In the past, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly had always taken a sympathetic but neutral stance when questioned about the PBA contract, saying he believed New York City police officers deserved higher salaries but that, since he was not personally involved in the negotiations, he could do nothing about getting them the kind of raise they deserved. (Why is it true, by the way, that the police commissioner has no say about what to pay the cops under his command while the labor commissioner, with no operational responsibility, has so much influence?)

I always thought that one of the things Kelly could do was to speak out more forcefully — and in May, he did just that. He did it to the extent that there was an unprecedented public difference of opinion between Mayor Bloomberg and his top commissioner — although Kelly subsequently softened his approach.

But on at least two occasions, Kelly deviated from his former pose of helpless impartiality to become more forthright in his arguments for truly doing the right thing by his troops. Both times, he was at City Council hearings.

On March 28, while saying how bad the low starting salary was for the NYPD recruitment effort, he publicly acknowledged for the first time that the retention problem was also critical and that that has to do with top pay.

“Quite frankly,” he told the council members, “when you can go to another jurisdiction and make over $100,000 after a few years, including the Port Authority right here in New York City, I think that is a pretty attractive salary for someone interested in law enforcement.”

Then, before a council budget hearing May 21, he made his most strongly-worded statement to date, testifying that the “whole issue of pattern bargaining has to be re-examined because it’s not working well [for] the Police Department” and repeated his concern that low compensation was responsible for the recruitment and retention problem. He warned that Operation Impact — the band-aid strategy credited with keeping the fragile lid on crime — and other crime-fighting programs were at risk because of staffing limitations.

It seemed to be a candid expression of support for one of the key elements of the PBA’s bargaining position — that slavish adherence to pattern bargaining has interfered with the city’s ability to come to terms with the PBA and that low compensation for New York City police officers is fast becoming a major public-safety threat.

We agreed with his remarks and said so. “Police Commissioner Kelly is absolutely correct about the dismal failure of pattern bargaining and the severe consequences on police operations,” I told the Daily News in reaction to the comments.

Bloomberg reacted by dismissing the suggestion that pattern bargaining needed re-thinking, saying, in effect, that it was a non-negotiable policy. “There’s nothing to discuss,” he said, in what the newspapers described as a “rare” and “unprecedented” split with Kelly. “We are not going to break pattern bargaining in this city. It would devastate the city. It’s not fair to the other unions. They would all have to come back and the city would be bankrupt almost overnight.”

Here we had the mayor of New York City recklessly asserting — contrary to both the spirit and the letter of the Taylor Law, and in violation of sound negotiating principles — that every other contract with every other city union would have to be reopened if police officers get more than the below-inflation-rate increases they are now being offered. Is every group of city employees in the same disadvantageously competitive position as New York City police officers?

On Wednesday, May 30, nine days after the police commissioner’s anti-pattern bargaining remarks, Kelly met with the mayor and others at City Hall. In a session with reporters later that day, Kelly was asked about his split with the mayor on pattern bargaining, and he disputed reports that he had openly disagreed with the mayor the previous week. His remarks, he said, had been intended to criticize the method of pattern bargaining among the city’s five police unions.

We have had our disagreements with Ray Kelly and have not hesitated to express them, loudly when necessary. So now we commend him for his candid May 21 analysis of what accounts for the recruitment and retention crisis and his implied support at that time for more equitable and realistic police compensation.

We urge him to stick to his guns and redress the injustice and correct the problems. As a 4-decades-plus veteran of the NYPD, he should be able to recognize better than others that what the PBA has been saying for years is true — that the public-safety future of this city is at stake.

Pat Lynch
President