FINEST LI'L HERO
Texas cancer kid joins NY anti-crime forces
Julian Galloway is fighting cancer — just like his heroes fight crime.
The cop-obsessed terminally ill 8-year-old boy has been battling the brutal disease for more than half of his life, with a recent scan revealing new tumors, and that the existing ones on his brain were growing.
But Julian, of Texas, was granted a brief respite Tuesday — and given rare reasons to smile — as he launched into a whirlwind tour of the Big Apple organized by a nonprofit police foundation.
“We’ve been at it [for] 4½ years battling cancer. It’s been absolute hell, up and down, beating it, getting it again, from the highest highs to the lowest lows,” dad Lee Galloway told The Post.
“These are the days he has the highest highs,” said Galloway, a detective with the Corpus Christi Police Department.
The brave boy beamed Tuesday as he got to inspect an impressive fleet of police vehicles — his instant favorite being a Port Authority Police Department SWAT truck — and flew drones with the NYPD’s Technical Assistance Response Unit.
On Wednesday, Julian will be sworn in as an honorary NYPD detective by Police Commissioner Edward Caban and meet with other department brass at a tour of One Police Plaza.
“I am a policeman,” the plucky kid told The Post when asked if he’d like to be a real cop one day.
Julian was just a toddler when in 2019 he was diagnosed with medulloblastoma, a rare, fastgrowing cancer of the central nervous system.
Before the family got the devastating news, Julian would spend the day at his dad’s office “playing around” — and that’s when his fascination with cops started, Galloway said.
“He said, ‘I want to go to work with you. I want to be a police officer.’ But he said it cute — he said, ‘oppicer.’ He was 5,” his father recalled.
Asked why he loves police officers, the energetic boy said, “Because they’re cool!”
The then-5-year-old was sworn in as an honorary member of the Corpus Christi force in 2021, standing beside his dad in his very own police uniform as he vowed to uphold the values of the department — and to “beat those cancer bad guys.”
He was invited to the Big Apple when Joseph Imperatrice, co-founder of the organization Blue Lives Matter NYC, saw a viral video Julian’s dad posted online of the youngster wearing a police uniform one day.
“His father Lee has 18 years on [the force], and we just want to let him know that even though he’s in Texas, we want to be able to show him that he has support out here and take away from the crappy news they’re getting and just see his smile,” Imperatrice told The Post.
“He gets to be a normal boy while he’s in New York City,” Imperatrice added. “They pulled out all the stops for this little boy and it reminds you why you became a cop.”