Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, were in fine fettle on Monday, which is not to be confused with doing themselves any favors.

Can you, a reporter asked at a news conference, persuade an appeals court to block a federal judge from imposing a legal monitor on your police force? The mayor offered a Dirty Harry squint.

“Boy, I hope so,” he said, “because I wouldn’t want to be responsible for a lot of people dying.”

Mr. Kelly took on the judge’s charge that the department was racially profiling young men: “That simply is recklessly untrue,” he said.

They are the aging Dead End twins, the billionaire mayor with his Hamptons-by-way-of-Bermuda tan and the square-jawed, crew-cut commissioner. Again and again, they displayed a fossil-like rigidity, refusing to concede even a jot of a point to the federal judge who imposed a monitor on the Police Department, or to the many critics who warned so often that a once-reasonable stop-and-frisk program had metastasized.