After the way they treated New York’s police commissioner Ray Kelly why would any sensible person ever again choose to speak to the baby Boo birds at Brown University? The Wall Street Journal explains:
In 2001, the year before Ray Kelly began his second tour as New York’s police commissioner, the city suffered 649 murders. In 2012, there were 419—a drop of 35%. The number of reported rapes fell by 27%; robberies 28%; burglaries 41%. The students at Brown University, an Ivy League school in Providence, R.I., think this is worth booing. Mr. Kelly was at Brown Tuesday to discuss “Proactive Policing in America’s Biggest City.” But nobody got to hear Mr. Kelly’s speech because he was shouted off the stage.
Brown is the school where in 1984 students voted overwhelmingly to insist that the campus health services stockpile suicide pills “in the event of nuclear war.” Campus administrators declined that demand, but the politically trendy, morally nihilistic campus spirit lives on.
Now student rage is aimed at the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policies, which account for much of the drop in the crime rate, especially in minority neighborhoods, and of which Mr. Kelly has been a vocal champion. Students also object to “community policing,” especially among Muslims, a tool the NYPD has used to keep the city safe from terror.
We realize that most Brown students have only a faint acquaintance with real life, and none of them know what New York City was like in the 1970s and ’80s. But it is revealing to see where the Constitutional right to free speech stands in the esteem of students at one of the most liberal campuses in America.
Judging by their profuse apology to Mr. Kelly, Brown officials are embarrassed by the episode. Mr. Kelly will certainly get over it, but at a better school the children who acted out at Brown would be expelled.
