THE FINEST IN AIR OR WATER
Meet the cops who patrol above and below to keep the city safe
AVIATION 19 had just finished its tour, hovering at eye level with the Statue of Liberty as part of an exhaustive, anti-terror sweep, when the crackling call came in to the pilots’ headphones:
A cop had just been attacked by a cleaver-swinging maniac in Midtown. The suspect was now on the run.
“Talk to me, Goose,” pilot Derin De Vuono said to co-pilot Anthony Daniels, quoting Tom Cruise’s mantra from “Top Gun” as he pushed forward the controls of the $10 million Bell 429 patrol copter.
They put the helicopter down in Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn just long enough for a refuel, and shot to the skies over Herald Square at about 150 mph. They made the trip in four minutes and spent another 45 looking for a needle in a haystack, but fortunately for all involved, the suspect was captured at street level. THERE are 36,000 cops in the NYPD, but only a fraction — just some 250 officers — have the spe- cialized training to work for the force’s Aviation and Harbor units.
They are the pilots, like De Vuono and Daniels, who chase fleeing perps and scan the city’s tourism landmarks for bombs.
They are the divers who check the Brooklyn Bridge’s stanchions for explosives, and the sailors who protect ferries and ships from terror and conduct painstaking searches for murder weapons tossed into waterways, including, recently, a gun that was used to kill a cop. HARBOR Patrol Sgt. Kevin Keenan, whose dad was a police officer for 34 years, has always loved boats. Stuck on dry land as a patrol cop in Brooklyn, he knew that he wanted a place at Harbor.
“I knew as soon as I could that I’d come to the Harbor Unit,” the dad of a 6-year-old boy and an 11-year-old girl told The Post during a ride-along.
The job — patrolling New York’s 150 miles of navigable waterways, increasingly crowded with kayaks, jet skis and speed boats — is a busy one.
The unit responded when a NY Waterway ferry struck kayakers on the Hudson River near West 44th Street on Aug. 30. Several of the kayakers were injured.
Its divers searched exhaustively for the gun used to fatally shoot Police Officer Randolph Holder in East Harlem on Oct. 20, 2015, after suspect Tyrone Howard allegedly threw the weapon into the East River from a pedestrian walkway.
Scuba diver Liam Devine and other divers crawled on their bellies, running their gloved hands through the silt 75 feet below the surface to find the weapon.
“Imagine searching an entire football field for a gun, on your belly, feeling around,” Devine said. “You’re under water and you have to try to feel what it is. We actually found another gun that was unrelated.”
He says the divers also found bicycles, car parts, beer bottles, rocks, wood and various other pieces of flotsam and jetsam.
“Everything was down there, and as you’re feeling it, ‘ OK, that’s not it,’ ” Devine said, adding that it took three hours to move 50 feet in a pattern
search. The divers ultimately found the gun used to kill their fallen brother. H ARBOR patrol has four 45foot, three 52-foot and two 70-foot fast boats. The 45footer is the workhorse, used for the most calls for jumpers at bridges and rescues. The unit has 175 officers, including 32 divers.
The NYPD vessels also have sonar to check the river channels for possible bombs and eight “Rad detection boats” that can find radioactive material.
The unit also has heavy weapons on all launches, and more than 40 members are active emergency medical technicians.
“So there’s lots of things going on below the surface,” said Inspector David Driscoll, the unit’s commanding officer.
Doing backward rolls out of their Zodiac boat on a recent afternoon, two divers entered the water just under the Brooklyn Bridge at Pier 17.
A cop on the boat was tasked with watching their bubbles to make sure there weren’t any problems during the routine drill.
During other drills, the Harbor cops attach a fast boat to the Staten Island Ferry and climb aboard — much to the surprise of the passengers — to practice responding to a terror attack.
Keenan said that the unit drills, in part, to be a deterrent to anyone who might want to launch such an attack.
“Omnipresence,” he said. ‘W HAT it comes down to is gut instinct,” De Vuono, 42, says of scanning the city from above, while inside the cabin of any of the NYPD’s four Bell copters.
All purchased within the past four years, they are flown by 40 pilots who work in three tours, continually patrolling the city and at the ready to respond to emergencies or give an edge to cops on the street.
“Our abilities have increased tenfold since getting this air- craft,” he said as he looked faceto-face with the Lady of the Harbor on a recent late afternoon.
The copters’ high-tech cameras let the pilots zoom in on activity below and observe it from a laptop inside the cabin.
“We can tell what kind of day you’re having from a mile, a mile and a half away,” one of the unit’s members boasted.
GPS technology superimposes a map onto the camera’s image, allowing the crew to home in on a specific building or intersection.
Searchlight and infrared tracking systems can turn a patch of estuary from night to brilliant day, assisting Harbor cops in a water rescue.
Infrared is also frequently used to find perps who might be hiding or running.
“We can’t see through walls,” De Vuono said. “But we can read heat signatures off anything that gives off heat. If you see a row of cars parked on the street, we can tell what car was recently moving, because the engine is still hot.”
The heat-detection system can also be used in rescues.
“If they’re still giving off heat, we’ll see them in the water,” he said. “Unfortunately, we don’t always find people who are alive.”
He says that 99.9 percent of the time, the cops in the helicopter are searching for bad guys based on a description. Their cameras are so strong, they can see faces, even without facial-recognition technology.
“Even though the cameras are good, we can only go off of a description,” said De Vuono. “We might have that it’s a male Asian wearing jeans and a blue shirt.”
They also have dozens of cops who are mechanics and provide constant upkeep. D E Vuono and Daniels ultimately were not needed that recent evening when the call came in for an officer in trouble.
Cops on the ground quickly shot, wounded and arrested suspect Akram Joudeh, 32, now charged with swinging a meat cleaver and leaving off-duty Detective Brian O’Donnell with a forehead-to-chin scar.
But often enough, it’s the chopper that clinches the capture.
“They always ask the same thing,” Daniels said: “‘ How did you find me?’ ”
Earlier that day, he and De Vuono scanned the roof and surrounding sidewalks of Pennsylvania Station, then veered east to the Empire State Building.
There, they hovered, to the delight of dozens of tourists who waved and cheered at the cops from the building’s observation deck.
That’s part of the reason Daniels — who’s known by the nickname C-3PO, for having the same name as the actor who plays thedroid in “Star Wars” — was drawn to the unit. He’d been a patrolman for 17 years in Brooklyn. But he loved the idea of flying.
“When you’re on the ground patrolling, you look up,” he recalled. “And it’s like, ‘Wow. I wanna do that.’ ”