Good news is not news. Bad news sells. Confrontation sells. And that's what the press is always looking for. I'm not bragging, but I have the highest job-approval rating of any public official in the city. And I've had it consistently. The approval rating for the police department is 70 percent. This notion that stop-and-frisk has torn the community apart is false.

You can be stopped if a police officer reasonably suspects a crime is about to be committed, is being committed or has been committed. Every law enforcement agency does it. It's essential to policing.

You're always trying to impress your parents regardless of how old you are. And when they're gone, there's nobody to impress. But I think my parents would be proud of me. My father has been gone for 30 years, and by the time he passed away, I was a lawyer. I hope he would be impressed.

Protecting the city is my job, which doesn't translate into hatred. This is war, and in most wars, professional soldiers don't hate the enemy. Hatred can blind you in ways that mar your judgment.

No other agency is scrutinized like the police. Everything we do is in a goldfish bowl. We are not the most popular people in society. We do things like use deadly force; we're the bearers of bad news. We're not firefighters, who are viewed as heroic, helping people, with people loving them back. The police have a much more complex and demanding job.

Good news is not news. Bad news sells. Confrontation sells. And that's what the press is always looking for. I'm not bragging, but I have the highest job-approval rating of any public official in the city. And I've had it consistently. The approval rating for the police department is 70 percent. This notion that stop-and-frisk has torn the community apart is false.

It doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out that if you stop or curtail stop-and-frisk, or if cops are reluctant to do it, violent crimes are going to go up.