Governor Andrew Cuomo: Dump Ray Kelly

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    The Message

    To Governor Andrew Cuomo:

    We call you on to immediately rescind the appointment of former NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly to your counter-terrorism advisory council. Someone who championed racist and discriminatory policies like stop-and-frisk and wholesale suspicionless surveillance of Muslims should not be advising your office.

    What do Steve Bannon and Governor Andrew Cuomo have in common? Both have given a platform to former NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly—champion of two of the Department's most racist policies: stop-and-frisk and wholesale spying on Muslim communities.

    Bannon's alt-right media company Breitbart seems like a natural fit for someone like Kelly: a platform to try and rewrite his legacy of using the NYPD to inflict lasting harm on Black, Latinx, and Muslim New Yorkers.

    But for Andrew Cuomo, the appointment of Ray Kelly to a special "counterterrorism advisory council" doesn't square with the Governor's stated commitment to defending New Yorkers from the Trump administration's national agenda of bigotry.

    That's why we're calling on Governor Cuomo to immediately rescind his appointment of Ray Kelly as an adviser. Click here to add your name.

    For many New Yorkers, the name Ray Kelly is a reminder of a time when millions across the city lived in constant fear of being targeted by the police—simply because of their race or the way they worshiped. 

    In his own words, Ray Kelly admitted to officials that the racist stop-and-frisk program—which systematically targeted Black and Latino men—was designed to "instill fear in them that every time that they left their homes they could be targeted by police."1

    And for Muslim New Yorkers, Kelly's policies instilled fear not only of the police, but of folks in their own communities. The NYPD's Muslim spying program led many to suspect—often rightfully—that people they thought were friends or classmates were actually informants or undercover officers—sent to spy on them for no reason other than the fact that they were Muslim.2

    As Commissioner of the NYPD, Kelly was a staunch defender of the program, even though his own intelligence division chief at the time admitted that the unit tasked with monitoring Muslim New Yorkers never yielded a single criminal lead.3

    The same policy was cited by Donald Trump when he proposed creating a national registry of Muslims.4

    Last December, a group of national and New York-based organizations sent a letter to Andrew Cuomo expressing our concerns over the appointment. But so far, the Governor has been silent.5

    At a time when we should be coming together to resist a bigoted administration, Cuomo's appointment of someone who paved the way for Trump's policies is unacceptable. Sign here and tell him to drop Ray Kelly as an adviser.

    Governor Andrew Cuomo has recently sought to position himself as the anti-Trump—in his State of the State speech in January, he vowed to stand firm against religious and racial discrimination.6

    But by appointing Ray Kelly, he's done exactly the opposite: validated someone who conceived, oversaw, and subsequently defended racial and religious profiling programs that left a lasting impact on the lives of millions of New Yorkers.

    And in his new role, advising Andrew Cuomo on counter-terrorism policies, there's no telling whether or not Ray Kelly will urge the Governor to renew the programs that he championed during his time as Commissioner. 

    In a time when our communities are constantly under attack by a bigoted administration, we can't afford to go back to the dark days of Ray Kelly's racially and religiously-motivated policing programs.

    Sign here if you agree that Governor Cuomo should dump Ray Kelly.

     

    Sources:

    1. "NYPD Commish Ray Kelly said 'stop and frisk' intended to 'instill fear' in blacks and Latinos: State Sen. Eric Adams ," New York Daily News, Apr 2, 2013.
    http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/senator-kelly-stop-frisk-instill-fear-blacks-latinos-article-1.1304763

    2. "The Ongoing Trauma of the Muslim Students an Undercover Cop Spied on For 4 Years," Broadly, Apr 21, 2017.
    https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/bjgz4z/the-ongoing-trauma-of-the-muslim-students-an-undercover-cop-spied-on-for-4-years

    3. "NYPD: Muslim spying led to no leads, terror cases," Associated Press, Aug 21, 2012.
    https://www.ap.org/ap-in-the-news/2012/nypd-muslim-spying-led-to-no-leads-terror-cases

    4. "Trump calls for bringing back surveillance of Muslim communities," Politico, Nov 19, 2015.
    https://www.politico.com/story/2015/11/donald-trump-muslim-surveillance-216058

    5. "Coalition Letter to Governor Cuomo Re Nomination of Ray Kelly to Counterterrorism Advisory Council," Center for Constitutional Rights, Dec 19, 2017.
    https://ccrjustice.org/coalition-letter-governor-cuomo-re-nomination-ray-kelly-counterterrorism-advisory-council

    6. "Cuomo positions himself as the anti-Trump," City & State, Jan 3, 2018
    https://cityandstateny.com/articles/politics/new-york-state-articles/andrew-cuomo-state-of-the-state-anti-trump.html

     

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