Why I turned in my NYPD badge

My son Robert, now 10, began asking about my chosen profession when he was about 4 years old. “I arrest bad guys,” I told him. Unfailingly, his eyes widened every time I used the phrase.

I would often feed his insatiable imagination, sometimes using my own, about what it was like to be one of New York’s Finest. My father, a cop who worked for 20 years in Brooklyn’s 69th Precinct, had done the same for me when I was his age, so perhaps I was just passing along a family tradition.

Phone calls from work between my son and me often ended with him pledging that he would come into the city and patrol with me if only his mom would let him.

More recently, our calls, still predominantly about what I was doing on patrol after we talked about his day, started to end with an important reminder.

“Don’t get hurt,” he would say. He and my daughter were beginning to understand my job wasn’t just about catching bad guys like in a comic book. It involved risk.

I joined the NYPD in the late 1990s, a time when many of my friends were making money on Wall Street. A civil service career, some chided, was something our fathers did because they had to. I had a different perspective. I always wanted to be a police officer in the greatest city in the world.

My outlook hasn’t changed over the past two decades, in spite of the anti-police rhetoric and hyperbole witnessed at escalating volume with each successive year. I knew differently than the broad-brush smears so many hurled at the law-enforcement community because I worked in every neighborhood in the city and witnessed firsthand the agenda of officers that labor day and night to make the city a safer place to live, work and visit.

Supporters say the calling to be a police officer is a selfless devotion. I agree. I have always felt that my colleagues and I do what we do for others.

But creeping into my thoughts recently has been the recognition that perhaps a piece of it we do for ourselves. The high of seeing instantaneously how you can positively impact the lives of others is intoxicating.

I had come late in my career to question whether I was helping people so they felt good or so that I did. The reality is most likely some combination of both.

While I experienced all the joys of a career in policing, my children were left with many of the downsides. The absent holidays, the phoned-in good night kisses, the dance recitals and Little League games experienced through pictures instead of a front-row seat.

I lay in bed as a child sometimes fearful that my dad might not come home, but throughout most of my time at work I never imagined that my children were doing the same thing.

A tragedy 18 months ago made me reevaluate where I was in my life and my law enforcement career. Sgt. Paul Tuozzolo, a 19-year veteran of the force just a few months from retirement eligibility, had been policing the Bronx’s 43rd Precinct on Nov. 4, 2016, when the dispatcher requested he and other cops respond to a female being menaced by her estranged husband. As the officers answered the calls for help, the gun being used to threaten the woman was turned on Tuozzolo and he was killed instantly.

Within days, two young boys, ages 4 and 3, stood on the steps of St. Rose of Lima Church in Massapequa, L.I., my hometown, left fatherless before they could even reach the age when they would warn their father to not get hurt at work.

Last month, I turned in shield No. 1121 and retired from the Police Department after 21 years and two days of service. The job had provided me, in good times and bad, with an extended family I would never have known and personal career satisfaction I couldn’t duplicate in any other profession. It was a bittersweet moment because I loved being a cop in the NYPD. I just came to finally understand that I loved my children more.