Although many groups don’t publicly oppose a nomination, their distrust of Kelly is evident. Stop-and-frisk dents Kelly DHS bid

Civil liberties advocates applauded a court ruling this week striking down the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policy, but it might not be enough to keep the program’s chief architect from getting a big promotion.

New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly is the only potential Department of Homeland Security secretary nominee that President Barack Obama has publicly acknowledged. He has the backing of powerful Democratic New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, and his record of overseeing a sharp drop in crime has won applause from both Republicans and Democrats in Congress.


But Kelly has spent much of his second stint as the head of the nation’s largest police agency battling civil liberties and minorities groups — not only over stop-and-frisk but also over a program that spied on Muslims, his handling of political protests and the proliferation of surveillance cameras on New York City’s streets.

Although many groups don’t want to publicly oppose a theoretical nomination, their distrust of Kelly is evident.

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“The Obama administration has made the public record very clear that they oppose racial and religious profiling,” said Corey Saylor, legislative director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “Kelly, in my book, is in complete opposition to the Obama administration’s policy and the direction they want to go in with regards to surveillance.”

Saylor said a Kelly nomination “would be stepping back to the McCarthy era, the 1950s, and the country just doesn’t need that.”

Civil liberties groups won a major victory Monday when a judge ruled that stop-and-frisk amounted to “indirect racial profiling” and said the police department’s practice of stopping and searching people on the street violated the Constitution’s Fourth and 14th amendments.

U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin said the program, which Kelly usually calls “stop, question and frisk,” involved stopping thousands of innocent people each year without a reasonable reason to search them. About 90 percent of those stopped were let go.

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Niaz Kasravi, the criminal justice director at the NAACP, said the ruling confirmed that the “NYPD’s abusive stop-and-frisk program is really one of the nation’s most blatant officially sanctioned racial-profiling programs.”

Kelly and Mayor Michael Bloomberg are waging a robust campaign against the ruling, which the city plans to appeal. They argue that the searches deter criminals from carrying guns and have helped cause a 50 percent reduction in the city’s murder rate. The duo appeared angry at a news conference Monday following Scheindlin’s ruling, with Kelly denying the program was racial profiling.

“That, simply, is recklessly untrue,” Kelly said, adding that the accusation was “disturbing” and “offensive.” He added, “Race is never a reason to conduct a stop.”

Kelly, who penned a lengthy Wall Street Journal op-ed last month saying the NYPD was “guilty of saving 7,383 lives” because of stop-and-frisk, is expected to continue the offensive this weekend. He’s scheduled to appear on both “Meet the Press” and “Face the Nation.”

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“We need some balance here,” Kelly will say on the NBC program. “The stark reality is that violence is happening disproportionately in minority communities. And that unfortunately is in big cities throughout America. We have record low numbers of murders in New York City, record low numbers of shootings, we’re doing something right to save lives.”

The NAACP wouldn’t go so far as to say it would oppose a Kelly nomination. Neither would the New York chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, another major critic of the stop-and-frisk policy.

“The hard questions would need to be asked of Ray Kelly,” said Hilary Shelton, the director of the NAACP’s Washington bureau, adding that Obama should find “the right person to handle Homeland Security in a country that is becoming ever more diverse.”

Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, pointed to the NYPD’s handling of protesters at the 2004 Republican National Convention and during Occupy Wall Street as particularly troubling.

“He has viewed political protests as part of a continuum that ends with terrorism,” she said. “He views protests as something to be controlled rather than facilitated.”

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Saylor zeroed in on Kelly’s involvement in a years-long program in which the New York police partnered with the CIA and spied on Muslims, monitoring mosques and groups well outside the city limits and even accompanying college students on a whitewater rafting trip. The department eventually acknowledged that the spying never generated a serious tip or investigation.

Kelly defended the program as necessary to keep the Big Apple safe following the Sept. 11 attacks.

“Not everybody is going to be happy with everything the police department does,” Kelly said in February 2012. “But our primary goal is to keep this city safe and save lives, and that’s what we’re doing.”

And it was Kelly’s record in keeping New York safe from terrorist attacks that led multiple senators to praise him in interviews with POLITICO.

“We’ve had at least 14 terror attempts since 9/11 for which Ray Kelly has thwarted through his hard work in collaboration with state and federal agencies, so he already understands how to keep a city as large as New York City safe,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) told POLITICO the day before Congress broke for the August recess. “His experience and ability would make him an excellent Homeland Security secretary.”

Asked about criticism of Kelly, the senator replied: “Obviously there is no room for racial profiling anywhere in the country, and I think those debates are important debates to have.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) commented, “If you can take care of New York City, that’s a pretty big accomplishment. It’s not just any other police chief job. That’s the front lines of terrorism.”

Graham, a former military lawyer, had no problem with Kelly’s work in the Big Apple.

“I think what he’s done in New York is just completely rational and part of acceptable police practices,” he said.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the chamber’s most prominent libertarian and a member of the Homeland Security Committee, said in July that he didn’t know enough about a potential Kelly nomination to have an opinion.

Schumer and Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) got the ball rolling on Kelly buzz shortly after Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced in July that she was resigning to take the top job at the University of California. The next week, a reporter for Univision’s New York affiliate asked Obama about Kelly.

“Mr. Kelly might be very happy where he is, but if he’s not, I’d want to know about it because obviously he’d be very well-qualified for the job,” Obama said.

A few days later, Kelly said during an MSNBC appearance that he was “flattered” by the president’s words but otherwise declined to comment.

It’s unlikely the former constitutional law professor in the Oval Office would suffer if he appointed Kelly. The commissioner’s record has proven popular even in liberal New York City, where he has a 75 percent approval rating, according to a Quinnipiac University poll from January. A potential Kelly nomination has drawn opposition from Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), a longtime critic of stop-and-frisk, as well as other members of the Congressional Black Caucus, who told Obama in an Aug. 2 letter that “we cannot quietly entertain the nomination of a man who has wantonly usurped the constitutional rights of minority populations in the name of ‘safety.’”

But so far, no senators have expressed opposition to Kelly.

Saylor said CAIR was talking with senators about opposing Kelly’s nomination but wouldn’t name names.

But for a relatively low-profile Cabinet position, Obama may also choose to go with a controversy-free nominee. Compared with other potential picks — mostly well-respected veteran D.C. hands like former Homeland Security official Jane Holl Lute, Federal Emergency Management Agency leader Craig Fugate and former Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen — picking Kelly would mean picking a fight.

King, a former House Homeland Security chairman who told POLITICO that Kelly was “the best police commissioner this country has ever had,” said this week that the stop-and-frisk lawsuit didn’t diminish his zeal for Kelly.

“I certainly hope the president would appoint him,” King said in a phone interview. “He’ s probably the strongest candidate. He’s be a great Homeland Security secretary, especially in view of what he’s done in New York in setting up such a strong counter-terrorism unit and intelligence unit which is really a model for the nation.”

Scott Wong contributed to this report.