His immediate task at hand was to speak to gathering media about a shooting on the other side of Brooklyn 11 hours earlier.
A house party in East New York, a part of the city where tourists would get arrested for their own safety should they visit there, had ended abruptly. The party, dubbed “Freaky Friday”, had been advertised on Facebook, flyers distributed and, sure enough, a sizeable crowd had turned up.
Around 3am, shots cracked from a semi-automatic handgun and a minute later a 20-year-old boy - for he was barely an adult - was dead and seven others injured. This was just days after another shooting in Brooklyn where another young man had opened fire on Brooklyn's famous Brighton Beach promenade at 5pm on a busy hot afternoon and killed a teenage girl. There had been some kind of argument earlier in the day and another boy barely out of his teens had decided to settle it with a gun.
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So here was Kelly, the New York Police Department's top man, speaking about guns and murder at an event his officers intended would promote the exact opposite. The occasion? This weekend the NYPD launches its annual summer cricket league. Cricket? In New York, a city more known for baseball, basketball, and American football? Actually, yes.
Kelly sees the sport as crucial in reaching out to the sons of immigrants from Asia, the Middle East, and the Caribbean, especially those aged between 15 and 24 years old. That's an age group for which firing guns at parties in East New York and on Brighton Beach seems like a good idea and a time in life when you figure out really which you end up heading.
So, overs and maidens and a silly long on are making the streets of New York somewhat safer. The league was launched in 2008 to reach out to communities that got a rough deal after 9/11 and has proved to be such a success that the NYPD can't accommodate all the teams that want to enter.
“Pak Stallions”, “Asian Cheetahs” and “Pakistan United” are among the teams that will battle it out in Twenty/20 cricket in Brooklyn's parks this summer.
“Every game, every team goes hard,” said a player, Arsalan Naeem, wearing a Brooklyn baseball cap and speaking with an accent as New York as Frank Sinatra (OK, he was actually from New Jersey but you get the idea).
“The funny thing is when some people see that we don't play with gloves like in baseball they think that we're crazy.”
Kelly pointed out, not only is his city one of the most diverse in the world, but so is his police force - with officers originally from over 50 different countries. These are the police stories you won't see on Law & Order or on COPS. Unfortunately, though, the cricket season happens just once a year. The shootings by young men Kelly wishes would take up cricket tragically happen more often.
