We have a layered approach uh- to protecting the city. [Host]: How is the counterterrorism unit funded? We fund virtually all of our operations from locally raised tax revenues. We don't get a lot of federal money we get very little uh- federal money and the federal money that we do get for the most part is purchasing equipment, hardware, and we have quite frankly just about all the hardware we can use. We'd like to get some federal money to enable us to do other things. [Host]: New York Republican Peter King is head of the House Homeland Security Committee. [King]: We have a passed bill in the House of Representatives which would make almost all the money based on risk and threat analysis. But uh- still is not moving inthe Senate primarily because the smaller states in the Senate- the smaller states who are represented equally in

the Senate so, a state like Idaho of Montana has the same representation as New York or California. They want to keep the system the way it is because the smaller states with the guaranteed minimum do a lot better so the fight is really going to be in the Senate. [Host]: Two out of the four airplanes in 9/11 were here. Four of the seven envelopes with anthrax uh- here. You know the attack in 1993 was here in- in New York City. This is the financial communications capital of the world. Terrorists, if they could, would come back. This is only common sense. But this message has not sufficiently resonated in Washington. [Host]: King is cautiously optimistic that the congressional debate over federal funding is going in the right direction and he sees Kelly's local counterterrorism program as a national model. [King]: I don't know if anyone expected anyone to be able to step up to the plate the way Ray Kelly has with this. Again when I see all the problems in Washington and I see all the problems in the rest of the country and I see people are floundering and not certain which direction to go in, to have a guy who is so focused and was

able to get it done and get results- it's really a tremendous tribute to him and even better than I would have expected. [Host]: Kelly's influence is also cut through local turf battles. It was of course your anti-terrorism unit that determined that the Freedom Tower's original location and design were too vulnerable to terrorist attacks and as a result uh- both the location in the design were changed why was this information conveyed so late in the game or why was it paid attention to so late in the game after ground had already broken. [Kelly]: Well we simply were not involved and we were not consulted on a decision [Host]: How is that possible? [Kelly]: Well because what you have is separate entities. The Port Authority- the 16 acre site that is owned by the Port Authority, which is an agency of the state of New York and the state of New Jersey and we were not consulted the only way we got it involved with this is questions started to be asked about traffic flow on- on West Street and how trucks would enter into the garage.

That's when they reached out to us we said well let us see- see the plans for the building and then there was some discussion as to whether or not we could see the plans and so it certainly wasn't you know it wasn't a desire on our part not to get involved. So when we saw the plans we were concerned both by the location and the proposed structure of the building. So we made recommendations and those recommendations were ultimately accepted and used to redesign the building. [Host]: Quite honestly it's a bit frightening to learn that there are entities that are designing huge jobs like the freedom tower without taking terrorism into consideration. [Kelly]: That's the way government is structured here in- in the city and it's something that I know the mayor is- is concerned about. So it's- it's sort of counterintuitive quite- quite frankly. And uh- we hope that uh- you know that the

Freedom Tower scenario is not uh- replicated. [Host]: How vulnerable is New York City now to a terrorist attack. [Kelly]: There are no guarantees and the terrorist want to come back here. And I think as a nation we've done a lot, as a city we've done a lot, but we have a lot more to do. We are an open society. It's easy to come here although it's certainly been made a little bit more difficult since- since 9/11 but you know we cannot rest on our laurels you say we have a good counterterrorism program, we do. We can do more here - as a country, I think uh- we can do a lot lot more. We're not spending the resources that I believe we should be spending the money on protecting the homeland and protecting the city. [Host]: You know this is Hollywood draws would be actors from around the country. New York city attracts would be

artists. And just as in Hollywood success in New York City can be elusive. Elizabeth Murray is one of the artists who made it and her work cannot be seen in museums, galleries and at the 59th Street BMT Station. [Murray]: I love to paint. There's something fantastic about being able to take this inert and bushy material, and ?shloop? it and scrape it and brush it onto something that I invented. And that part is very exciting to me. But I don't find it easy either. So I suppose that my art comes from a lot of conflict really. And the end product is just kind of the product of that sort of battle that I go through. [music] My clearest most wonderful memory is actually coming to New York for the first time and standing in front of MoMA, the old MoMA feeling like I was in front of a church. Just that I was about to enter into this

hallowed place where I knew I was going to see the Picasso, the Demoiselles d'Avignon, I was going to see the Matisse Red Studio, the Russo all the paintings that I'd seen in slides. I was finally going to be able to see them and it was just a kind of a humbling incredible feeling. I was just determined to get to New York that was the main point of my life. I wanted to come to New York - I don't know why - I'd been to New York but I just felt I had to be there. And uh- after a couple of years I did various kinds of jobs worked in a department store worked as a waitress just perfectly happy- happily. I got to New York and I taught kids for a couple of years. Nobody had any money and you could eat out and you could really have parties and get art materials and- and live - for that amount of money. [Music]

I think the biggest milestone for me was when Paula Cooper called me up and asked me if I would join her gallery. And that was wonderful because I felt like I was part of this community, that I was part of the art world. In terms of career that was one of the happiest things that happened to me. Then when she started to sell things which took a few years, oh that was wonderful. But it really wasn't as though things just started to sell immediately and I- I worked for many many years as a teacher teaching before I could afford to stop for a brief period of time. [Music] I don't know how I decided on sculpted canvases. It was all around me, I was seeing various painters, I guess the most prominent of which was Frank Stella was working- were working with shaped things

so it felt like a kind of a thing that honestly Jasper Johns I never- Rauschenberg they were maybe- Rauschenberg primarily, and Johns and a lot of pop art things. So it seemed like this kind of like lake of ideas that you could pour- pour over and I guess I was sort of bored with a rectangle and a square. It just felt like it would be more interesting to have a lot of multiple edges. And then to put shapes against and balance shapes against one thing just led to another. When something doesn't work that's the tricky and the most wonderful part because it's really a question of balance and arrangement and sensitivity to that. And it's interesting to be - I think everybody has experienced this in one way or another - like you make something and then you have to objectify

it and decide whether it really satisfies where you want to go. The finishing point is a long long period of time and I think it's all about- it's- resolving is the perfect word because it's like a relationship you've got a relationship that you started, that you're completely responsible for and, in a practical way what happens for me is I'll wish something is finished. I'll wish it's finished and I'll say OK it's finished but I'll come into the studio and I'll still see it and this corner of something will nag at me or this part will nag at me and I'll work on that again and go back into it it's like opening up the wound kind of. I'll make it better, or I'll feel that it's better, then something else will come up in the painting because I changed that something else isn't quite right. And it's just it's kind of like this juggling act at the end like getting things to finally fall into place. Then I stop looking at it. It's like I say to myself OK it's

got to be done and if it's not really totally OK it's still as much as I can do it's as far as I can go. There's always a little bit of a feeling that OK I'll get it on the next one. [Music] [Host]: Elizabeth Murray's work now hangs on the same walls as the painting she most admired. This year, MoMA mounted a major retrospective of Murray's work. From the earliest phase of her career in the 1960s through the most recent. It consists of 75 paintings and works on paper. [Murray]: More than anything else, if I really thought about it I would just feel like this is something I never could have imagined and I certainly wasn't imagining it then, I didn't have that kind of an ego. Oh someday I'm gonna have my work here at MOMA - it just wasn't on my mind at all. I think that then and now you want to feel that you belong to something that you're really participating, that you're connecting with your work. And no matter what people say I really believe that for

most artists it comes way before money. It's just this feeling that you are in this situation you're doing what you want to do and you want your work to be good, you want it to be strong, and you want to excite people and provoke people. One of Murray's largest and most visible works is not on the walls of a museum but at the BMT station. On 59th and Lex. The reason I wanted to do it in such a large scale was that it felt like an opportunity to really do something in the city that everybody would really be able to participate in and see. Anybody who takes th- the mixing box from the 4, 5, 6 to the NR train. I'd like the people who walk through there at least subliminally to feel a kind of beauty and taken up with the colors, feel the shapes

right before the piece was really finished but it was up on the wall, I had to go up there to work with a fabricator and artist who, who put the piece up. And I saw this guy with his briefcase like walking up the stairs and- and before he walked in he hesitated, just like a split second and it made me feel great. I just knew that he felt something about it and then he may have rushed through. I mean I've seen- stood there and watched people just go by and not notice anything. But I think the words like the noise and the whip of the whirlwind that we live in it- I just wanted to stop that for a second with those colors and those shapes. Having my art in the city in a really, very wonderful way I feel privileged to have been able to do that, when a work was in a museum, only certain people who really have an interest um- usually- I mean some people wander and they're captured- captivated and they see

things. But it's a much more exclusive place. And New York is basically an inclusive city. So I just was glad to be able to get a chance to do that. [Host]: And that's it for this edition of New York Voices. For more on this or any other New York Voices program log on to our website at thirteen.org. I'm Rafael Pi Roman, thanks for joining us, we'll see you next week. [music] New York Voices is made possible by the members of Thirteen, additional funding provided by Michael T. Martin the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Elise Jaffe and Jeffrey Brown.