Police Commissioner Ray Kelly is the most popular man in town, according to a recent poll. Kelly's approval rating is an impressive 70%—which is hilarious, because there's more news of the NYPD's corruption every day.

Mayor Bloomberg has succeeded in toning down the Guilaini-era hysteria surrounding the cops and race, without doing a damn thing about the institutional racism of the NYPD. This makes white liberals feel much comfortable supporting him. But the mayor whose legacy will be thousands of vacant luxury condos and 16,000 homeless children has spent more of his time pretending to consider running for president than addressing any of the myriad problems with the corrupt mob of steroid addicts who police the city and the completely unaccountable little Napoleon who oversees them.

Let's look at, like, the last week:

Two cops get off scot-free after sodomizing a guy, the NYPD announces that it's going to force parades to be less fun, and a Bronx cop who blew the whistle on corruption (writing false summons and refusing to report crimes, the effect of Compstat) had to be reassigned because someone in the station posted the log of his anonymous call to internal affairs on his locker and put a rat trap with his name on it in the station house. Seriously, some fucking Departed shit is going down, right here in New York. (Though it's actually never been clear that Mayor Bloomberg knows that the Bronx is part of the city he is in charge of.) Oh, and the stop-and-frisk stats are in! Guess who got frisked the most?

When two researchers working for Molloy College surveyed retired police supervisors, more than half of them said they were "aware" of manipulation of the crime statistics. The mayor's response was to bitchily say that "one of the unions" sponsored the study (which is not true), instead of actually doing anything about it. (Of course, five years ago, the mayor let his Police Corruption Commission chairman resign after Kelly refused to cooperate with a review of Compstat. It's almost as if he doesn't want there to be any objective review of the practices of the NYPD under his tenure.)

And if we may get historical for a second, there was the city's utterly shameless and completely illegal behavior during that Republican National Convention that Mayor Mike threw for us, for Bush and Bernie Kerik to dance on various graves while actual New Yorkers were illegally surveilled, arrested, and detained without charges. There's Sean Bell and Ousmane Zongo and Omar Edwards and, yes, even the naked guy. Does anyone think the asshole who knocked the kid off the bike would've been fired if it hadn't been videotaped? And hey, New York leads the world in marijuana arrests! We're number 1! We're number 1!

Through all of this shit, Ray Kelly escapes unscathed, and barely even criticized. 70% of New Yorkers (80% of white New Yorkers!) approve! Mike, give it up—Ray's the asshole who should actually run for President.