BY ZACH WILLIAMS | NYPD Police Officer and 10th Precinct veteran Robert Karl knew something was wrong when a little dog passed him one day on Ninth Ave., walking close to its owner but without a leash. He recognized the pair from just moments before — but now, headed in the opposite direction, toward W. 15th St., and with an additional person.
“The dog was well-behaved the whole time, and that’s the only reason I paid attention to it,” Karl said in an interview.
Then, however, he noticed one man take out a baggie of cocaine. The other held some cash. Neither of them knew the blue-eyed loiterer five feet away was an undercover cop who was poised to add another arrest to his career total of 353.
Similarly decisive action by Sixth Precinct Police Officer Robert Lewis earned him place alongside Karl, when both were among those receiving Officer of the Year awards from the Greenwich Village-Chelsea Chamber of Commerce (GVCCC; villagechelsea.com), whose 13th Annual Safe City Safe Streets event also recognized the work of five other officers who distinguished themselves by thwarting criminals, assisting crime victims, and serving the local community.
Karl and Lewis followed different paths to their profession, but a shared instinct for action turned them into the best of New York City’s Finest. Karl came from a patrilineal line of cops, while Lewis joined the department after a friend dared him to take the entrance examination.
Then three years later, in 1996, he received a phone call. A voice on the other end informed the 20-year-old college student that his name was at the top of the wait list for the police academy.
“I didn’t even know I passed,” Karl said in an interview. But he followed this unexpected opportunity to the first of hundreds of arrests in the northeast Bronx. Karl meanwhile followed the footsteps of his great-grandfather — the first person in his family to wear the NYPD badge — to Chelsea, where he has spent the entirety of his career since graduating from the academy in 1999.
The neighborhood at the turn of the century faced different types of crime compared to the thefts that now dominate local crime statistics. Karl recalled that prostitutes and drug dealers congregated on 11th Ave. back then. The population grew by 25% in the next decade while crime fell by about 600 incidents per year over the course of Karl’s career.
Karl also changed in the middle of all of that. He became a plainclothes officer in the anti-crime unit. He pretended to party at local clubs while keeping an eye for the pickpockets and bag-snatchers who preyed on unsuspecting revelers. This shift from uniformed patrol also reflected a larger shift in the department’s strategy to combat crime.
The “Broken Windows” approach of policing depends on preventing low-level crimes like petty theft as a means to preventing more serious crimes such as rape and murder.
The enemies of law enforcement were evolving at the same time, according to NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence and Counterterrorism John Miller, a former TV journalist who was the keynote speaker on Dec. 15. Terrorism emerged as a threat as the murder rate dropped in the past two decades. The September bombing on W. 23rd St. showed that the threat continues to evolve, with lone attackers inspired by ISIS having replaced organized terrorist cells run by Al-Qaeda.
The department established dedicated units to guarding high-risk targets throughout the city. But despite the additional resources, a safe city still depends on the help of civilians, like the food cart vendor who alerted police years ago to a bomb in Times Square.
Complicated threats as dangerous as terrorism and as prosaic as petty larceny require street savvy, according to Miller.
“Like politics, I think all terrorism is local,” he said.
He added that events like Safe City Safe Streets strengthen the relationship between cops and the community — even at a time when that relationship has come under greater scrutiny because of police killings of unarmed civilians in New York City and across the country.
However, vigilant cops like Karl and Lewis remain the top weapons against crime, even in an era of super-trained bomb-sniffing dogs, shot-spotting technology, and stat-crunching computers, according to Miller.
Lewis brought that shared instinct for action from the streets of the Bronx when he transferred to the Sixth Precinct earlier this year. Crime rates have fallen dramatically in the West Village and Greenwich Village in the past decade. Incidents of rape fell by half in the last year alone. But Police Officer Robert Lewis remained on patrol even when he was off the clock on a September afternoon this year.
He had just left the stationhouse when he saw three men beating a fourth man at the corner of W. 10th and Bleecker Sts. Instinct took over, he said in an interview. He grabbed the wrist of one assailant with his left hand and the wrist of another with his right, and began leading them back towards the nearby police station.
“They were calling me ‘Mister, Mister, Mister’ ” Lewis said. “They didn’t know what was going on until we got into the precinct.”
The victim got his iPhone back, but the third perpetrator got away — for the time being, according to Lewis. Experience taught him that NYPD will revoke his borrowed time soon enough.
“We know who he is and the detectives will be apprehending him soon,” Lewis said.
Serving the Gramercy/Chelsea area, Police Officer Michael Eschmann was recognized for the “tireless work ethic” that has resulted in approximately 600 career arrests (including 34 in 2016). Officer Eschmann joined the NYPD in March 2000, and was assigned to the 13th Precinct. Since then, he has worked several units: Conditions, Crime, and, most recently, the Cabinet Unit. One of Eschmann’s most notable arrests took place earlier this year, year when he followed a male acting suspiciously into a building, observed him check numerous doors and eventually made the arrest for burglary after the perpetrator entered an office and attempted to remove property.
Also honored at the ceremony was Police Officer Alberto Ortiz, who has worked in Midtown South ever since he joined the department 22 years ago. His commanding officer noted in his nomination for Officer of the Year that Ortiz has been a constant at a precinct that has had to evolve with the changing needs of the West Side. His experience came in handy during recent shooting and terrorism-related incidents in the area, “to which he served a pivotal role in the overall outcome of the situation.”
