Police Commissioner Ray Kelly was testifying yesterday before the City Council on the need for extra bank security when an aide handed him a note that starkly made Kelly’s point – another bank had been hit just minutes earlier.
Kelly was reporting on the rash of 335 bank stick-ups so far this year, when he startled the City Council’s Public Safety Committee by announcing: “As a matter of fact, we have an ongoing [robbery] right now on 144th Street.”
“You probably need to get to a bank robbery investigation, so we’ll let you go,” responded Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. (D-Queens), the committee chairman.
Police said later that a female in her 40s demanded cash from a teller at the Citibank branch on West 144th Street and Adam Clayton Boulevard but fled empty-handed.
The incident occurred at 9:45 a.m. Kelly began speaking at 10:15 a.m.
He urged passage of a bill sponsored by Councilman Oliver Koppell (D-Bronx) that would require all banks to install bullet-proof partitions known as “bandit barriers.”
Kelly said while most banks have complied with an NYPD program to improve security, some are resisting barriers so they can market themselves as “friendly environments.”
Bank robberies have more than doubled this year and Kelly described the barriers as “essential.”
He revealed that the NYPD had even “diverted resources dedicated to counter-terrorism” to thwart the brazen – but not always literate – robbers who usually bring threatening notes.
“One robber who wanted to convey that he had the deadly anthrax virus wrote and said, ‘I have Amtrak,’ as in the railroad,” Kelly said in a lighter moment.
Michael Smith, president of the New York Bankers Association, said many of his members have already upgraded security, from adding digital surveillance cameras to posting “greeters” at entrances.