BY ZACH WILLIAMS | Police Officer Robert Karl knew something was wrong when a little dog passed him one day on Ninth Ave. The Tenth Precinct veteran recognized it from a minute before when it walked in the opposite direction with its owner. A dog without a leash stuck out when the pair headed in the opposite direction toward W. 15th St. with another man.
“The dog was well-behaved the whole time and that’s the only reason I paid attention to it,” Karl said.
One man took out a baggie of cocaine. The other held some cash. Neither of them knew the guy 5 feet away was an undercover cop — who was about to add another arrest to his career total of 353.
Experiences like that earned Karl an Officer of the Year award on Dec. 15 from the Greenwich Village-Chelsea Chamber of Commerce. The 13th Annual Safe City Safe Streets event also honored five other officers who distinguished themselves by thwarting criminals, assisting crime victims and serving the local community.
Karl came from a line of cops, while fellow honoree Robert Lewis of the Sixth Precinct joined the department when he was a 20-year-old college student after a friend dared him to take the entrance examination. Three years later, in 1996, Lewis got a call telling him he was at the top of the wait list for the Police Academy.
“I didn’t even know I passed,” he said. 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 New York Police Department badge — to Chelsea’s precinct where he has spent the entirety of his career since graduating from the academy in 1999.
Twenty years or so ago, the area faced different challenges compared to the thefts that now dominate local crime statistics. Karl recalled the prostitutes and drug dealers who congregated on 11th Ave. back then. The population grew by 25 percent in the next decade while crime fell by about 600 incidents per year over the course of Karl’s career.
During that time, Karl became a plainclothes officer in the precinct’s anti-crime unit. He pretended to party at local clubs while keeping an eye out for 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, to prevent more serious crimes, such as rape and murder.
The enemies of law enforcement were evolving at the same time, according to John Miller, deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism, who was the keynote speaker on Dec. 15. As the murder rate dropped over the past two decades, a new threat emerged — terrorism. This September’s 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.
Police established dedicated units to guard 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 to a bomb in Times Square in an incident that was thwarted six years ago.
Complex threats as dangerous as terrorism and as prosaic as petty larceny all 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 bomb-sniffing dogs, shot-spotting technology and stat-crunching computers, Miller stressed.
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. Reported rape incidents fell by half in the last year alone. But Officer 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 another man at the corner of W. 10th and Bleecker Sts. Instinct took over, he said. He grabbed the wrist of one assailant with his left hand and the wrist of another with his right and began leading them back toward the nearby police station.
“They was 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 — though only for the time being, Lewis assured.
“We know who he is,” Lewis stated, “and the detectives will be apprehending him soon.”
In addition, this October Lewis busted an intoxicated driver for bribery after he offered the officer $4,000 to let him off.
Also honored by the chamber as Officers of the Year were two of the Ninth Precinct’s Finest, Sergeant Thomas Wahlig and Officer Vanessa Felix-Hidalgo. The pair make up the East Village precinct’s domestic violence unit. Their role is to visit the homes of victims, as well as provide referrals to court, counseling services and shelter alternatives. They also assist in obtaining orders of protection and safety planning.
Wahlig began his career as a patrolman in East New York in 2005, and was assigned to the Ninth in 2010. Felix-Hidalgo has been on the force since 2002 and at the Ninth since 2004. She was assigned to patrol until 2011, when she became a domestic violence officer. She has made more than 100 arrests in her time at the East Village precinct.
