Joe Pulgarín is currently the highest-ranking Colombian in the New York City Police Department (NYPD). A year ago, he was promoted as Deputy Traffic Inspector for District 4, whose operational center is Union Square, in Manhattan. And it is a fundamental part of the great mechanism so that Subway lines 4,5 and 7 remain safe.
Behind this career, as in a large part of New York police officers, there is a history of migration and improvement in a police force, the largest in the country, which until this week, has 34,000 officers on the streets, of which 32.45% They are of Hispanic origin.
“My parents came from Cali in the 80s to look for better life opportunities. Since they arrived, they were entrepreneurs who fought very hard, until they had a commercial printing press on 82nd Street and Roosevelt Avenue. Here I was born, raised and studied. But always maintaining my Latin roots,” he commented.
Whoever now wears the uniform, as a sub-inspector, never dreamed, nor even imagined, that he wanted to display the NYPD insignia, as most officers almost always say. On the contrary, it was a career that arrived pulled by the threads of chance. When he took on his first assignments as a rookie, he immediately interpreted it as a life commitment to the city that welcomed his family.
“I really wanted to be a public accountant. He was already studying at Queensboro College. Coincidentally, I was in a mechanical workshop and I met a detective who asked me if I was interested in being a cadet. I got motivated, I applied, I went through a selection process and I was assigned to the Flushing detective squad in Queens.”
NYPD is constantly looking for young people who are studying a university degree, between 18 and 33 years old, to be part of the institution.
Since that moment when Pulgarín became interested in becoming a cadet, almost 18 years have passed. Without pauses, he has been interested in training professionally, nothing less, to address criminal investigations in a megalopolis, where every day situations that seem taken from fiction transcend.
“We are going to enter with all of them”
Since 2005, he internalized that he did not want to be anything other than to lend his shoulder to help the Big Apple become a space, increasingly removed from the scourge of crime.
“We are going to get into this, with all of them,” he remembers commenting.
In 2007 he entered the Police Academy and was then assigned to patrol and inspect the bustling line 7. Coincidentally, the route, where he moved since he was a child, when he lived with his family in Jackson Heights, the epicenter of one of the neighborhoods with the largest Hispanic population in New York.
“Speaking Spanish and being part of this community helped me better understand the security challenges. The fact of understanding this culture in depth, speaking this language, opens up the possibility of approaching things better. Perhaps more precisely, knowing what happens in some scenarios,” he shared.
Then Pulgarín went to the FBI academy. He worked in narcotics control, and became involved with the great complexity of ensuring that in a public transportation system, like Subway, with millions of crowded passengers and hundreds of incidents, with a “labyrinth” of trains and stations, it can be increasingly safer for New Yorkers and tourists.
“Nothing is enough”
With a great team, it is present in situations that can be complicated in the underground. It follows up on 311 and 911 calls. And most importantly, as part of the police force, it helps draw up prevention strategies, at a time when official statistics show a decrease in serious crimes on the subway.
“Our only goal every day is that both New Yorkers and tourists can move around on their trains in a comfortable way. That is our commitment. Have the certainty that every day you can do more. Let everyone reach their destination on public transportation, without problems. “We have come a long way, but in this job nothing is ever enough.”
The data:
14,000 NYPD officers are of Hispanic origin, with representatives of all Latino nationalities, a presence that has quadrupled in recent years in the police force that currently has a total of 34,000 active officers.