Law & ardor
NYPD honors high schoolers for essays
WHEN BRYAN RIVERA was just 2 months old, his father was shot to death.
Rivera, now 16, was one of 130 of high school students given awards Friday for authoring essays about how to improve police-community relations, and he used the moment to honor his dad.
“I know that if he was here today, he would be very proud of me and who I have become,” Rivera said, dressed in a black suit, black bow tie, and white shirt, clutching his award at the Police Commissioner For a Day ceremony at NYPD headquarters. “Everything I do, I do it in his name. All the success that I have right now, I dedicate it to him.”
His father, Leonardo Vernon Rivera, was shot 22 times on Longwood Ave. near Westchester Ave. in Foxhurst, the Bronx, on Oct. 1, 2002 . He died at Lincoln Hospital. Cops later arrested two men in the murder.
Rivera, a junior at Mott Haven Village Prep, told the Daily News that he grew up distrusting police officers, but after building a rapport with Officers Danny Lopez and Elizabeth Michel from his local 40th Precinct, he now wants to go into law enforcement.
“When my father was murdered, and I heard the stories, that turned me off from being a cop. But as I grew stronger with the officers of the 40th Precinct and as I stopped listening to the prejudices, my opinion changed,” he said. They are just regular people just doing their job.”
Rivera, who focused his essay on his own struggle with his father’s slaying and why he wants to become a cop. He got the chance to shadow Michel for the day.
Police Commissioner James O’Neill spent the day Friday with 18-year-old Kayla Danielle Parker.
Her winning essay proposed creating regular youth council meetings in each precinct where teenagers can voice their views.
“I have a lot of friends who feel ways about certain things that happen in the community and I feel like that’s a chance where everyone can speak,” Parker, a senior at Brooklyn’s Kurt Hahn Expeditionary Learning School, said. “They won’t feel like they are being overpowered by only adults speaking.”
O’Neill said Parker’s essay reflected well on her character.
“I thought she hit three main points there that we need to do do better with and one of them is with the youth,” he said. “I think youth is where we have to concentrate our efforts.”
In his essay, Caleb Otero, 15, of Bellerose, Queens, proposed a program to teach citizens their rights.
“There’s a lot of misinformation about that, and it makes police officers’ jobs harder,” the St. Francis High School sophomore said. “Some people are misinformed, some people don’t know, so having the community be informed will make a lot of people’s jobs a lot easier, on both the citizens’ side and police officers’ side.”
The event was co-sponsored by the Police Athletic League.