Who’s stopping who? Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has been the most frequent defender of the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policy, but City Council Speaker Christine Quinn told us she holds Mayor Bloomberg responsible for the large number of stops. “As it relates to stop and frisk, Ray Kelly has implemented, I believe, the plan as his boss has told him to do it — that’s not how I would tell him to do it,“ Quinn said July 25 during an interview with the editorial board of The Villager and other NYC Community Media papers. Quinn once again said if she’s elected mayor she’d like to keep Kelly on. She pointed out that the city’s crime rate began to drop without stop and frisk during Kelly’s first stint as top cop under Mayor David Dinkins. In fact, Kelly was quoted as criticizing the policy in 2000 — a point Quinn did not make.
Trash Talk? Speaking of Quinn, she and Julie Menin seemed to be engaging in a little trash talk as they bumped into each other at our offices last week, but it was not at all like the traditional variety. Actually, they were pretty friendly to each other as they may have been chatting about the proposed E. 91st St. marine waste-transfer station. Quinn was a strong supporter of the proposal, and Menin, a candidate for borough president and the former Community Board 1 chairperson, recently penned a Daily News op-ed backing the plan because the alternative would be to send more garbage trucks through lower-income neighborhoods. Two candidates running against Menin, Councilmembers Jessica Lappin and Gale Brewer, are strongly against the plan.
Liu Polls: Mayoral candidate John Liu told us the constant polls are a “pain in the neck” because they are so persistent and none even try to calculate the Asian-American vote. “Something’s missing there,” Liu, the city comptroller, said last week. “The Asian-American vote in this year’s primary is going to outpace the overall turnout.” He predicts he’ll get more than 80 percent of Asian-Americans, whom he thinks will turn out in slightly higher percentages than other groups. He said polling firms can’t hire people who speak a dozen-or-so Asian languages or dialects. He thinks he’s really at 20 percent, not the around 7 percent that the polls consistently show.
