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- From left, Officers of the Year Sergeant Duane Percy, Officer Sergio Delamota, Officer Leonardo Nimo and Sergeant Gregory Abbott.
BY ALBERT AMATEAU | The Greenwich Village-Chelsea Chamber of Commerce last week honored members of the Sixth, Ninth, 10th and 13th Precincts, covering Greenwich Village, the East Village, Chelsea and the Union Square / Flatiron neighborhoods.
The Chamber’s eighth annual Safe City Safe Streets luncheon honored four Officers of the Year. Police Commissioner Ray Kelly attended the awards ceremony.
Sergeant Gregory Abbott, leader of Greenwich Village’s Sixth Precinct Narcotics Enforcement Unit, was policing Christopher St. in July when he arrested a suspect who fought and made his escape, leaving Abbott with injuries that required hospitalization.
Abbott, an 18-year New York Police Department veteran, was back at work a couple of weeks later, making as many as a dozen arrests per night with his team. The suspect who injured him, a violent career criminal who was on parole at the time for a felony offense, was apprehended later after a citywide search.
Abbott’s unit, working in both plainclothes and in uniform, has made hundreds of arrests this year for every type of offense, including on Christopher St., in Washington Square Park, around Sheridan Square and along the precinct’s main avenues.
Officer Duane Percy joined the N.Y.P.D. in 2007, patrolling the Times Square “Impact Zone” in the Midtown South Precinct. In 2008, Percy came to the 10th Precinct, covering Chelsea and the West Midtown up to 43rd St.
He began working in the precinct’s Cabaret Unit. In January of this year he moved to the precinct’s Midnight Conditions Unit, focusing on all quality-of-life issues facing the residents and business people of Chelsea.
Since the beginning of the year, Percy has made 43 arrests, seven of which were for felonies. He was honored for his commitment to Chelsea residents and to his fellow 10th Precinct officers.
Police Officer Sergio Delamota joined the N.Y.P.D. in January 2007 and was assigned to the East Village’s Ninth Precinct on June 28 of that year. He soon began identifying and apprehending criminal-activity suspects on his own initiative. As a member of the precinct’s uniformed Conditions Unit, Delamota blends into the street scene without being detected by suspects. Over four years he has made a total of 314 arrests, 113 of them this year to date.
Officer Leonardo Nimo, a member of the 13th Precinct’s plainclothes Anti-Crime Team, has made 436 arrests in his 10 years with N.Y.P.D. This year to date, he has more than 90 pickup observation arrests, including 19 felonies in the precinct, which covers the Union Square, Flatiron and Stuyvesant Town areas.
In March, Nimo recognized and arrested a suspect wanted for a series of cell-phone snatches from young women.
On May 27, while at home on his day off, Nimo received a phone call from an informant in the area about a suspect in several commercial robberies and two bank robberies. Using his cell phone, he coordinated the arrest of the suspect with his Anti-Crime teammates. In August of this year he helped the precinct’s Homicide Squad arrest a suspect wanted in a murder the night before in Union Square Park.
