TL;DR
The memoir of Ray Kelly, the longest-serving police commissioner in New York’s history, from a milkman’s son on the Upper West Side to the man who built the NYPD’s counterterrorism operation after 9/11. Blunt, unapologetic and argued over.
“Terrorism is theater.” Ray Kelly built much of his second term as New York police commissioner around that idea, and Vigilance: My Life Serving America and Protecting Its Empire City explains why. Grand Central Publishing, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, published it in September 2015, about twenty months after he left the job.
Who is Ray Kelly?
A New Yorker all the way down. Kelly grew up on the Upper West Side, the son of a milkman and a mother who worked in a Macy’s dressing room. He started with the NYPD as a trainee in 1960, served as a Marine in Vietnam and became a patrolman in 1966.
He spent 43 years with the department in all and served as commissioner twice, from 1992 to 1994 and from 2002 to 2013, the longest tenure in the city’s history. Between those terms he monitored police in Haiti, then held senior federal enforcement posts with the Treasury Department and the Customs Service.
What does Vigilance cover?
The early chapters cover a city where murders topped 2,000 a year and Kelly built a reputation for fixing troubled precincts. His first term as commissioner included the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. His federal and international work, he writes, convinced him that a city’s security and a nation’s security are the same thing.
The heart of the book is what came after September 11, 2001. Kelly writes that New York couldn’t rely on federal agencies to protect it, so he built an intelligence and counterterrorism operation inside the NYPD. He credits it with helping stop 16 plots against the city over twelve years, and the book walks through several of them, including plans against the Brooklyn Bridge and the subway system. He also pushed to harden the base of the new tower at the World Trade Center site.
The book describes his dealings with presidents and mayors across both terms.
Where does Ray Kelly stand on street stops in Vigilance?
Head on. Kelly defends the practice and the crime numbers he credits it with. His preferred term for it is street inquiries. He points to a study he commissioned, criticizes the federal ruling that found the department’s use of it unconstitutional, and faults the city for dropping its appeal. He also writes that he publicly called one officer’s shooting of an unarmed man unjustified before the internal investigations were finished. The union never forgave him for it.
How was Vigilance received?
Sharply divided, much like Kelly’s tenure. The Wall Street Journal called it blunt and proudly unapologetic, and the Washington Post found it inspiring. Other reviewers were harder on it. A writer in the New York Review of Books argued that it read like a press release and that crime kept falling after stops dropped. A longtime NYPD reporter said several of the terror cases were told with important details left out.
What did Ray Kelly do outside the NYPD?
More than most commissioners. Between his two terms he went to Haiti in the mid-1990s to oversee the international police monitors there. He then served as under secretary for enforcement at the Treasury Department from 1996 to 1998 and as commissioner of the U.S. Customs Service from 1998 to 2001. The book draws on all of it to argue that a big city’s security can’t be separated from what happens overseas.
After leaving the NYPD at the end of 2013, Kelly moved into the private sector, including corporate security and investigations work. The book came out while the city was still arguing over the policies he’d left behind, and he wrote it knowing that.
What Vigilance shows a leader planning a book
It shows how to carry a very big public life in one book. Kelly ties his story to a single city and a single day that changed what his department had to become, and everything else hangs on that. A leader with fifty years of material can learn from that structure.
A law enforcement memoir will be argued over. The strong ones are written by people prepared for that. Bill Bratton, who held the same job before and after Kelly, wrote his own account in The Profession.
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